On Monday, before the stock market opened, I jotted off a note to five key professors at the graduate school of economics where I've returned to complete my Master's thesis this semester after a ten-year absence. Here is what I wrote:
Hi all,
It looks like 'The Crash' is here that I've been busy warning the world about since I wrote my first related paper, The Second Great Depression?, back in my senior year of high school just before the '87 stock market crash. My most recent related writings on the matter are on my homepage and my blog.
My thesis, Manic-Depressive Man, elaborates on many of the arguments presented in the writings referenced above in further detail, but, given that the historical conclusion of my work is now evident, I thought I'd better give you a preview.
I must admit I was somewhat dishonest in my reasoning behind returning to college to complete my work in that I indicated it was for my own sake. Indeed, I believe I've returned for your sake as well. You are very intelligent professors, but, as I recognized at the time I was in school, this means you are quite good at outsmarting yourselves. Just because a lot of savvy people agree on certain beliefs does not make those beliefs true....a point well reflected by the uncanny capacity of our $50 billion-a-year intelligence services to consistently err.
When I left the graduate economics program before, I had not passed the prelims. I like to tell people that the first time I took the exam, my professors said I failed, but the second time I took the exam, I wrote that my professors failed. Here is what I mean.
According to reigning economic theory, greed, in effect, is good. If economic participants engage in pleasure-maximizing and profit-maximizing behavior, i.e., this is the 'objective function' of consumers and businesses, and everyone freely competes for possession of the world's wealth, then, in the long-run, it is believed that market societies will tend toward general equilibrium and Pareto optimality, i.e., social harmony and maximum happiness for all, as if society were governed by some imaginal Invisible Hand.
This is a pleasant, but most dangerous, popular delusion IMHO.
The historical reality for market societies is one of boom and bust, swings between collective prosperity and mass depression. As Joseph Schumpeter correctly described in Business Cycles, the prevailing instability is characterized by cycles within cycles within cycles, including very long waves of economic activity like the Kondratieff Wave:
This idea of cycles within cycles is brought to its full historical light by the Elliott Wave Principle popularized by Robert Prechter. According to the Wave Principle, the cycles within cycles underlying economic change and social progress and regress abide by fractal geometry evident in time series of market price movements, particularly in the stock market:
According to this pattern, world history has recently reached a Grand Supercycle peak, or even a Millenium Cycle peak, which, for all intents and purposes, represents the peak of Western Civilization.
Thus, in the long-run, markets have tended toward an ultimate general DISEQUILIBRIUM that is now resulting in a Grand Supercycle crash and maximum unhappiness for all.
What should be drawn from 'The Crash' is that selfishness is not a virtue, contrary to the mindset of Alan Greenspan (a protege of Ayn Rand) and the other market 'experts' who have overseen the effective self-destruction of the global economy.
The moral philosophy being advanced under the auspices of science is, in fact, a prescription for collective suicide. The extent to which this is so is best revealed by how almost no one has been interested in what the enemies of the free world have truly been up to over the last couple of decades, i.e., misleading the West into military defeat. Because people opt to believe what they want to believe, this world has come to believe an extraordinary popular delusion of perpetual peace and prosperity, when the truth is that war and depression are on the historical horizon. As I have long hypothesized, there is reason to believe our species is suffering from a Global Bipolar Disorder leading to this world's near suicide.
Hopefully there will be time for me to fully explain my concerns in the context of my Master's paper, but I figured I'd send you this note ahead of time given the current alarming developments on Wall Street.
I'm yet to receive a response to this note from any of my professors, but I imagine the sharp drop in the stock market over the past couple of days has girded their attention.
Will those teaching the virtue of selfishness realize the error in their ways?
At what point does man have his moment of truth?
I deeply pray that it doesn't literally take World War Three for this world to get the point God has so long been seeking to make, but for now my thesis remains unaccepted.
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