Parlays at the End of Days

Katechon at the craps table

What looks like inside trading by people within or close to the use government on geopolitics has been covered elsewhere. This post is not about that, as curious and compelling an avenue of inquiry as that may be. No, this is about the curious phenomena of the US government apparently briefing soldiers they are going to Armageddon against Iran (very cool and normal stuff) and…. insiders also betting on that?

Before you laugh or cry - let’s explore this a little and “steel man” this behavior. If you believed that you were indeed going to the war to end all wars, then being offered a 25x return on the second coming would be a compelling bet. Then there is the question that if you indeed believe that and that you are entering the kingdom of heaven or being thrown into a lake of sulfur, what is the point of gambling? You cannot spend your winnings because either way you will not need them. If you do not believe this then bet against the second coming and get it wrong your losses are hardly the worst of your troubles. There is a nasty in-between state of the US becoming a klepto-theocratic state that threatens private businesses and which might interfere with market integrity here - Trump declared Jesus or some such. That is why I will not bet on this Pascals wager like proposition.

This strange combination of everything-is-gambling Mammonistic tendencies and Semitic-Levantine apocalyptic thought is everywhere once you start looking. AI GDP impact charts from the Federal Reserve:

indicate wide range of “everyone has every desire met” to “everyone dies” are one example, but so are various forms of doom porn from Citrini to say nothing for the ability to “Bet on Anything, Everywhere, All at Once” and engage in relentless self vs other lifestyle comparisons on Instagram with just about everyone. The underlying social competition and dopamine reward circuitry is not new, nor are these observations about the impacts of new forms of media or gambling but it seems parlays into the apocalypse seems the logical end point here. The apocalypse is important because it gives people a sense of certainty, closure and an inflated sense of importance. In an attention poor world where everyone can shout online “being there and being special” for the end has a deep appeal.

The issue is how do you model and predict people’s actions - especially those with the levers of power if they literally cannot stop talking about the apocalypse in extremely literal terms? “Take him seriously not literally” did not pan out any better than Solana as an asset class, apologies to David Sacks. This is not a silly or irrelevant question: there is a deep emotional logic to all this. These people are in power and they are motivated by these ideas. Taking this all seriously and literally in the anthropological sense is long overdue and it is a serious failing that the press has only managed to engage with this stuff using ridicule or selling cortisol spikes via pearl clutching and panicking. These are serious ideas held by people with serious power: a surgical and clinical view is required because while you might not care much for millenarian cults their cultists, they have an interest in everything and the capacity to change the world.

A first order problem might be that what looks like a disaster to anyone who is not pining for the apocalypse would look like the road to victory to someone thinking apocalyptically. Massive war? Expanding conflict? Famine, disease, pestilence? To the apocalyptic cultist this is running up the scoreboard. People who are shocked or surprised at how happy elements of the US government seem to be about how things are going need to understand the completely reversed perspective here. Ending the world is the point. The people flying the plane do not have the instrumentation turned off, they see it completely upside down. That is vastly worse of course.

So — the US government and its supporters is still comprised of some people who assume that Middle East Wars are bad and lose them elections, but a non-trivial share who think they are going to enter the Kingdom of Heaven the worse this goes. Markets initially priced in a quick conclusion and reversal here and that seems to be wearing thin already. This is to say nothing of the millenarian tendencies on the other side of this conflict. Suffice to say if you are taking out some kind of rational agent public choice framework to call this you may not have a good model of this reality. For that to work you need to either believe those who assume elections will occur and that they have to win them can coerce the apocalyptic side of the administration or hope for the better angels of the IRGC (best of luck) or that perhaps this is the apocalypse after all.

I am not a believer in all this and my sensibilities around time are more cyclical and South Asian. All things change but there are cycles and but never an end as such. If you are not part of team apocalypse or singularity, then the historical record provides plenty of good examples of how to get through hard times. Eric Cline’s work (recently on William Dalrymple and Anita Anand’s Empire Podcast), the history of Buddhism’s spread and survival in Tibet and China all show there is agency in these times where some people really do seem out to destroy themselves and others deliberately.

To get through this states that do not pine for the apocalypse are going to have to consider hardening themselves more going forward - in energy, in food, technology and through a broader range of relationships than the hub and spoke order under Pax Americana. Stockpiling and energy security are a top priority but no doubt only the start and the practical tasks of Malcolm Turnbull-ish Mark Carney at WEF-ish lines of thinking.

The problem is that after the apocalypse, some of us have to go on living.