Marking Time
This week started out like every other week in the world's conflict zones and across less fortunate areas of the Global South: With desperate suffering and acute deprivation.
If you get the Daily, you read my Sunday evening summary of conditions in Gaza. It's bad there. Famine. Disease. Mass death. And so on. It's bad in Ukraine too. Likewise in Yemen. Parts of Africa are perpetually beset. If you live in North Korea, there's a good chance you're starving right now despite the presence of a div
This piece seems to reflect the dark place you are in right now. I get it, this is a crappy time, the outlook is bleak. Have you ever noticed that every year these prognostications are always somewhere along the lines of “next year will be good for investments”? I have come to accept that it is all a sales pitch. As a fund manager you need people to feel positive about investing so they will continue to give you money.
I’m not in a “dark place.” I’m in a very good place. That’s the whole point, my friend. The better we do, the more important it is to keep perspective.
Then perhaps it is me who is projecting on to you. Perspective is important but can also be psychologically detrimental. If you are benefited by the poor, starving, and dying then anyone with humanity naturally feels some guilt that they are being benefited by those who are being destroyed. There is little that you can do about it, so then you are left with guilt over a problem that you can’t solve. You are the beneficiary solely by the fact that you were born here and not there. Call it beneficiary’s guilt (a form of survivors guilt?) but it’s the reality. There have always been winners and losers in the human saga and by the fact that humans are not satisfied with balance, there always will be.
It’s never “psychologically detrimental” to have perspective. It might be uncomfortable, but that’s not the same thing.
I could barely get through your Sunday evening Daily- the situation is beyond horrific. Honestly, I can’t think of any overseas situations where US involvement was unequivocally a good thing.
Maybe it is time for the US to adopt the Swiss approach to foreign policy? Or restrict our efforts to help rebuild post conflict.
To at least the extent we made the mess, it’s our responsibility to help clean it up. Not that I expect the US to ever do so.
The US officially dates back to 1784. Since that time, as near as I can determine, we have never been on the right side with our foreign policy. We keep backing the wrong team, except maybe in WWII, but even that that was a close call initially. We think we the responsibility to support the world like still having kids living in our proverbial basement. We should work with people but we don’t have to pay their wages. We do none of this very well. Neutrality and leadership is better. Part of the problem of the last 75 years is that we need a constant supply of oil and the guys who have it, besides us, like our killing machines. [For those who remember such things, we are Br’er Rabbit getting tangled up with the Tar Baby. The more he struggled the more tangled he got. BTW, that’s the same story redone in Fargo.]