It Won’t Be Free
I spend far too much time on geopolitics and global macro. And I try to avoid the filter bubble which is why I listen to or read everything, whether right or left. From whatever country. And it is damn uncomfortable. But in discomfort comes truth. Or from truth you don’t want to accept.
One of the guys I listen to is Balaji Srinavasan who I’ve written about before. Watch this interview he does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-CjidoeMaE&t=1s.
He is damn smart. And he is damn negative on America and makes a damn persuasive case of why. It’s a hammer blow of fact after fact. And then a litany of facts about why China is winning. They make almost everything from PPE to robots to solar panels to electrical transfers to refining rare earths to pharma to steel to batteries to drones. All things needed to dominate the 21st century economy and war. As he says “China is strong, Zeihan is wrong”, which as an aside, Zeihan is a well known geopolitical analyst famous for predicting China’s end.
I think any American who has been paying attention would concur. We have a divided political elite and populace. Our elites in America are venal and clueless. Most Americans still think we are stronger than we really are.
Yet we literally cannot make anything anymore due to over-financialization and outsourcing to China including our critical industrial base and defense base. We have massive bureaucracy that gets in the way of everything. We are losing because of political cowardice, arrogance and decades of bad decisions. One big self-own after another. I get depressed writing this. And it’s far worse in Canada and Europe.
But I will never doom. I still think about what an ex-US Marine friend told me when he used to get into fights in his younger years. His mantra was “It won’t be free”. The point was that even if he got his ass kicked, he would fight so hard and make it so painful that it would feel close to a loss for his opponent, or opponents in some cases. Basically he went down fighting. I try to channel this energy. The odds might be stacked against us but from what I saw from the community of the Reindustrialize Summit, there are people who feel the same way as I do.
It’s going to be a hard road but I saw a passage from Ernst Junger that may be helpful for all of us in this challenging decade.
"Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment."