Interesting Mashup — Is it 1984 All Over Again?

Here’s an interesting mashup.  Take Paul Farrell’s story on Marketwatch yesterday, which has the subhead of “Hypnotized, you’ll forget dot-coms, subprimes, the next Great Depression.”

A brief excerpt from this funny-yet-scary article …

Folks, this is too real to make up. Less than a year ago, Wall Street banks were insolvent, near bankruptcy. Then in a swift “disaster capitalism” maneuver by Henry Paulson, Wall Street’s Trojan Horse in Washington, they raided our Treasury and the Fed, while our clueless reps in Congress stood by.

Eight short months later, Wall Street’s back in “business as usual” with bigger salaries and bonuses, while taxpayers hold the bag for over $5 trillion in new debts, a record $546,668 per household reports USA Today.

Forget the metaphor; Wall Street is the real Skynet. And the Twitter/Tweet Codes are just a few of their many nanobots — financial-innovation Terminators — infiltrating the investor’s brain, dulling our long-term reasoning powers, replacing them with new short-term irrational neurotoxins that will block their capacity to detect the broader strategies of the Wall Street Skynet Conspiracy.

That coupled with a memory purge is preventing us from assembling the “Resistance,” a rebellion against Wall Street’s version of Skynet.

Wall Street is hypnotizing Main Street investors: That way we forget the past, embrace the illusions and are easier to manipulate. In a trance state, we’ll be unable to resist them.

Farrell goes on to quote another great Wall Street writer, Stanley Bing, who offers a list of “10 Lessons We’ll Forget,” including that economists misled us and will do so again, that new crooks are plotting to steal your money, that regulators are political hacks, and more.

Now, put that together with Jesse’s post, also from yesterday, comparing the way U.S. employment numbers are revised with the way reality was revised in George Orwell’s 1984.  Jesse, has a great chart, which Wordpress will probably reproduce abominably …

Anyway, go see the real deal at Jesse’s place.

My question is:  Are we living in a 1984 universe?  Are we as manipulated as the “proles” of Oceana. Are we doomed to forget the painful lessons, as Bing and Farrell say?

A sociologist I once talked to says “yes, we are.” He said humans were biologically programmed to forget the worst parts of whatever awful things happen to them.  The evolutionary point of this is to keep us breeding — if women remembered how painful childbirth really is, they wouldn’t do it more than once.  As for men — our ancient ancestors had to be willing to go out on the plains hunting game the day after our best friend was eaten alive by a lion.

We may have come to an evolutionary crossroads.  If people can’t remember how bad they’ve been screwed by Wall Street and politicians, they’ll just repeat the same mistakes all over again.

Food for thought — good luck out there today. Look out for the lions!

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