John Mangun / Outside the Box
What would you do if you knew tomorrow was the last day of your life?
That
philosophical question has been asked for centuries.
However, it may
have become more relevant in the post-war and Cold War period when the
vast majority of the citizens of the world were living under the cloud
of nuclear war.
In
the last decades, primarily because of instant communication and news,
we had the greatest of human tragedies brought right into our own homes.
Crime, natural disasters and war are offered as nightly fare on the
news. We can experience nearly in real time as these events unfold and
no matter how immune we might think we are, some of this hit home,
touching our souls and our thinking. It seems as if no one, no matter
his or her country or economic status, is safe anymore.
We are almost constantly bombarded by all the gloom that we can handle and it has been happening for a generation.
People
are not very optimistic and positive about the future. You might say
that we have reason to be afraid of the future. I mean, look at all the
different kinds of major problems that even the average person may have
to face. Not only must we consider the traditional “Acts of
God”—earthquakes, storms and volcanic eruptions—but each can be
compounded by subsequent “man-made disasters.”
The
Japanese have known for 600 years that the Sendai plain could be
subject to a tsunami. There are old markers in the area telling people
not to live closer than a certain distance from the ocean.
But the ancestors did not have to confront the aftermath when a nuclear plan goes ballistic.
In
the 1970s, the “experts” told us that the world was going into another
Ice Age, which would cause massive starvation as crops would not be able
to grow. Now we are told that so-called global warming will sink the
land.
We
live under the same psychological cloud as the child who is convinced
that there is a monster on the closet, never knowing when it is going to
strike.
In the last decades, fear of the future has become a worldwide pandemic.
The
world is in the midst of a financial disaster that is going to last
years, if not decades.
Purchasing power, which is just another way of
saying “standard of living,” in the US is the same as in 1996. It is as
if more than a decade of hard work, wealth creation and advances in
technology has been wiped out. How could this have happened?
We
now obviously know that it is the result of very bad decisions on the
part of governments, business, and, maybe most important, individuals.
Then
you must ask, if you knew back then what you now know, would you have
made those same decisions? Tens of millions of families bought homes
they knew they could not afford, only because they believed that the
price of the house would always go higher and that they would never have
to pay the mortgage off. Does that make any sense at all?
Financial
institutions invested in financial instruments that did not have any
value whatsoever except if they could find another institution to buy it
for a higher price just because that’s what they were all doing. Does
that make any sense? Governments borrowed trillions to buy things “for
the people” when they knew there would never be enough tax revenue to
pay the debt. Does that make any sense?
What would you do if you knew tomorrow was the last day of your life?
Would
you spend your remaining life helping others in order to leave a
lasting positive mark on the world? Or would you sink to the lowest
level of immediate gratification, completely disregarding the lasting
consequences because you will not be here to face it?
Perhaps the world never look at future consequences because there was a hidden belief that the future would never come.
Year
2000 came and went and the world continued. 2012 will come and go and
the world will go on. Perhaps all of the secular humanism doomsday
thinking of the last decades has created the gloom the world must face
today. So what do we think today and what do we do tomorrow when we are
still here?
On
a personal note, I invite you to visit mangunonmarkets.com. You can
gain access to the PSE Strategy Guide for stock-market investors as well
as other content that I hope you will find interesting. The web site is
still on “soft launch” status but do not hesitate to ask your questions
using the appropriate box.
E-mail to
mangun@gmail.comand Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis tools provided by CitisecOnline.com Inc.
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