Off The Cuff: The United States Of Anxiety

In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

• Fraudulent Markets
  • Justifying today's valuations requires more and more absurdity
• Rampant Risk
  • We're too fearful of the small risks and too complacent of the big ones
• Con Job
  • A complacent populace is easily manipulated
• The Need For Hard Truths
  • Our savalation lies in our willigness to face reality as it is, not as we wish it to be

This week's discussion takes a fascinating turn into the psychological mindsets that are limiting society right now. Namely a willful blindness to the systemic risks we have created (too much debt, asset price bubbles, etc), paired with an anxiety over much smaller issues that keeps us as a populace meek, fearful and easily controlled. To break this cycle — or to deal effectively with the system once is breaks — we'll need to return to a more stoic and honest cultural mindset, one that can handle facing the hard truths:

The cartels and the oligarchy are serving their own agendas. And those agendas don't necessarily align with the interests of the nation or of the general populace.

It was a dumb idea to give all this centralized power to a handful of folks who then have the power to pursue their own self-interests — as humans always do.