It all makes sense to me now. Leonard Cohen was right. Everybody knows. It’s a rigged game. I’ve been puzzling about how it is possible that any human being intelligent enough to reach adult age with the experiences that necessarily must come from living that long, could listen to Dr faucci and then listen to Trump, Peter Navvaro, Jim Jordan, and conclude that Faucci was selling bullshit while the others were selling truth. Politics, policy, physical appearance, fashion choices, everything else aside, how does this compute for anyone? And I mean this in the most genuine way possible. Assuming the person who decides that Faucci is a fraud is a rational human being with the intelligence and experiences that most adult human beings have, how is this possible? What is the perspective, what do you have to do to the other side of the equation to make it balance with the Faucci is a Fraud side?

But now I know. The Redditors powering GME’s rise are also betting on insanity, and like the Trump supporters their bet is paying off, in the short term, but it can’t last any more than Trump could have turned into a competent leader. The difference is that the Redditors have Wall Street’s balls in a vise, not that it will save them in the end. The establishment will come and loosen the vise leaving the Redditors holding overpriced shares and calls in an underperforming company. But for now they’ve got the upper hand.

But why make these crazy bets? Because it is a rigged game. Hillary rigged it against Bernie in the 2016 primary. Wall Street called in its insider privilege during the 08/09 crash to bail out some of the same firms that are now getting squeezed by the Redditors, (but truthfully Wall Street calls in its insider privilege everyday to suck a little bit, more than a little bit really, off the backs of everyday working people).

And as soon as you realize that it is a rigged game, then everything becomes suspect. Faucci is just a mask hiding a diabolical monster bent on stealing freedom and making people sick, Trump is brilliant strategist planning to overthrow the corrupt government and install a government for the people.

So what causes the break? When do people start believing that it is a rigged game? This is why Trumpism is not just about economically disadvantaged people frustrated with the system, it is about anyone who is so frustrated with the system that they start believing that it is a rigged game. Then again, who doesn’t believe that it is a rigged game? God knows for the past 500 years if not forever the game has been rigged against people with darker skin.. maybe that is the clue to why anyone with dark skin would support Trump. Trump calling it out as a rigged game trumps Trump’s worst racist remarks, to use an awkward play on words.

Back to the question, the game has always been rigged, why now? What ball gradually reached its balance point and started rolling the other way? Trump was clearly just a catalyst, the genius able to see that he could start things rolling.

I’ll take a shot at it. It is this. We’ve gone for money. The whole society is based on “getting yours”. Money has completely obliterated religion so the system people believe in is not supernatural (after all science has pretty well discredited the supernatural explanation) it is material. Maybe we’ve come full circle. Do animals believe in anything other than the material? But our big brains had us believing in imaginary causes. While all those stupid beasts were wandering around wondering where their next meal was coming from, we were dreaming of virgins and streets of gold and the rights of man, and now here we are, back to the material world. But if the material world is going to be your god (Nature’s god was such a brilliant formulation, material, natural and yet indefinably mysterious) then the system has to deliver material goodness. But more than that, the system, like a religion, can’t be too overtly hypocritical or the adherents start to disbelieve and question the priest’s sanctity.

So when the Redditors band together and storm the hedge fund palace, using the hedge fund’s own tactics, and then the priests swoop in to save the hedge funds, the religion is broken. The robes have fallen off. It’s a rigged game. It’s not a religion, it’s just a Pope selling indulgences. It becomes a rigged game when the believers question their faith, and as with most religions, by the time the true believers start questioning their faith, the system is so corrupt that they are flabbergasted by what they see and no alternate reality, however fantastical, becomes impossible to believe.

I don’t know if I’ve always believed that it was a rigged game. I certainly believed for a while in the theory of investing, but I never really believed in the money god. i didn’t believe in any other god either, and this has made its own difficulties over the years, but if you don’t believe in the money god you don’t have as much at stake when you discover that the game is rigged.

What now? i have to admit that this exercise in stream-of-consciousness writing has left me unsettled. As i think i heard Bret Weinstein say, the system can’t break down. We have 400 plus nuclear power plants just to name the leading edge of the disaster that might happen if people really lose faith.

Let me add a couple more observations. First, the Catholic church did somewhat reform itself from its pillage and plunder days, so perhaps it is possible for a money religion to reform itself.

Second, in light of Robinhood suspending trading in GME for lots of regular Joe stock jockeys, it could not be more plain. The Redditors who thought they had found the keys to the golden palace and would be able to push share prices upward (and maybe in a different scenario downward) like Stevie Cohen are discovering that the game is rigged differently than they thought. They thought that the rules were to make money anyway you could as long as it was mostly legal, like Stevie Cohen, but actually it was the other Cohen who knew the rules, “the poor stay poor the rich get rich”, that’s the game, the “rules” are just there as a distraction.