This post is in response to the attention the book The Chickenshit Club is receiving after becoming the #1 Best Seller with its release this week. The book is by Wall Street veteran reporter and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jessie Eisinger. In my opinion, (based on the authors interviews, I haven’t read the book yet) this author is among the first writers to articulate our economic system from a long cycle systems perspective, and the importance of a robust regulatory structure, much like what I describe in my work in MEMEnomic Cycles.
For 9 years I have spoken about how the regulatory value system, the Blue level of development was made impotent by design over the last 40-year. I call this cycle The Only Money Matters Cycle which began with the election of Ronald Reagan. When I talk about the decline of the regulatory system during these years, the primary subject of this book, people take pictures of the graphics that show those historic changes in the values memestack. Finally, someone from the mainstream is able to see clearly the necessity of Blue that people familiar with macromemetics and the value systems framework have known for years.
When the dominant economic meme says only money matters, the battle to proof otherwise becomes extremely difficult. That system knows no consciousness other than it’s own self interest. Its primary obsession has remained the repeal of laws to allow the free market to determine the destiny of humanity. To argue its toxic outcomes like income disparities and extreme poverty only reinforces its tenets about self-reliance and individualism while becoming more and more oblivious to its own toxicity.
When a problem is created by a system, only a systems approach can solve it. A system’s perspective, provides for a shift in focus from “what an individual can or failed to do”, to “how the system can be nudged forward in the right direction”. Sometimes if that system’s values have become toxic to the overall health of the culture, it becomes necessary to know when it should be nudged over the cliff to hastened its end and allow for a new system to rise from its ashes.
While the author argues that Obama missed the opportunity to do just that during the financial crisis, I argue that the system chose Obama precisely to fool people into thinking he’s a change agent. Yes Obama exhibited the highest expression of progressive values with climate change and a renaissance of civil rights, but any effort to resurrect the Blue system in an environment that has developed a repulsive resistance to regulation, was doomed to fail.
I agree with Eisinger that we have Trump today because of Obama’s failure to regulate Wall Street and to a greater extend his failure to rein in the excesses of the Orange system. Everyone who was effected by the financial crisis wanted Obama to act on this unprecedented opportunity to cut toxic Orange at its knees. His failure to do so was not because of his personal lack of will or intelligence, but because of the absence -by design- of intelligence in our government institutions that know how today’s Orange operates. It is this systems failure that extended the life of this declining system of values and gave it new life and gave us the executive leadership we have today.
So the Orange in the White House today is not limited to the President’s tan, or hair color. Those are just some of the ironic manifestations of the Orange value system during its decline and entropy phase. Treachery, contempt for the law and collusion with known enemies to get what you want are just examples-made-visible of how this system in its unhealthy manifestation normally operates. Today, the Orange that sneaked into the White House is on its death bed confessing the ugliness of all its sins to a world that is divided on how to deal with its misery.
Until new leadership rises that can articulate the need for the current system’s early death and what needs to be done to transition us to the next system we will be stuck with Trump and the next leader that the system picks.
Sadly, things point to a noticeable vacuum in new leadership that can transition us without considerable pain. The obsession we have with admiring Orange values and dismissing Blue values is pervasive. The blind allegiance to one of the two current political parties is prolonging the life of the Only Money matters system. We naively continue to believe that a solution to this problem will come from within the confines of the two-party system. As long as this remains the debate there will be complete dominance of the current system (the Only Money Matters, not Republican v. Democrat).
This system will eventually collapse as transparency cuts across both political parties, leading either to a revolution or a higher level of consciousness that can contain the arrogance of everything Orange. Once we detach from our current and outdated paradigm and begin to articulate the characteristics of the new stage, things like multi-party democracy and corporations not being granted the same rights as people, all become parts of the vibrant dynamics that define the possible future of our human journey.