Muse 006: Obfuscation and Forest Fires
Origin Story
In Greek and Roman mythology, a muse referred to each of nine goddesses, the daughters of Zeus (god of sky and thunder) and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory), who preside over the arts and sciences. The above is, of course, the definition of a muse as a noun but it can also be used as a verb. That can be defined as “ to be absorbed in thought” or “say to oneself in a thoughtful manner”. I like all of this as it relates to what I intend these writings will to be for both myself, as well as, anyone who finds value in them.
Obfuscation and Forest Fires
Obfuscation is the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language. The obfuscation might be either unintentional or intentional, and is accomplished with circumlocution (the use of many words where fewer would do, especially in a deliberate attempt to be vague or evasive) and the use of jargon, per Wikipedia. This epitomizes all of the communication coming from the Federal Reserve and the White House. Every press conference by either the Federal Reserve Chair or Press Secretary is pure obfuscation. The reason why this is the case, in my opinion, is due to the forest fire fallacy, which is that they are inherently bad. On the contrary, they are natural and, while destructive, resulting in a beautiful, fresh start for the soil and flora that remain. The actuality of antifragility. This is analogous to the debt-based system built on fiat and the genesis of why these officials need to obfuscate the truth. While I vehemently oppose this system and believe that we will no longer have a use for it when bitcoin takes over as the global reserve system, we must deal with the consequences while it remains. There are countless examples of negligent action over the years, where this system needed to be reset by cascading defaults to serve as the proverbial forest fire but rather than allowing this to run its course, the debt was kicked to the Fed’s balance sheet, which was under a trillion dollars in August 2008, ballooned up to 4.5T by December 2014, in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC), and now sits at 8.9T, due to the pandemic lockdowns. These actions by the Fed precisely represent the deadfall that was unable to be culled by the fires to provide life to new flora in the form of new businesses and institutions. The only way this system can be salvaged, if at all, is with persistently high inflation and yield curve control that will, on a real basis, destroy the purchasing power of bondholders. It’s pure math. Now I don’t blame them for being dodgy on this fact because if they explicitly said this, we would experience mass chaos as people rushed out of dollars and into scarce assets but this is an experiment that cannot succeed indefinitely. If we didn’t have bitcoin, we would be in an even more precarious position than we find ourselves today. If you visit hope.com (listed in the Education tab of this website), you’ll find a website dedicated to the growth of knowledge around bitcoin. Michael Saylor, founder and CEO of MicroStrategy, owns the domain and, among other assets, more than 130,000 bitcoin.
