David Brooks in the New York Times talks this morning about not what we are but what we could be:

The New Humanism

Over the course of my career, I’ve covered a number of policy failures. When the Soviet Union fell, we sent in teams of economists, oblivious to the lack of social trust that marred that society. While invading Iraq, the nation’s leaders were unprepared for the cultural complexities of the place and the psychological aftershocks of Saddam’s terror.

We had a financial regime based on the notion that bankers are rational creatures who wouldn’t do anything stupid en masse. For the past 30 years we’ve tried many different ways to restructure our educational system — trying big schools and little schools, charters and vouchers — that, for years, skirted the core issue: the relationship between a teacher and a student.

I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

The soothing, atavistic Brooks pitches a “richer and deeper view” of human nature” … brought to us by researchers across an array of diverse fields”, presumably scientists. He mentions, “neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and so on.”

Economists, that’s a horselaff! The economist is a scientist the way a whore is the love of your life.

Brooks reads like ‘HAL 9000’ right before Dave pulls the plug on it in ‘Space Odyssey’. He leaves out comic book artists and advertising managers. “The best minds of my generation” with the greatest resources and incentives are not prowling “the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix” which is where poet Allen Ginsberg reasonably had them. Instead, these uber- minds are convincing Americans they are ‘musselmaners’ fit only for the gulag unless they race out & buy some pieces of Chinese- made shite.

Don’t believe me, just look outside the electronic windows that surrounds Internet ‘content’: it’s nonstop spam for cars, overpriced ‘homes’, watches, Lady Gaga. It’s Buy! buy! Buy! We’ve long since quit being human beings any more: we’re ‘Consumers’: we are already in the gulag!

Primo Levi creates the image: he was narrating his vacation in Poland but he also describes modernity’s cultural and institutional wasteland while doing so:

“The musselmaner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march to labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, they are too tired to understand.… If I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image, which is familiar to me: an emaciated man with head dropped and shoulders curved, on which face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen.”

“Get out there and consume, you dog!” CRACK! Times change: according to a leading mind of our generation, all of our musselmen are fat.

This sort of ‘cultural misinformation’ rubs off after awhile! People believe what the lying machine tells them to believe. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Peer pressure is all your so-called ‘friends’ watching the same shows and slavishly obeying the same diktats of fashion. If you don’t conform you are a slug, a loser, a psycho, a creepy stalker, a potential terrorist or a pathetic, loony mass murderer. You are shunned; if you conform you are shunned anyway because you are never conforming enough. You can’t win: you are a striver, a ‘nouveau riche’, a social climber, a calculating, conniving, weasel. Even as these are qualifications for success in finance they are deathly within the ambit of consumerism which paints the human face on the hierarchy of goods in order to rip the face away at the last possible second (Charles Hugh Smith):

A recent piece from The Nation entitled “Stockton Goes Bust” instructively communicates the monumental paradoxes implicit in the “Progressive” project.

Stripped down to its essence, the piece would have us feel sorry for a citizen who lost her $138,000 a year job (not including benefits) with a school district and as a result lost her suburban McMansion. Now, we are told, only her fancy clothing remains from her luxe lifestyle of international travel and all the other trappings of an upper-middle class lifestyle.

The implicit message is that this person somehow “deserves” a job that pays $138,000 and all the goodies that salary bought. That this person took in over $1 million in less than a decade and basically squandered that fortune on extravagances and fantasies is carefully left unsaid.

Implicit in this point of view is the basic “Progressive” assumption that all workers in America “deserve” a job which supports the “American Dream” of a suburban home, two cars in the driveway (the garage is filled with the other trappings of consumerist “success”), designer clothing, and international travel.

In other words, the “Progressive” view of what’s good and right is circa 1946, only the “good life” “deserved” by all American workers has been upgraded to higher levels of consumption.

Yes, “Progressives” give copious lip service to “green” suburbs and “green” hybrid vehicles, but it’s all a nostalgic fantasy of leafy suburbia and long commutes magically devoid of any value creation.

Consumerism is about isolating individuals and saturating him or her with non- stop demands to spend money they don’t have.

Here’s a question for David Brooks: What about the scientists who tell Americans that their economic activities are poisoning the atmosphere, the ocean and everything else?

Brooks & Co. get to pick and choose their scientists and ignore those whose views do not support the ‘luxury theory’ of non- stop waste. All of the habits associated with decades of the consumption economy are of a piece with the American cultural progress narrative. If Americans can simply waste a little bit more we can have flying cars! Utopia is only one more strip mine, one more 7-Eleven, one more shale- gas well in the New York City watershed away.

If the Americans cannot waste enough they must stand aside and let the billions of ambitious Chinese waste in our places! Utopia has never been so ravenous yet so far out of reach. This is the monstrous legacy of the Industrial Revolution. Movable type in 1439 by way of Johannes Gutenberg introduced a mass market of ideas for sale. Most of the ideas are crazy! The addition and cumulation of more cleverness and innovation has the human race at the edge of a Mass Extinction Event.

Great job, idiots! What will the next 600 years bring the human science experiment? I’m sure I don’t want to know …

Meanwhile, we have the perfect example of post- modern ‘moron-think’ from the Fed:

Tipping point for oil seen at $150 per barrel
Banker would urge Fed to act

Patrice Hill, The Washington Times

A top Federal Reserve official on Monday said the central bank should react if oil prices soar as high as $150 a barrel because prices that high could throw the economy back into recession.

Meanwhile, the White House is considering releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to curb the rapid rise in prices since unrest broke out in the Middle East last month. Within weeks, the price of premium crude has jumped from near $90 to more than $106 per barrel in New York trading Monday.

Although both moves are aimed at easing public consternation over the run-up of prices at the pump to more than $3.50 a gallon on average for regular gasoline, they also likely would rile conservatives in Congress.

The strategic reserve has been tapped only during emergencies, such as the Persian Gulf War, while critics say further easing by the Fed would only stoke oil-fed inflation while doing little to help the economy.

Divisions have emerged on the Federal Reserve Board over what to do, but many members appear to side with Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who hinted in testimony last week that the central bank might react if oil prices go too high.

Gas prices are posted Monday in Santa Cruz, Calif. Pump prices have jumped an average of 39 cents per gallon since the Libyan uprising began in mid-February, forcing motorists to pay an additional $146 million per day for the same amount of fuel. (Associated Press)

Dennis P. Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, for the first time Monday spelled out what level of oil prices might trigger Fed action, pinpointing the record level around $150 set in 2008. Many economists say those oil prices, along with $4-per-gallon gas, helped throw the economy into a recession.

“I think at the $120 range — it’s a manageable level,” Mr. Lockhart told the National Association of Business Economists.

“Around $150 it becomes a much more serious concern,” he said. “If it plays through to the broad economy in a way that portends a recession, I would take a position we would respond with more accommodation.”

The Fed is a pitiful helpless giant. Lockhard’s ‘solution’ is “more accommodation”, more easy money.

Question: Why are catalepts like Lockhart in charge of anything? Money is as easy as it is possible to get! How is it possible for the Fed to be more accommodating than it is now?

Accommodation has been taking place while oil prices have been rocketing through the roof. Oil prices in 2007 and 2008 rocketed through the roof even as the Fed was tightening short term interest rates! The Fed is irrelevant. Whatever they do is wrong.

Accommodation and tractor- trailer loads of moral hazard have given finance the green light to speculate and create asset bubbles in stocks and commodities. To the great minds of my generation shambling down the angry negro corridors of the Fed none of this is of any consequence. The central bank ignores the big picture while fixating on how to sweep the various details it obsesses about toward its one and only approach … creating more easy credit to shovel toward its banker clients.

Notice that the Fed ‘shill- speak’ does not reference economic optimus any longer. The Fed’s policies have devolved into a series of rear- guard actions that aim to hold off the inevitable denouement. There is no conceptual space for anything other than extended stays within monetary intensive care.

“More accommodation” is of a piece with this. The economy is safe to limp at any and all crude price levels short of the magic $150 mark. At which point two things happen, all hell breaks lose and the Fed swings into action with more doses of bank reserves.

The economy at a theoretical $150 will be breaking down and the central bank will offer unneeded loans to its pet banks @ zero- percent interest. That’s definitely going to solve an energy shortage.

What the Establishment refuses to acknowledge is the fragility of consumption in a period when items to consume are becoming harder to find and more expensive. This is the dilemma confronting the waste- based economy: consumption is needed to generate cash flows, but these flows are insufficient to generate a return on what is consumed. This is obvious, and should be, even to central bankers.

Consumption has become too expensive. The solution is to make an economy that lets people get rich conserving things. A gas tax would be a start, but this goes over the heads of the banker brain trust.

Meanwhile Estimable reader jvc929 sent a chart yesterday: let’s look @ charts:

This is the dollar index where the buck is priced in a basket of other currencies. Here’s the euro futures contract in dollars which is another look @ the same sort of thing:

The light blue area in the futures chart represents the time frame in jvc’s chart. A point to watch is that the dollar has been much lower recently and the euro much higher. In order to signal a trend the euro would have to print above $1.52 rather than the current $1.40. This might happen. Anything is possible in our unstable world with numbskulls the great minds of my generation running things.