Charles Hugh Smith: The premium in America has shifted from truth to self-serving distortion, and from trust to manipulation.
The premium we place on truth and trustworthiness is self-evident. Truth
is uniquely productive feedback from the real world. Truth (including
factual data) is indispensable, for it alone enables us to correct
errors, learn from mistakes and improve our effectiveness and
communication.
We pay a premium for trust because the cost of dishonesty and artifice is steep.Would
you pay more to buy a used car from someone you trust? If you place no
premium on trustworthiness, then you buy the "great deal" used car you
found online: oops, the "new" battery was spray-painted black, the
crankcase leaks, the engine is shot and doesn't pass smog, and the
certificate of ownership is forged.
The premium on truth and trust is eroding under the constant onslaught of officially manipulated data and markets, and a vast array of distortions and propaganda designed to serve the interests of ruling Elites and key constituencies.
We all know the negative premium placed on fact: telling the truth will get you fired. And
not just in the corporate world: politicians from the President on down
all worship at the altar of the carefully distorted unemployment rate.
The officially sanctioned lying and manipulation are now shameless. Never
mind that millions of people have become statistical phantoms (i.e. not
in the workforce) to generate that low rate, and college graduates
working 3 hours a day (if they're called in at all) are gleefully
counted as employed, as if there is no difference between a full-time
job and a marginal one.
President Obama is touting rising auto sales as proof of the "recovery"
(and implicitly, of his wise stewardship), studiously avoiding the fact
that these stupendous auto sales are the result of offering low-interest
rate auto loans to marginal borrowers with near-zero collateral (i.e.
skin in the game).
How did blowing a credit bubble and securitizing the debt turn out last time?
Never mind: here we go again. Via Doug Nolan at Prudent Bear:
Springleaf Finance Corp., the lender to borrowers with poor or
limited credit, sold $604 million of bonds last month backed by personal
loans secured by household goods from furniture to electronics, its
first such deal. Demand for riskier asset-backed bonds has grown as the
Federal Reserve holds its benchmark interest rate at almost zero for a
fifth year. Sales of securities linked to subprime auto loans doubled to $4 billion in January from a year earlier.
Manipulation and carefully crafted distortion erode trust, not just
in the individuals employed to repeat the lies but in the institutions
that issue them. The ruthless pursuit of self-interest is now the
norm; truth is a terribly risky disruptor that must be hidden, masked or
countered with plausible lies.
As a nation, we're like the obese person who looks at himself in the
mirror and sees his body as normal--the distortion of truth is so
complete that we literally no longer recognize reality. Untruth no
longer arouses any moral indignation; we are either too jaded to care,
or our moral compass now spins aimlessly from one manipulation to the
next.
There can be no trust if there is no truth. How can we trust
people who lie to us constantly, who issue one self-serving
justification after another for their own parasitic predation? We
cannot. How can we trust institutions whose credibility now rests on the
continuation of lies that are so embedded in our financial sector and
State that their collapse will bring down the entire house-of-cards
debtocracy? We cannot.
The premium in America has shifted from truth to self-serving distortion, and from trust to manipulation. This
spiritual and moral rot will end gloriously, have no doubt, for the
stock market's permanent ascendancy dissolves all other narratives.
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