Charles Hugh Smith's Substack

Narrative Control: Everything Is Fake

Charles Hugh Smith — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 18:25:47 GMT

Controlling what the populace believes to be true appears to control the world, but Controlling the Narrative Is Not the Same As Controlling the World. This is becoming increasingly clear as the status quo narratives--everything's going great, AI will deliver super-abundance to everyone, inflation is low, etc.--are now so detached from what we experience that they are inducing mass psychosis.

The incentive is obvious: persuade the populace to accept an arrangement that enriches and empowers those in control, and you no longer have to deliver authentic Progress or Prosperity, you only need to deliver artifice: fake statistics, fake claims presented as certainties, a ceaselessly promoted narrative in which everything is fake.

But narrative control doesn't actually control the world. A rancher told us the cost of fodder has doubled in the past year. That's the real world of weather and the cost of energy. Telling us that inflation is only 3.6% while healthcare premiums go up 13% a year, insurance costs triple and beef is now a luxury item is a parody of factual reporting.

The Pendulum of History has reached an extreme of artifice and narrative control that will break the status quo as the gulf between the fake and the real widens to the point the bridge connecting them collapses.

Real Innovation / Fake Innovation

Charles Hugh Smith — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 18:17:51 GMT

The nature of innovation has undergone an implicit shift few seem to have noticed. Where innovations once improved life by eliminating self-evidently bad things (infectious diseases, hunger, etc.), now innovation is all about conjuring and commercializing things we didn't know we needed, with the personal computer and smartphone being the now classic examples.

This reflects the third article of faith in the Mythology of Progress: whatever is "new" / novel is always an exciting innovative advance.

These quasi-religious beliefs--innovations are 1) boundless 2) intrinsically positive and 3) "new" / novel is always an innovative advance--are the foundation of immense profitability, as "innovation" has shifted from eliminating self-evidently bad things to commercializing things we didn't know we need, which is now anything that is new / novel.

That every innovation--which includes everything new / novel--is inevitably a positive advance is self-evidently false: many innovations have downsides which offset or cancel whatever (immensely profitable) upsides were heralded, and the commercialization of new / novel "innovations" has reached extremes that qualify as hokey parodies of authentic innovation.

The Innovations of Necessity

Controlling the Narrative Is Not the Same As Controlling the World

Charles Hugh Smith — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 16:46:15 GMT

The core dynamic of this era is the notion that controlling the narrative controls the world, as persuading the populace to believe something is true controls their convictions which then control their behaviors. Centralized powers discovered the potential for narrative control to control the world in the 20th century, as mass communications enabled centralized control of what is presented as true and important.

Propaganda has an ugly tone, so now we say narrative control, which is of course a comically obvious propaganda technique. We call propaganda designed to financially benefit a private entity marketing, a key component in what I call privatized totalitarianism: establish a monopoly that controls a key mass communication technology--a social media platform, search, smart phones, etc.--and voila, privatized totalitarianism controls the medium which controls the message.

Controlling what the populace believes to be true appears to control the world, but Controlling the Narrative Is Not the Same As Controlling the World. This is becoming increasingly clear as the status quo narratives--everything’s going great, AI will deliver super-abundance to everyone, inflation is low, etc.--are now so detached from what we experience that they are inducing mass psychosis.

The incentive is obvious: persuade the populace to accept an arrangement that enriches and empowers those in control, and you no longer have to deliver authentic Progress or Prosperity, you only need to deliver artifice: fake statistics, fake claims presented as certainties, a ceaselessly promoted narrative in which everything is fake.

But narrative control doesn’t actually control the world. A rancher told us the cost of fodder has doubled in the past year. That’s the real world of weather and the cost of energy. Telling us that inflation is only 3.6% while healthcare premiums go up 13% a year, insurance costs triple and beef is now a luxury item is a parody of factual reporting.

The Pendulum of History has reached an extreme of artifice and narrative control that will break the status quo as the gulf between the fake and the real widens to the point the bridge connecting them collapses.

The social control of replacing authenticity with artifice will backfire and the pendulum will swing back to punishing self-serving artifice rather than rewarding it.

Yes, yes, I know this is “impossible.” Those wielding the machinery of social control have god-like powers that will never diminish, they will only increase, etc. But everything is fake and mass psychosis are not stable arrangements. Artifice is self-liquidating.

The pendulum has reached an extreme of parody that cannot be pushed any further, and as the real world intrudes, all the narrative control in the world won’t actually control the real world.

New podcast: Global Uncertainties may result in Nonlinear, Self-Reinforcing Instability (26:31 min)

The Innovations of Necessity

Charles Hugh Smith — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 21:05:35 GMT

The ideas that technological innovations are 1) boundless and 2) intrinsically positive are the core convictions of the Mythology of Progress. Skeptics are quickly inundated with examples: antibiotics, The Green Revolution, electricity, the Internet, and so on.

The nature of innovation has undergone an implicit shift few seem to have noticed. Where innovations once improved life by eliminating self-evidently bad things (infectious diseases, hunger, etc.), now innovation is all about conjuring and commercializing things we didn’t know we needed, with the personal computer and smartphone being the now classic examples.

This reflects the third article of faith in the Mythology of Progress: whatever is “new” / novel is always an exciting innovative advance.

These quasi-religious beliefs--innovations are 1) boundless 2) intrinsically positive and 3) “new” / novel is always an innovative advance--are the foundation of immense profitability, as “innovation” has shifted from eliminating self-evidently bad things to commercializing things we didn’t know we need, which is now anything that is new / novel.

That every innovation--which includes everything new / novel--is inevitably a positive advance is self-evidently false: many innovations have downsides which offset or cancel whatever (immensely profitable) upsides were heralded, and the commercialization of new / novel “innovations” has reached extremes that qualify as hokey parodies of authentic innovation. I addressed this in two recent posts:
The Status Quo Is a Comic-Book Parody
and
Our Vaunted Technology Is Rubbish.

These realities are masked by the quasi-religious fervor of True Believers in boundless, intrinsically positive Progress and corporate marketing that exploits this unshakeable faith, marketing that also exploits the other shift few seem to notice:

The economy no longer rewards durability in service of authentic value / need, it rewards consumers’ addiction to buying something, anything, as 1) entertainment 2) distraction 3) solace 4) something to do and 5) identity, as buying status markers generates a brief flush of identity and worthiness in a culture that breeds insecurity as the driver of profitable addictions to consumption and social media.

If we don’t constantly consume / travel and post / live online, our selfhood evaporates.

There is another type of innovation that has largely been forgotten: the Innovation of Necessity, which can be described as 1) doing more with less because less is all we have, and 2) appropriate technology, using the fewest resources, labor and capital needed so scarce resources, labor and capital can be devoted to addressing other scarcities.

In other words, this type of innovation is driven by true need, not addictions to rising profits and consumerism, and by scarcity, not an overabundance of 1) stuff to buy / jet fuel for travel 2) credit and 3) “money” in all its forms.

Appropriate Technology is the term applied to low-cost, durable, simple technologies for people and places with little money / credit, who by necessity must do more with less because less is all we have.

This term is thus tainted with the stain of scarcity and poverty. The idea that people in the developed, wealthy world would choose low-cost, durable, simple technologies over costly, planned-obsolescence disposable options is anathema because the costly, planned-obsolescence disposable options are immensely profitable while low-cost, durable, simple technologies are not profitable.

And of course the best way to make sure consumers don’t have the option of choosing low-profit appropriate technologies is to establish monopolies and cartels which only offer costly, immensely profitable designed-to-fail (what Cory Doctorow calls ensh*tified) products and services.

Limiting available options to costly, disposable, low-quality, highly profitable products and services goes hand in hand with the parody of “innovation” that claims to be “new” and novel to mask the ensh*tification of overfeaturing, where senseless, overly complex and prone to fail “features” are stuffed into a product or service which was once durable and actually addressed an authentic need to speed up the product cycle / add illusory “value” to justify a higher cost and lower durability.

Simply put, most of what’s presented as “innovation” is a pathetically transparent simulation of authentic innovation. True Believers bridle at this self-evident reality, and in their indignation, spin frantic claims that overfeaturing really, really, really is Progress with a capital P.

What’s on display isn’t Progress; what’s on display is the quasi-religious nature of our attachment to the idea of technologically powered Modernity and Progress--the belief in the eternal improvement in everything.

The resulting mix of parody and real progress is a tangle.

A writer friend and I agree: the best word processor we’ve ever used was MacWrite, circa 1986, forty years ago.

Windows NT (Windows 2000 Professional) was stable and functional. All later versions are just exercises in monopoly. If you insist on a later version, Windows 7 (2009) was also stable. Everything that’s been added is overfeaturing exercises in monopoly.

My 1977 Honda Accord (manufactured 49 years ago) that I acquired used in 1981 was preferable to the 2026 Accord we recently rented. It delivered the same excellent mileage (close to 40 MPG), was extremely reliable and had a perfectly adequate audio system (radio and cassette player). I did not wreck the vehicle because it didn’t have a rearview camera, sensors and beeps. I never had to deal with false TPMS alarms or the driver displays suddenly going dark. I did not have to navigate endless digital menus to correct this constant flow of software defects.

OK, there are more airbags in today’s cars, but can we dare admit that the chances of today’s vehicles that depend on buggy software and motherboards to function are still running 30 years from now are basically zero?

Once the warranty runs out, there’s no incentive to update kludgy, dated software. All of today’s overfeatured vehicles are basically Windows 98 software awaiting “the blue screen of death.”

The idea that the current abundance of resources, money and credit could reverse to scarcities that forced innovation to revert to serving real needs rather than higher profits and over-consumption is nowhere to be found.

That the proverb “necessity is the mother of invention” might actually apply to those living in developed economies is so outlandish that it’s easily dismissed.

But the reality is economies that are dependent on credit-asset bubbles for their “growth,” income, gains and consumption (50% by the top 10% reaping the gains of credit-asset bubbles) are juggling lit sticks of dynamite, as speculative bubbles are intrinsically unstable: they all pop, with devastating consequences.

Just as “innovation” is now a parody of authentic advances, economies that depend on credit-asset bubbles for their “growth” are parodies of authentic prosperity.

Should our dependence on credit-asset bubbles, rising costs and resource depletion become causal factors, all innovation would be Appropriate Technology, focused on durability and doing more with less, regardless of the low profitability of the technologies.

That would be true Progress and innovation.

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Cycles, Waves and the Pendulum of History

Charles Hugh Smith — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 17:57:37 GMT

This pendulum swing eventually reaches an extreme that cannot be increased or even sustained. The asymmetries imposed by the dominant few reach the limits of the system, and the pendulum pauses for a brief moment before beginning its mechanically inevitable swing to the opposite extreme.

The Pendulum of History

Charles Hugh Smith — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 16:38:00 GMT

A great many phenomena in both Nature and human history follow cyclical patterns, while others form waves. Author David Hackett Fischer (The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History) described the difference between cycles and waves:

“Cyclical rhythms are fixed and regular. Their periods are highly predictable. Great waves are more variable and less predictable. They differ in duration, magnitude, velocity, and momentum. One great price wave lasted less than ninety years; another continued more than 180 years. The irregularities in individual price movements make them no more (or less) predictable than individual waves in the sea.

Even so, all great waves had important qualities in common. They all shared the same wave-structure. They tended to have the same sequence of development, the same pattern of price relatives, similar movements of wages, rent, interest rates; and the same dangerous volatility in later stages. All major price revolutions in modern history began in periods of prosperity. Each ended in shattering world crises and was followed by periods of recovery and comparative equilibrium.”

As Fischer observed, waves of human history share characteristics with ocean waves, which can accrete energy and become giant rogue waves that cannot be predicted even as they can be foreseen as recurring phenomena.

Two cycles have attracted much commentary over the past decade: The Fourth Turning posited by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1997 book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (subtitled What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny) which laid out an 80-year cycle of four generational turnings (High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis) that culminate in a system-changing Fourth Turning.

This 80-year cycle aligns with the nation-changing crises of 1781 (the end of the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States), 1861 (the start of the Civil War) and 1941 (America’s entry into an existential global conflict, World War II). This cycle suggests a nation-changing crisis began around 2021.

Strauss and Howe took pains to note that the outcome of each crisis isn’t pre-ordained to be positive. Complacency based on the idea that it will all turn out wonderfully due to the nation’s destiny could be fatal.

Peter Turchin and his colleagues have mapped out a 50-year cycle based on data ranging from archeological to financial--or in the case of coin hoards buried in times of crisis, both archeological and financial. Turchin’s prediction of a crisis beginning in 2020 drew skepticism which then flipped to recognition when the events of 2020 came to pass.

Cycles are generally depicted as some version of a sine wave:

Waves build up and break in irregular fashion. If we discern the forces at work--storms, etc.--we can predict the eventual arrival of waves but not their amplitude. In other words, the outcome of waves cannot be predicted. The complacency lent by cycles--everything will recover in time, etc.--is not possible in waves, as the wave might sweep away the entire status quo.

Moana Jones Wong at Pipeline, North Shore, Oahu, Hawaii

A pendulum offers a third model of history: asymmetries push the socio-political-economic order to an extreme that cannot be sustained, and the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, for example, from order to chaos and from surplus to depletion.

In my framework, the shared interests of society are always in competition with the private interests of markets. Ideally, these generate a dynamic equilibrium, as adaptive forces provide feedback that counteracts any overreach.

But as I have taken pains to explain, when one set of interests gains the power to override or ignore competing interests and the shared interests of society, their power becoming self-reinforcing, with fatal consequences. When a financial-market elite gains enough wealth to take control of the political machinery, they use this power to increase their share of the economy’s output / gains at the expense of everyone else.

From their point of view, this is the natural order of things: we’ve gained supremacy because we’re smarter and therefore deserving of power.

What they miss is that by gaining dominance, they eliminate the adaptive forces needed to maintain systemic stability. The system veers into moral decay as self-interest is deemed all that’s necessary for “growth,” and rampant corruption / unfairness reigns as the system is tilted to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

The irony is rich: the status quo the dominant few believe is permanent cascades into disorder due to the destabilizing effects of their dominance.

Richard Bonugli and I discuss the resulting potential for nonlinear disruption in our latest podcast: Global Uncertainties may result in Nonlinear, Self-Reinforcing Instability (26:31 min)

This pendulum swing eventually reaches an extreme that cannot be increased or even sustained. The asymmetries imposed by the dominant few reach the limits of the system, and the pendulum pauses for a brief moment before beginning its mechanically inevitable swing to the opposite extreme.

It’s impossible not to note the pendulum of wealth and power swinging from the extreme of elites owning most of the wealth and accumulating most of the gains to the other end of the spectrum of a more widely shared distribution of wealth, power and gains. Here we see Peter Turchin’s 50-year cycle depicted as pendulum swings.

We are currently poised in that brief moment in which the pendulum has reached an extreme that cannot be pushed any further as the asymmetries have reached their systemic limits. Wealth-power-income asymmetries have reached extremes of concentration that generate instability:

The broad-based distribution of the economy’s gains to the workforce has been siphoned off and distributed to the owners of capital in a highly asymmetric power-law distribution: over time, this resulted in the transfer of $150 trillion from the workforce to those at the top:

Wealth, income and power now follow a power law distribution that favors the few over the many due to the self-reinforcing nature of an economy dominated by what’s moral is what’s legal, and what’s legal is for sale:

Life is good for Billionaire Tech Bros and the financial Nobility:

Thanks to the status quo’s mastery of The Big Con, the majority have been conned into believing the current moment of apparent stability is authentic stability. But this apparent stability is as fake as everything else in Ultra-Processed Life, as events will reveal.

I don’t follow the predictive gambling table in the casino, but I did overhear a peculiarly garbed stranger murmuring, with some urgency, “I bet 100 million quatloos the economy will collapse into disorder and depression by 2032.” I think he was given good odds from the gamblers who fell for The Big Con.

The delusion that technology and finance have given us god-like powers that moot the pendulum of history will be revealed as delusion in a most painful manner. A social-economic system in which what’s moral is what’s legal, and what’s legal is for sale generates its own demise, as The Big Con doesn’t work on the forces of history.

New podcast: Global Uncertainties may result in Nonlinear, Self-Reinforcing Instability (26:31 min)

You Can’t Parody the Status Quo Because It’s already a Parody

Charles Hugh Smith — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:16:01 GMT

The core quasi-religious belief of the status quo--that the profit motive drives technological innovation which drives improvements in the quality of our lives--is now a parody, as the ceaseless mania to increase profits by any means available has led to speeding up product cycles with what correspondent Mike Fasano calls overfeaturing, adding complicated features which are parodies of utility and durability, all designed to improve profits, not the quality, utility, value or durability of products and services. Mike described the resulting parody of “innovation”:

“Just like with your experience on getting AI customer support, the endless options are never trimmed or even updated. They are only expanded upon -- often described in names reflecting faddish, incomprehensible computer lingo which itself will become archaic in a month or two.”

The other driver of the status quo--that novelty drives profits higher by enticing consumers to buy “what’s new” on the much-hyped belief “new” is “better”--is also now a slap-stick parody of “innovation” and novelty. Here is the winning recipe from Trader Joe’s recent contest promoting novel uses of hoisin sauce: Hoisin Sauce Recipe Contest WINNERS! (note the caps--every novelty is a WINNER!)

And the winner is: Hoisin Caramel Apple Sundae with Black Pepper & Pistachios:
Go ahead and try to parody this parody of “novelty”; you can’t. It’s already a hokey, trying-too-hard parody of novelty.

This hokey, campy, slap-stick caricature quality characterizes the entire status quo apparatus:

The Status Quo Is a Comic-Book Parody

Charles Hugh Smith — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 14:55:57 GMT

The sharpest critique of the status quo--and therefore the one most likely to spark spittle-flecked freakouts--is that stripped of self-important spin, it’s a comic-book parody of a functional state of affairs. The key to a solid parody is the most absurd exaggerations are taken with the utmost seriousness, as if the participants are completely unaware of the laughable nature of the caricatures they’re playing.

So let’s conduct a thought experiment: boil off all the grandiose self-importance (”we’re serious people discussing serious things,” blah-blah-blah) and hyper-stylized spin (”AI will make everything free, or end the world as we know it!”), and then try to parody what’s left.

You can’t. Everything in the status quo is already a self-parody and therefore impervious to being parodied. Whatever we come up with as a parody is only a pale shadow of what’s passed off as “serious people doing serious things.”

Consider The Imperial Project (tm) War Room for playing their live-action game War of Choice (tm). This is the pinnacle of “serious people discussing serious things”--what’s our next War of Choice (tm)?

It’s not ideal, but it’s the only war we got.

War generates inflation which creates an illusory “growth” that impoverishes the bottom 90% as life becomes unaffordable, a tragicomic parody of prosperity: as long as this parody of prosperity enriches Wall Street, the status quo cheers.

Our Billionaire Tech Bros have concentrated enough personal wealth to buy political power in unlimited quantities, generating delusions of grandeur and hubris that are now comic-book parodies:

When those we worship as Tech Gods go mad with power, the parody ceases to be amusing.

By turning the hype machinery to 11, our Billionaire Tech Bros have become parodies of themselves. Each AI Tech Bro is now a thinly cloaked parody of a James Bond villain, a fervent believer in their own private religion of PR and delusions that transmogrify the AI Ponzi Scheme credit bubble into the Savior or the Devil, either one works equally well.

An economy dominated by monopolies, cartels and Billionaire Financier - Tech Bro concentrations of wealth / power is a parody of “democracy” and “prosperity”: cue the comic-book caricatures of Private Equity:

Go ahead and try to parody this parody of “novelty”; you can’t. It’s already a hokey, trying-too-hard parody of novelty.

This hokey, campy, slap-stick caricature quality characterizes the entire status quo apparatus: ‘education” is a parody of useful learning, “leadership” is a comic-book parody of authentic leadership, “innovation” is a Rube Goldberg parody of technological advances, and “novelty” has reached such absurd excesses that it’s no longer amusing.

Here’s a few of Trader Joe’s Fall novelty products. Try to identify my attempts to parody these concoctions. Or try to concoct your own parody products. It’s fun for all.

Duck with blueberry favoring (dog treats)
Caramel Creme Scented Body Butter
Candy Jar Flavored Lip Butter Balm Set
Crawdaddy-shaped macaroons with caramel and chocolate
Pumpkin Spice Coffee
Pumpkin and Spice Caramel Sauce
Glazed Pumpkin Pie Spice Donut Holes
Pumpkin Spice Espresso Martini
Pumpkin Spice IPA beer
Pumpkin Maple Bacon Flavored Stuffies (dog treats)
Pumpkin Spiced Teeny Tiny Pretzels
Pumpkin Cream Cheese Croissants

Personally, I found the dog treats the most appealing. I hope Fido won’t mind sharing.

What’s obvious and therefore verboten to state out loud is this status quo parody of a functional economy and society is not just hokey, campy, slap-stick caricature; it’s demeaning, delusional and sad. Acting like it’s not a demeaning parody only extends the artifice and delusion.

Our Vaunted Technology Is Rubbish

Charles Hugh Smith — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 01:03:47 GMT

It’s extremely difficult to set aside all the preconceptions we’ve been given about how the world works, and even more difficult to look at the world around us with a gaze untainted by ideas borrowed from others.

It’s equally difficult to recognize these borrowed ideas as beliefs rather than facts.

Let’s consider the possibility that all the ideas we’ve inherited about technology are beliefs, not facts, and these beliefs no longer map what we actually experience. Rather than mediate our experiences with a promotional golly-gee-whiz-this-is-wunnerful filter, let’s report our direct, unfiltered experiences.

This is my report of recent experiences with everyday technology, which is ceaselessly presented as awe-inspiring Progress. The unfiltered reality is it’s rubbish.

Let’s start with X.com, home of AI software Grok. Out of the blue, I start getting promotional emails from X.com addressed to an imposter, who seems to have used my email to open an imposter X.com account.

A human could spot this imposter in three seconds, yet the immense “intelligence” of Grok failed to recognize an obvious imposter account. How difficult is it to compare images, likenesses, email addresses, etc. and note that the new account is a copy of an authentic “blue check” account?

I dutifully filled out X.com’s form reporting the imposter, URLs of their posts, etc. X.com responded with demands for more data / busy-work / unpaid shadow-work. I wrote back that they already had more than enough information to delete the imposter account, so please stop pestering me and do your job.

Eventually I received an email addressed to the imposter that “your account has been deleted.”

This is not intelligence, this is a parody of intelligence. It’s rubbish. A truly intelligent system would have flagged the imposter immediately. So sorry if I hurt Grok’s feelings.

Next up, Xfinity. My Xfinity email was hijacked. This is not the first time; Xfinity’s security is Swiss Cheese. So I dutifully call the “customer service” number which activates an AI Agent. What can I help you with? My Xfinity email account has been hacked. I’m sorry you’re having problems. Would you like an email or text link to our upgraded email service?

No matter what voice prompts I gave the AI agent, all I got was this endless loop. This is a parody of customer service and AI. It’s rubbish. Eventually I recalled that Xfinity has a security-service-only phone number, and I spoke with a human being who walked me through the recovery process, which was complicated by the extremely poor design of Xfinity’s website.

Arriving at twilight in a city unknown to us, we used booking.com to scan motel options. We were prompted to log in, but given the rarity of our using the site, we didn’t have the PW. So we clicked the “reset password” link, which promised to send a link via email. No email ever arrived, even when we used a second email address.

So we clicked the “log in using a different method” link, and were presented with the same screen: click here and we’ll send you an email--which never arrived, and no, it wasn’t in the spam folder.

Next, we tried to open an account with Wyndham, which didn’t like our password, triggering another endless loop, with one twist: the small print indicated that the “reset password” email would be sent within 5 days.

Big Tech is cutting down 250,000 trees in Finland to build more data centers, and Corporate America needs days to send an email that is functionally instantaneous? Once again, this is a parody of functional software / “technology.” (A reset email did arrive several days later.)

Google Maps (GM) now integrates Google’s AI software Gemini. Here’s my experience: it’s rubbish. Out of the blue, GM’s female voice instructed me to leave the highway going east to 505 heading north. No explanation, just a command, which I ignored because it made no sense. This was the first evidence that GM was now rubbish.

As we attempted to locate a motel, GM directed us on convoluted routes down unlit side streets with instructions like “turn right on Monroe Street.” Well, that’s just fine in daylight, but it’s night, and the streets aren’t lit, so we can’t see any street signs.

If Gemini were even slightly intelligent, wouldn’t it “know” that it was night and these streets were dark / unlit? Eventually I figured out that GM’s default settings are--cue the laugh track--to “choose routes that save fuel and time,” an absurdist parody given that GM’s nonsensically convoluted intructions caused us to waste fuel and time.

After this fiasco, Google Search provided convoluted instructions on how to reset the user parameters of GM to limit its convoluted routes that were supposed to “save fuel and time” but accomplished the exact opposite. Wouldn’t common sense suggest the default algorithm be one that selects the easiest to follow, most direct route using primary roadways, and let the user navigate endless menus to choose other algorithms prioritizing fuel and time savings?

How hard would it be to program GM’s voice to ask, “would you like a convoluted detour that might take four minutes off your six-hour drive?” This isn’t intelligence, it’s a parody of intelligence.

I’ve owned Honda vehicles for 45 years. When we needed to rent a car, we chose a 2026 Accord with less than 8,000 miles on the odometer--essentially a brand-new car. The engine and other basics were fine, but the software was rubbish. Anecdotally, this doesn’t appear to be unique to Honda--all vehicle software is rubbish, an accretion of legacy software larded up with layers of so-called “smart software.”

I know others would just ignore the nag messages on the distractingly large audio screen, but seeing “would you like to activate Apple Car-Play?” for the 127th time made me think, how hard would it be to add a few lines of code:
1. Is this a rental car, yes or no.
2. If yes, what is the duration of the current rental.
3. Once the customer clicks “no,” they don’t want to activate Apple Car-Play, do not display the message again.

In a sad parody of droid devotion, the software kept scanning for previous rental customer’s iPhones. It also informed us every time we started the car that one USB port was for charging only, and the other was a data port that also charged the connected device.

The software hallucinated various conditions. For one stretch, the software notified us that one of the “driver assist” sensors was not working and needed to be cleaned. I did nothing, and the problem disappeared the next time we drove off.

Then it notified us there was a problem with one of the tire’s pressure, via the Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS). I had a digital tire pressure gauge, which revealed the tire pressure hadn’t changed at all, much less 25%. But to get rid of the nag message, I had to go through a stupidly complicated set of menus controlled by the 27 buttons and scroll knobs on the steering wheel. (OK, slight exaggeration on the number.)

As usual, the instructions delivered by Search didn’t match the reality of the steering wheel, despite searching for this specific year and model.

Then the digital display of speed, fuel, etc. inexplicably went dark. Multiple searches online revealed that covering a sensor in the dash near the windshield results in “permanently setting the display” on dark. Maybe I slid a notebook up on the dash for a moment. Whatever the cause, it was brief, and no beeps, squawks or alarms alerted us to “NEVER PLACE ANYTHING OVER THE HIDDEN SENSOR.”

Note the word “permanently.” This meant that the usual fixes--restoring defaults, brightness controls, etc.--didn’t fix the problem. Fixing this failure required more convoluted navigation through menus controlled by the 27 arrows, buttons and scroll-knobs on the steering wheel.

This is a parody of utility and value. Any attempt to argue that all this software is “creating value” is itself a parody--a rather pathetic one at that.

The driver’s digital display features a little representation of the car. When you press the brake pedal, the tail lights on the little digital car flash red. What is the point of showing the driver a digital cartoon of the car they’re driving? Are we supposed to drive the car, or look at the little car on the screen? Or is the little car on the screen for a backseat driver?

One wonders what data is being collected by the software. The sensors pick up the speed limit signs, but comically get it wrong when the highway is paralleled by a local lane with a posted speed limit of 15 MPH. So the digital display showed I was driving 65 MPH in a 15 MPH zone. Woah. I’m sure whatever entity gets the vehicle’s data will have fun with that bit.

Last but not least, Google Search delivered completely wrong supposedly up-to-date information about national and state parks. All flavors of search are untrustworthy; you have to go to the source sites to confirm what “search” reports as “fact.”

All this is fun amd games, but there are serious issues hidden beneath rubbish software’s farce and parody of utility, value and “intelligence.” If drivers start depending on “driver assist” functions, and the sensor or system fails, it won’t announce it has failed; you simply won’t hear the “beep” when you pull in front of a semi in the blind spot, and that’s how you end up in the morgue.

Our 1998 Civic still works just fine. Sure, it’s needed routine maintenance and repairs, but it’s still a fully functional vehicle 28 years after it rolled off the assembly line. What are the odds that today’s software-dependent vehicles will still be functioning with only routine maintenance in 28 years?

Based on the rubbish quality of software, I would put the odds at zero. The fantasy of True Believers is that AI will correct all the rubbish software, but software engineers are reporting that AI is part of the problem, not the solution. The kludgy mess of legacy and AI-coded script isn’t attuned to maintenance, much less self-correcting perfection.

All these technologies are rubbish. They don’t work, they hallucinate, they’re unreliable and untrustworthy, they are parodies of customer service and value. All the examples above occurred over two weeks. I doubt I’m the only one who’s experienced rubbish software / technology being the new default.

As I’ve noted before, what AI excels at is surveillance and malicious hacking / spoofing / ransomware. What it is not good at is defending against AI malware.

Or we can ask AI to answer the question for us:

This is the question we should ask but don’t dare ask:

Observations from a Month of Camping in the American West

Charles Hugh Smith — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 20:21:26 GMT

You may have noticed that my posts have been few / sporadic the past month, the result of being on a month-long camping trip in the American West, starting from California and ranging as far east/north as North Dakota and as far south as southern New Mexico. Cell service was generally spotty to non-existent in the remote sites we visited, and wi-fi was non-existent other than when we arrived in a town/city after dark and stayed in a motel.

I don’t announce when I’m not at home because other bloggers I know were burgled after posting photos of their travels.

Any journey is both an internal and external experience. We experience internal revelations and insights and assemble observations about the people, places and vistas we’ve seen. Interestingly, we both experienced vivid dreams throughout the journey as our minds processed all these new experiences and challenges.

This camping trip was both an experiment--could we still engage in what Teddy Roosevelt called “the strenuous life” in our early 70s--and a long-desired but long out-of-reach revisiting of the joys of car-camping, which we have enjoyed for over 30 years (starting in 1994), but could not do in the years 2019-2025.

We’d each gone camping as children with our families, so the whole “roughing it” experience was not new to us. Camping appeals to each of our characters, for it is elemental in a way that cannot be experienced in any other mode of travel. The tent is nothing but the thinnest fabric, and life is lived outside.

The key to camping for more than a few days is a comfortable bed and good food. It’s often a rugged experience, especially if you’re on foot seeing the sights, and you need a good night’s sleep, meaning comfortable, warm bedding. Healthy, varied, hot meals are equally important to sustain weeks of camping, which is often arduous due to wind storms, rain, freezing weather, etc.

From long experience, we’ve developed a system for both sleeping and cooking that fits in a standard sedan: three layers of foam / inflatable sleeping mats (Thermarest), two small camp stoves plus a portable kitchen including a wok, waffle iron, pots and pans and everything needed to make good coffee and do dishes. (I suspect our wok surprised other campers.)

All this also fits in a sedan, with the important caveat that the rear window is kept clear for driving safety. The packing is exact, as that’s the only way to move everything you need for comfortable living in a limited space.

Our REI tent is 32 years old but still works well. Like most of what we own, it’s now “vintage” (like our 40 to 50 year old sleeping bags, still in excellent condition). The tent is an aluminum-tubing-frame-under-tension hexagon with a fly. It’s compact but large enough for two adults to sleep in. You can’t stand up in the tent, so setting up the bedding, changing clothes, etc., requires what we call “tent yoga.” Fortunately, our work keeps us flexible, so “tent yoga” is no big deal.

We experienced several wind storms with gusts in the 40-50 miles per hour range, and while the tent fly flapped loudly and incessantly, the tent held up well. One night of rain soaked it, but the next day was sunny and we dried it all out.

High winds make cooking difficult, but we managed to always have a hot meal at night.

Going late in the season at high altitudes and latitudes guarantees cold nights, and as expected the night temperatures in Yellowstone and elsewhere fell below 30 F.

But we were prepared for this, and have a 12-volt light we attach to the car battery via a long cable to be able to read in the tent after dark. After sunset (6:30 pm), the temperature drops quickly, especially with wind-chill, so we were in the tent by 7 pm and only ready to face freezing temperatures in the morning after 7 am, when the sun started warming things up.

That warming up took a while, and so it was amusing to see our coffee cups sliding off the frozen surface of our vinyl table cloth in the morning. (Most campground tables are not level.)

It’s important to note that all this equipment is made of sophisticated synthetic materials, the opposite of primitive. But this equipment enabled comfortable camping in primitive sites.

Given the end-of-the-season timing--most campgrounds in the National parks were closed or closing in late September-early October--it’s not surprising that there were few tent campers. We were the only tent campers in many campgrounds, and in most other cases, there might have been one other tent in a large campground filled with RVs and trucks towing trailers.

Only the campgrounds with tent-only sections had other tent campers, and as far as I could tell, the other campers were half our age or younger. Families with school-age children were of course not out camping in Autumn.

My impression is that camping is now dominated by RVs and trailers, though perhaps I’m wrong about this.

Camping now requires a smart phone. There’s a certain irony to this, of course. Camping in national parks and many state parks now require online reservations. A few state campgrounds reserve some sites for late arrivals / first come, first served, and many Forest Service campgrounds are first come, first served, but most sites require navigating complicated, often confusing reservation sites.

Most are poorly designed. For example, few indicate which campgrounds are closed for the season. Many don’t have adequate maps of the campgrounds. Others don’t tell you which sites are open / not yet reserved, so you have to click on each site to check. In several instances, we secured the last campsite in a large campground or state park.

Here’s a typical example: one state reservation system required a license plate be entered, but since we hadn’t yet picked up a rental car, we didn’t have a license plate. Many campers come from overseas, and they don’t have a license plate yet, either. No license plate, no reservation....

Each of these reservation sites requires registering, logging in, etc.--tedious to say the least.

in most cases, despite the paucity of information available, we lucked into large, relatively private campsites.

There is a kind of camaraderie in camping, and we enjoyed chatting with other campers--petting their cute dogs, etc. But I was also struck by how closed down many people were: they didn’t acknowledge our “hello” and didn’t even turn their head. This struck me as reflecting the general decline of civility in America.

City dwellers may be surprised by how spotty cell service is in remote areas of the nation. How do you reserve your next campsite if you have no cell or wi-fi service? You can’t. Google / Apple maps also cease to function. Knowing this, we took paper maps. A paper map draws guffaws in cities--”old school”--but finding your Google Map screen blank changes your perspective. Yes, I know that we can download maps, but your location is a mystery without cell service.

We were surprised by how full the national parks and all the campgrounds were this late in the season. Teton and Yellowstone National parks were jammed with visitors, foreign and domestic. (We heard more Mandarin on some crowded trails than English.) We had to get up early to secure a parking spot at various parking lots at trail heads.

As noted, campgrounds were full of RVs and large trailers. Anecdotally, based on conversations with other campers, a large number of retirees spend their time driving around the country camping in their RV or towed trailer.

My impression is that we were the oldest tent campers around. This fits in with my approach to aging: the way to age well is to constantly push up against your limits as they tighten with age. There’s no way to know your limits other than pushing up against them. The body isn’t aware of aging like our conscious mind; the body will keep trying to do what it’s designed to do, without any awareness of time or diminishment.

As long as we don’t look in the mirror--and there are few mirrors in camping--then we forget our age. We just focus on the many tasks at hand, or the incredible scenery around us.

We often walked 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day, many times on steep, poorly marked trails with harrowing descents and ascents. Due to being active in our work, we were never sore, just tired.

The commonly used Chinese name for the United States is Meiguo, Beautiful Country. Yes, this is partly phonetic, but camping reinforces the accuracy of this name: the US is staggeringly beautiful, not just the parks, but the prairies, the hills, the Big Sky, the deserts and the mountains.

There are many stunning drives to take in the West, often tortuously winding, two-lane roads, but the full experience requires walking the terrain, seeing the landscapes, plants and wildlife on the ground.

Camping accentuates this, as sunrise and sunset are visible without obstruction, and many trails branch off from campgrounds.

To avoid stressing our 1998 Civic, we rented a 2026 Accord. Our 5,200 mile route took us up and over numerous high mountains and passes, many above 7,000 feet elevation. We often camped at sites between 5,000 and 7,000 feet elevation. The Accord delivered 37 miles per gallon, remarkable given the constant ascents and narrow, winding mountain roads. This is about three or four times the reported mileage of large RVs / towed trailers.

On highways, 2,000 RPM delivered about 70 miles per hour. (Interestingly, this is about what my 1977 Accord delivered with a smaller engine and vehicle.)

Minus the car rental, our month-long trip cost $2,200, including six restaurant meals (four Mexican, one Chinese and one buffet lunch at Yellowstone Inn) and six motel stays (the cheapest Super 8s). We took around $100 worth of canned goods and other food from home, so call it $2,300. This included $662 for 140 gallons of gasoline, the sit-down meals, motels, groceries, ice for our cooler, and the campsite fees, which ranged from senior-discount $5 per night in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota and $8.50 for a primitive Forest Service site in Nevada to $38 per night in state parks.

Based on prices listed online, this is equivalent to the cost of a three-day weekend in a resort-spa for two adults, minus airfare / transportation costs. So a month-long car camping trip cost the same as a 3-day resort stay.

About half our campsites were relatively primitive (no showers, pit toilets, water), the other half had showers in the bathrooms. New Mexico state parks topped the list of luxe showers, though many of the state campgrounds’ shower facilities were excellent.

My observations on the US economy await another Musings Report.

Thank you for supporting my work during my camping break.
CHS NOTE: If you’re unconventional enough to be reading this, maybe you’re unconventional enough to toss $7 in my begging bowl. Go ahead, throw caution to the wind and become a supporter of my work, because you never know what you’ll read here next week, and every week beyond--and that’s half the fun.

Homogenization Is Decay

Charles Hugh Smith — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:54:23 GMT

That everything of true value is decaying around us is what we dare not notice. That's the point of optimizing homogenization.

All those engaged in optimizing this Homogenization of Decay will deny it, of course. They will claim they're sincere about finding "real solutions," that they care about the same things we care about, and so on.

Homogenization is decay, on multiple levels. This is inescapable.

So the problem with these claims is if they were true, the individual would be incapable of staying within this system another minute, much less an hour or a day. Sincerity and real solutions only exist outside the system that optimizes homogenization. Everything inside is artifice.

The Homogenization of Decay

Charles Hugh Smith — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:47:12 GMT

Of the many dynamics generating systemic decay, none are more pervasive yet unrecognized than The Homogenization of Decay, which we experience daily but don’t notice because The Homogenization of Daily Life is now so ubiquitous that it’s the water we swim in.

This homogenization is visible in the physical world, but it happened over enough time we’ve forgotten a time when life wasn’t Homogenized. Every town in America now has a Dollar General store (or duplicate) on the edge of town that looks just like the Dollar General stores on the outskirts of every other town.

Every freeway off-ramp looks the same: gas station, fast food outlets, no sidewalks, no humans on foot except the most marginalized.

Every main street looks the same: the same corporate chains, with the only variation being the order in which they’re arranged.

Every Big-Box outlet has the same look, feel and inventory, with the differences so minor they don’t count.

Every cold cereal has the same ingredients, with the only differences being the quantity of sugar added: this one has 13 grams, that one has 9 grams, etc.

Every guidebook and tour directs tourists to the same selfie-worthy spots.

Homogenization serves a number of purposes:

1. It enables the profitable optimization of national / international supply chains and centralized corporate controls.

2. It enables easier control of what the populace sees and hears. Once everyone sees and hears the same things, they lose sight of the diversity of perspectives, especially those dissenting from the status quo.

3. It enables the profitable marketing of centrally controllable mass-produced products, services and experiences, the essence of Ultra-Processed Life: we’re presented with a limited menu of unhealthy but immensely profitable ultra-processed foods which generate illnesses, which are then treated with costly, immensely profitable pharmaceuticals.

All the services we’re offered are equally poor quality, but since there’s no option, we resign ourselves to software that doesn’t work, products that randomly fail, AI “customer service” that is the opposite of customer service, and so on.

4. This optimization of homogenization maximizes profits by optimizing monopolies that present facsimiles of choice: the same corporation owns all the brands presented as “choices,” all the healthcare insurers are functionally similar, all the brands of appliances break down in a few years rather than lasting a few decades, as in the past, and so on.

Unbeknownst to most consumers, the private-public Leadership Class managing all this homogenization are themselves homogenized, as they all attended the same elite universities.

And to make sure they’re able to attend these elite universities, the wealthiest few are admitted at much higher rates than the less wealthy:

And what this Leadership Class learns is that all problems are technological or financial, and so all problems can be solved with technology or finance. I call this mental construct The Delusion of Circularity: if we define all problems as technological/financial, then we don’t need anything but technology and finance to solve all problems.

And since both finance and technology are incredibly homogenized--take your pick, Apple iOS or Android--solutions are also homogenized, meaning easily controlled to maximize profits for those controlling the “solutions.”

This is how we end up with a Leadership Class devoid of any moral foundation, a class of public-private leaders whose moral compasses spin aimlessly while they optimize their personal gains managing global homogenization.

These leaders naturally hire underlings who are equally devoid of any ethics, as who needs ethics when we have the god-like powers of technology and finance at our fingertips? In this mindset, AI offers the power to homogenize everything to the point that no one will ever see anything that hasn’t been approved by the leadership.

With AI, we never know what was excluded or edited out of the “answer.” This offers homogenized leaders imbued with homogenized, morality-free mental constructs to fine-tune their homogenized Ultra-Processed Life menu of carefully engineered facsimiles of “choices.” This system of gearing generates the same Narrative-Control output no matter who is turning the crank.

The machinery of Narrative Control isn’t organized into a formal structure, but the structure is well-organized nonetheless, covering the entire spectrum of governance, media, and Privatized Totalitarianism. Informally, we can call it The Ministry of Propaganda, which homogenizes the narratives that offer full-spectrum control.

All this reinforces a focus on the present distractions and pressures to keep our fraying private worlds glued together another day, and this too is purposeful: what was once unacceptable is now so ubiquitous we no longer even notice.

That everything of true value is decaying around us is what we dare not notice. That’s the point of optimizing homogenization.

All those engaged in optimizing this Homogenization of Decay will deny it, of course. They will claim they’re sincere about finding “real solutions,” that they care about the same things we care about, and so on.

Homogenization is decay, on multiple levels. This is inescapable.

So the problem with these claims is if they were true, the individual would be incapable of staying within this system another minute, much less an hour or a day. Sincerity and real solutions only exist outside the system that optimizes homogenization. Everything inside is artifice.

America's Doom Loop of Moral Collapse / Corruption

Charles Hugh Smith — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 17:39:50 GMT

A society and culture that has lost its moral compass loses more than its principles and soul--it loses everything that underpins a functional society and economy, including social cohesion, shared purpose, civility, trust in leaders, institutions, the judicial system and in the fairness (a.k.a. a level playing field) of the entire system, and critically, the belief that honesty and hard work will be rewarded rather than exploited / looted.

Moral Collapse / Corruption consumes all these foundations as the systemic cost of incentivizing self-enrichment to the exclusion of all else. Every component of society's moral foundation is hollowed out by the artifices of The Big Con, which claims to embody all the revered principles it grinds to dust in its relentless drive to accumulate private wealth and power by any means available.

Every source of authentic value is debased for personal gain as empty cliches--increasing shareholder value--are deployed to mask the monopolizing of power to reward the most corrupt at the expense of those powerless to limit the looting of the worst, who encounter no limits on their corruption in a culture and economy in which everyone has their price.

This Moral Collapse / Corruption is self-reinforcing, as those with any shred of ethics either quit / opt out or are fired / sent to digital Siberia, leaving only those in charge who see everything as an opportunity for self-enrichment, regardless of the consequences to others or the system as a whole.

In their pathological narcissism, they see the system as a bottomless feeding trough for their personal aggrandizement, oblivious to the causal results of everyone with a place at the trough gorging themselves: the system collapses.

This corruptive frenzy for unearned money has infected the entire spectrum of American society, rich and poor and everyone in between. From fake disability claims to fake invoices, every form of fraud flourishes in America. This raises four important points:

Legalized Looting by the Rich Leads to Chaos

Charles Hugh Smith — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 16:59:59 GMT

An astute reader summarized the dynamic succinctly: "Looting by the rich is hidden, silent, not criminalized while the physical looting by the poor is overt, thunderous and criminal."

Note that "the market" doesn't dictate what is legal and what is criminalized; the state dictates what is legal and what is criminal. This establishes the second truth which is taboo in the status quo:

"The Market" and the State are one system. Every claim that these are separate is self-serving misdirection / artifice.

Moral Collapse / Corruption Rewards the Worst and Penalizes the Best

Charles Hugh Smith — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:05:41 GMT

Moral Collapse / Corruption are not abstractions. Rewarding the worst (those with zero scruples / moral foundation) and penalizing the best (those with high ethical standards) generates self-reinforcing feedback that dooms the system to disintegration: the worst prosper so mightily that they gain control of the system while the best are exploited / marginalized, reduced to Tax Donkeys or indentured laborers serving the worst.

A society and culture that has lost its moral compass loses more than its principles and soul--it loses everything that underpins a functional society and economy, including social cohesion, shared purpose, civility, trust in leaders, institutions, the judicial system and in the fairness (a.k.a. a level playing field) of the entire system, and critically, the belief that honesty and hard work will be rewarded rather than exploited / looted.

Moral Collapse / Corruption consumes all these foundations as the systemic cost of incentivizing self-enrichment to the exclusion of all else. Every component of society’s moral foundation is hollowed out by the artifices of The Big Con, which claims to embody all the revered principles it grinds to dust in its relentless drive to accumulate private wealth and power by any means available.

Every source of authentic value is debased for personal gain as empty cliches--increasing shareholder value--are deployed to mask the monopolizing of power to reward the most corrupt at the expense of those powerless to limit the looting of the worst, who encounter no limits on their corruption in a culture and economy in which everyone has their price.

This Moral Collapse / Corruption is self-reinforcing, as those with any shred of ethics either quit / opt out or are fired / sent to digital Siberia, leaving only those in charge who see everything as an opportunity for self-enrichment, regardless of the consequences to others or the system as a whole.

In their pathological narcissism, they see the system as a bottomless feeding trough for their personal aggrandizement, oblivious to the causal results of everyone with a place at the trough gorging themselves: the system collapses.

This corruptive frenzy for unearned money has infected the entire spectrum of American society, rich and poor and everyone in between. From fake disability claims to fake invoices, every form of fraud flourishes in America. This raises four important points:

1. At the lower levels of the social-economic order, there are still some limits on fraud and corruption. Despite the immense resources devoted to evading oversight and audits, fraudsters and embezzlers are occasionally caught and convicted.

2. There are no limits on the super-wealthy, as they don’t need to commit fraud to increase their wealth; they just rewrite the rules to suit themselves with their wealth. $100 million is nothing to billionaires, but it buys the entire political-judicial power of the state.

3. This scale of wealth bypasses the need for the consent of the governed, which is why I call America’s current status quo Privatized Totalitarianism: the super-wealthy dictate what’s legal to suit their desire for “more”--more wealth, more power.

As correspondent Simons Chase so insightfully put it, “what’s moral is what’s legal, and what’s legal is for sale.” These eleven words summarize America’s terminal corruption.

4. In this terminal stage of moral collapse and Privatized Totalitarianism, passing more laws will not reverse the unraveling of the moral foundations needed to sustain a functional society and economy. Chapter 57 of the Tao Te Ching describes the core dynamics in play:

The more restrictions and limitations there are,
The more impoverished men will be.
The more arms men possess,
The more disordered the country will be.
The more scheming and deceitful men are,
The more strange things will occur.
The more rules and precepts are enforced,
The more bandits and crooks will be produced.

(Translation by my philosophy professor Chang Chung-yuan)

And Chapter 38: (my free-form version)

When the Tao is lost, we have attainment (optimization).
When attainment is lost, we have benevolence (superficial-phony virtue-signaling).
When benevolence is lost, we have righteousness (political correctness / ideological rigidity).
When righteousness is lost, we have rules (propriety for show).
Rules are the dry husk of loyalty and trust, the beginning of chaos.

In this free-for-all frenzy of fraud and self-enrichment, the best opt out and disappear into the woodwork, stripping the system of any talent other than self-enrichment and Big-Con / Ultra-Processed Life artifice. Self-enrichment and artifice are self-liquidating, for once they consume whatever can be looted, there’s no foundation left to support a functional society and economy.

This moral collapse includes an intellectual collapse, as “liberty,” “democracy,” “innovation,” etc., are reduced to parodies of their original substance by the artifices of The Big Con PR. Every statistic is gamed, every market manipulated, every principle debauched, and every bit of adaptative vigor is throttled to maintain a grip on power.

This excerpt from The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant crystalizes the present moment in American history with remarkable aptness:

“There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. His whole attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.

This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.

This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all.”

And so as the worst apply Band-Aids to the metastasizing cancers as “solutions” (AI! Stablecoins! Bases on the Moon!), we stand on the beach as the tsunami of consequences of rewarding the worst and punishing the best races toward us.

In this moment, the future no longer seems real, and in the incoherence of the present, the radical action needed to change the outcome seems impossible. If we cannot run, perhaps we can still walk toward higher ground, leaving footprints in the damp sand few will follow.

The Hidden Looting by the Rich leads to the Physical Looting by Those Who've Been Looted

Charles Hugh Smith — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:28:32 GMT

That The Hidden Looting by the Rich leads to the Physical Looting by Those Who’ve Been Looted is so obvious that it is strictly taboo in the polite circles of those tasked with protecting The Hidden Looting by the Rich behind the cliches of “market forces” and the many carefully obscured mechanisms of state subsidies, tax giveaways, insider trading, market manipulation, and so on.

An astute reader summarized the dynamic succinctly: “Looting by the rich is hidden, silent, not criminalized while the physical looting by the poor is overt, thunderous and criminal.”

Note that “the market” doesn’t dictate what is legal and what is criminalized; the state dictates what is legal and what is criminal. This establishes the second truth which is taboo in the status quo:

“The Market” and the State are one system. Every claim that these are separate is self-serving misdirection / artifice. Consider the difference between what happens when Average Citizen contacts their state representative or a regulatory agency, and what happens when Tech Bro Billionaire contacts their state representative or a regulatory agency with an offer to fund $10 million of campaign contributions if various regulations and tax codes are amended.

The truth is “the state” is a “market” for corruption and self-service in which the “market” is hidden from view: The auction that dictates what’s legal and what’s criminal is won by the highest bidders, who are of course the wealthiest and most powerful few, who then dictate state policies that expand and protect their wealth and power by looting the powerless many.

French economist Frederic Bastiat famously described this dynamic of “market” and “state” generating legal plunder, i.e. legal looting. Once the purchase of state power for the purposes of self-enrichment becomes normalized--what I term moral decay leading to moral collapse--it becomes more profitable to pursue legalized looting than actually create authentic value.

This is why we see extreme wealth-power inequality increasing while the quality of goods and services plummets. There are no “rewards” for the richest few to risk capital by increasing the quality of goods and services when political influence is both cheap and risk-free: just “buy” a tax break or subsidy or regulations that protects your lavish state contracts from competition and expands the power of your monopoly / cartel.

The reason why this dynamic of legalized looting by the rich expands until it breaks the status quo is that it is self-reinforcing. Those who aren’t delighted to further enrich the moneylenders in the temple with their labor quit in disgust, while those with zero scruples and limitless greed devote every waking hour to enriching the most avaricious few for their share of the loot.

Politicians who don’t kiss the ring of Tech Bro Billionaires to raise millions of dollars in campaign contributions lose elections, as once again those with any shred of integrity self-select out of the political / “market” cesspool.

As Bastiat put it, the status quo boils down to “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen”. What’s seen is an endless spew of paeans to the glories of “the market,” scrappy innovators creating new products in garages that generate billions in wealth, blah-blah-blah, or paeans to the glories of the state protecting us from the evils of exploitation, blah-blah-blah, all of which is the necessary cover story to cloak the market-state system of legalized looting by the rich and the criminalization of any blowback by those being looted.

We’re being looted in so many ways that are not seen until the scales fall from our eyes. Billionaires manage to exploit tax shelters intended for the middle class to protect millions of dollars in gains from any taxes. Inflation in goods and services that is gutting the bottom 90% doesn’t affect the wealthy, as they spend an inconsequential share of their wealth and income on essential goods and services.

As in any conflict staged for show, “the market” is glorified as the saint and “the state” is demonized--or on other stages, the roles are reversed. Neither staging reflects the truth: there is only one system, and the only possible output of this morality-free system of self-enrichment is the terminal expansion of looting until the system breaks down.

This--

leads to this:

Legal looting by the rich--who have eliminated both the moral foundations of society and avenues of Redress as impediments to the ceaseless expansion of their wealth and power--leads to uncontrollable looting by those who have been looted--Retribution. I address all these dynamics in my book Investing In Revolution. If you can find another book that explains everything I explain, by all means buy that book. But there is no other such book to my knowledge.

Our Leadership Has Failed Us

Charles Hugh Smith — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:01:14 GMT

I just completed a 5,200 mile camping trip through much of America, and it's worth repeating what I observed everywhere: Truth be Told, America and its hard-working people are already great, and never stopped being great. They don't need to be "made great again." It's America's hopelessly corrupt leadership class that needs to be cashiered en masse and replaced by real leaders who aren't vying to sell their souls to the highest bidder.

So what can we do? For a start, stop voting for people who collect $100 million from the wealthiest and most powerful stripminers and spend it on the The Big Con. Start voting for the handful of real leaders who refuse to accept more than $100 from any person or entity, who refuse to sell their souls to the highest bidder.

America Is Already Great; Its Leadership Class Is Not

Charles Hugh Smith — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:56:29 GMT

I generally avoid juggling lit sticks of dynamite, i.e. addressing MAGA (Make America Great Again), but this juncture in history obligates me to make a few points now, despite the risks of outrage.

1. America and its hard-working people are already great, and never stopped being great. They don’t need to be “made great again.”

2. America’s self-serving Leadership Class--those in power--has failed the nation and its people. By Leadership Class I mean the class of people who have authority / power in every sector of the economy and society, not just in the political realm but in academia, what passes for America’s intelligentsia, technology, corporate America, energy, media, finance, banking, foreign policy, manufacturing, defense--every sector.

This class has mastered the artifice of pantomiming leadership, not real leadership, to cloak their sole real goal, which is self-enrichment and the consolidation of their personal wealth and power. This pantomime of leadership is what I term The Big Con, which boils down to this:

Telling us what we want to hear--the con man’s core technique--so they can stripmine us without restraint.

What we want to hear are cliches of restoring greatness lost to the corruption and greed of our Leadership Class and a grab-bag of other sappy, hollow cliches--I feel your pain, Hope and Change, peace with honor, innovation, increasing shareholder value and so on, an endless spew of phony PR slogans designed to con us into thinking their self-serving actions are actual leadership rather than artifices of self-enrichment cloaked in PR finery.

These hokey cliches are hyped by $100 million campaigns funded by the rich and powerful cronies of the self-serving Leadership Class to make sure they stay in power so they can make the rich and powerful even richer and more powerful, all at the expense of hard-working Americans who are losing ground every day.

Consider one example among many: how many leaders in academia devoted their prodigious intelligence and energy to slashing their institution’s bloated bureaucracies that contribute nothing to actual learning to reduce the cost of attending their university by 50%?

The answer: none. Higher Education leaders feasted on the hundreds of billions of dollars of “free money” funded by student loans, a modern-day version of indentured servitude, funding lavish buildings and other fripperies, padding their own already-stupendous paychecks and pensions, “investing” in PR about the value of their education rather than actually making sure their students learned anything of actual value.

This pantomime of leadership--The Big Con--masking the zealous pursuit of self-enrichment is visible in every nook and cranny of America. The pantomime--self-glorifying theatrics, overblown visions of techno-paradise, threadbare cliches reworked in a hundred ways to distract and lull the populace--is now so pathetically obvious and absurdly excessive that it’s a self-parody, a comic book version of leadership.

Real leaders demand sacrifices of the rich and powerful to serve the national interest and the shared interests of the citizenry. Real leaders don’t stage an elaborate pantomime of leadership to cloak their self-enrichment and their ceaseless efforts to further enrich their campaign contributors / cronies.

The moral rot of America’s Leadership Class has now reached a self-reinforcing terminal spiral. The rot started two generations ago, and has now reached the point where the corruption, avarice and the stripmining of the populace are not even recognized for what they really are, they’re now just BAU--business as usual.

Foreign policy is now guided not by national interest but by what I call The Imperial Project, which boils down to expanding the power and profits of America’s monopolies and cartels.

The leadership of Corporate America gutted the nation’s manufacturing sector over the past 30 years to boost their own private wealth and the private wealth of their biggest shareholders. Corporate America is run by greedy lemmings--with apologies to real lemmings--who slavishly jump on every trend no matter how destructive and nonsensical.

Way back in 2000, on my first flight to China, I sat next to a senior employee of a top-tier semiconductor equipment company, who recounted his CEO’s lemming-like insistence on shipping production to Asia, resulting in a flood of defects that cost far more to fix than the supposed gains. The corporate lemmings all jumped on the offshoring bandwagon regardless of its impracticality and many obvious downsides.

And now all the corporate lemmings have jumped on the equally flawed AI bandwagon, guaranteeing a horrific host of dire consequences await all of us chained to the idiocracy of our Leadership Class.

As noted previously, it’s painful to admit we’ve been conned. The con man knows this, and is a master of misdirection and phony excuses. But unlike these forked-tongue artifices, the consequences are real: beneath the gamed statistics and parody-level theatrics--AI!--we’re going to Mars!--our economy and society are in shambles.

So what can we do? For a start, stop voting for people who collect $100 million from the wealthiest and most powerful stripminers and spend it on the The Big Con. Start voting for the handful of real leaders who refuse to accept more than $100 from any person or entity, who refuse to sell their souls to the highest bidder.

I just completed a 5,200 mile camping trip through much of America, and it’s worth repeating what I observed everywhere: Truth be Told, America and its hard-working people are already great, and never stopped being great. They don’t need to be “made great again.” It’s America’s hopelessly corrupt leadership class that needs to be cashiered en masse and replaced by real leaders who aren’t vying to sell their souls to the highest bidder.

Yeah, I know--this will never happen. Don’t be too sure that moral decay and corruption have no consequences, and that The Revolution No One Sees Coming isn’t just off-stage.

Truth Be Told

Charles Hugh Smith — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:59:33 GMT

This is the first in a series of posts around the theme of Truth Be Told, a theme that demands some interpretative explication / context.

There is a spectrum of ways to tell the truth. There’s the angry rant (”I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this any more!”), the tearful confession, the accusatory diatribe (”you can’t take the truth!”), the dispas…

The Fatal Temptations of Scapegoats and Fantasies

Charles Hugh Smith — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:03:37 GMT

This is essay #17 in the series The Revolution No One Sees Coming.

This series has endeavored to trace the human emotions driving the pendulum swing from the present-day Gilded Age extremes to the other extreme, where demands for redress will arise that if refused will lead to unquenchable retribution.

In parallel fashion, as the belief structures underpinning the status quo collapse, along with the Consent of the Governed and the Mythology of Progress, the public will seek a replacement worldview that “makes sense of the world” in a newly inspirational way.

Last week’s Musings, How a Renaissance Erupts and Changes Everything, introduced the potential for a Renaissance arising from the rediscovery of inspirational ideals and ideas.

These processes are not seamless or linear; they are inherently convulsive, non-linear and messy.

If history is any guide--and it’s the only guide we have that isn’t theoretical--then we can anticipate a dangerous gap opening between the collapse of the beliefs propping up the status quo and the emergence of a new story/belief structure.

In this period of grief and anger, the temptation to blame others for our failure--a failure that angers us because we were exploited, conned, or dismissed / treated unfairly--will intensify because humans resist accepting responsibility for being conned into accepting being exploited / treated unfairly.

Identifying scapegoats as the source of our travails is psychologically far more appealing than accepting the bitter reality that we allowed ourselves to be conned because we were too trusting and perhaps that was the easier path.

In this tumultuous gap, we seek solace, certainty and hope, the first as a balm for our wounds and losses, and the second two as the means to re-establish confidence in a better future. Since the real world is uncertain--especially in such tumultuous times--the appeal of fantasies intensifies, as they offer a false certainty and hope.

For example, AI will make everything free, or modular nuclear reactors will be mass produced and will power everything we value.

These are technological fantasies, but their power is emotional: we want to believe in simplistic solutions, as that’s far more emotionally satisfying than facing uncertainty and the potential for increasing hardship.

These fantasies can also be political or spiritual: a Fearless Leader will lead us out of Mordor.

As Hannah Arendt explained, the appeal of scapegoats and fantasy are the core drivers of fascism, the emotional centers of gravity that power our embrace of a worldview that conveniently focuses our desire for retribution on an external group and provides a simplistic fantasy that gives us certainty and hope: all we need to do is 1) punish the bad guys who caused our suffering, and 2) place our confidence in a simplistic fantasy--AI godhood or Greatness Restored by Fearless Leader, or some equivalent fantasy (free money for all, free energy, etc.).

The problem is that refusing to accept our role in our misery and giving in to the temptations of blaming scapegoats and indulging in fantasies lead not to the promised Utopia but to ruin.

This dynamic illuminates the need to generate a positive story / worldview before belied in the status quo collapses, a vision that offers solace, certainty and hope based not on techno-fantasies / techno-fascism but on the principles of working together to serve common interests and on a moral compass that is unwaveringly pinned to True North, as opposed to the current national moral compass, which is spinning aimlessly in a sea of corruption, avarice, artifice, cons, narcissism and falsehood.

In the status quo mindset, all problems can be solved by technocratic game-theory optimization. That this mindset isn’t the solution, it’s the problem, is invisible to a mindset that is completely blind to the truth that the foundation of a durable, adaptive, just social order is a moral order that limits the extremes of self-interest and greed that have pushed America to the crumbling edge of the precipice.

This truth must be the founding principle of a new vision of “the good life” that is not only universal, it’s also practical, focused on doing more with less and limits rather than grandiose fantasies of techno-godhood.

I have often referenced this quote from Ivan Illich, which succinctly describes the need for a replacement inspirational vision of a better future that isn’t just an extension of all that brought us to the inevitability of ruin:

“Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into the future so that we can take the next step. If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.” Ivan Illich

I have attempted to lay out a way of living that replaces the corrupting emptiness of Ultra-Processed Life with a renaissance of authenticity, but these threads must be picked up and woven into a new story / worldview by the generations now coming of age. Inspiration is eternally profound, but it is especially potent when embraced by youth.