On the collapse of the dollar

And other possibilities

Dear T-,

We are currently on the road to being strangled. It didn't have to be this way, but due to public policy, we can no longer afford to live like we used to. Personal budgets are being slashed while public budgets are burying us in debt. Things we used to buy are no longer on our shelves. You pray every day that your water heater keeps heating and your old car keeps running, because your savings took a hit and used cars, the only cars you could afford anyway, are much more expensive than last year. And we expect things to get worse, because the food that’s being made now, which is still standing in the fields, costs way more to make than last year’s too, and this year’s is already costlier than last year’s.

But just as things are getting this bad you find out something new. It turns out your leaders weren’t the only retards in charge; and in fact, due to mass opposition, we were much less idiotic than the rest of the world. The New York Times reports that the dollar, so far from being devalued and eventually dumped as the world's reserve currency, is the strongest it's been in a long time — surpassing even the Euro for the first time in history, and giving the Yuan a good sock on the nose. By our “more conservative” money printing, we’ve trounced Britain, Mexico, Japan, the entire Eurozone, and the country we were most worried about ditching the dollar as a reserve currency — China.

Conservatives were worried about a collapse and we found that collapse is a relative concept; and in the world of money, you only have to perform relatively. We believed we were the only ones being slowly strangled, and found out that some of us got it with velvet, while others got the barbed wire. We can put up with almost anything so long as we know we’re in it with everyone. Especially when most everyone has it worse.

This doesn't mean all is well by any means, but it does mean things were much better than we imagined. And it’s possible (and even likely) they could get worse*. What lies out there, far beyond not only our sight, but many times beyond our comprehension**, will hit us when it hits us — and whatever we plan or prophesy, we are guaranteed surprises. A virus, a war, a terrorist have upended the world as we knew it — and who’s to say it won’t be upended by a cure, a prophet, a writer, an invention? It could go all backwards even from there. The terrorist could give us a new unity. The inventor could give us a new virus**.

This reminds me of an old letter of Seneca's to Lucilius (in the must-own translation by Graver and Long),

More things frighten us, Lucilius, than really affect us, and we are more often afflicted in thought than in fact. My advice to you is this, rather: don’t be miserable before it is time. Those things you fear as if they were impending may never happen; certainly they have not happened yet. Some things, then, torment us more than they should, some sooner than they should; and some torment us that should not do so at all: either we add to our pain, or we make it up, or we get ahead of it. […]

We do not demand evidence of the things that frighten us, or check them out carefully; we quail, and take to our heels, like the army that breaks camp because of a dust cloud kicked up by a herd of cattle, or like people who are terrified by some item of anonymous gossip. In a way, empty causes produce even more trepidation. Real dangers have an inherent limit; anything that arises from uncertainty, though, is given over to conjecture and to unrestrained anxiety. Hence our most pernicious, our most uncontrollable fears are the crazy ones. Our other fears are unreasonable; these are unreasoning.

So let us look carefully at the facts. Some evil is probable for the future; it is not proven right off. How many unexpected things have come to pass! How many of our expectations never happen at all! Even if it is to come, what good does it do to anticipate your grief? You will grieve soon enough, when it comes; in the meantime, allow yourself something better. What do you gain by that? Time. Many things will happen that may avert the approaching danger, even if it is nearly at hand, or make it cease, or direct it toward someone else. The fire leaves an escape route; the collapsing building sets some people down gently; the sword is right at the throat, and then drawn back; the one condemned to death survives his executioner. Even bad fortune can be fickle. Perhaps it will happen, perhaps it won’t; certainly it is not happening now. So keep the better things in view.

This coming from a man who lived not only at the same time as Nero, but alongside him. He was forced to commit suicide after living in almost constant danger of murder. A cross much heavier to bear than ours, I think.

Yours,

-J

*We get tossed around by circumstances, but there are people out there who genuinely believe anything that goes badly is their fault. The irony is, these are the people whose situation is the most hopeful. The man beyond help is the one who believes everything is someone else's fault.

**Lovecraft opens the Call of Cthulhu with a similar sentiment:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Our friend Cthulhu

**Another way of looking at these things: "great thinkers" love to say that things are falling apart — and they are. It's very much true (as Don Draper put it) that we know this all ends, and we don’t know how, but we know it ends badly. But did you consider that beautiful things are being built every second — over billions of years? And that whatever you really love has been a masterpiece in the making? And that there are countless more masterpieces under construction? And that you, like your ancestors, will never even see them coming? The future is bleak — and it's also beautiful.