Something is very wrong with my country. Something big and something bad.
We can all feel it, though we might not agree on what is actually wrong.
The great institutions of state are falling apart. Mighty institutions that I grew up trusting for their integrity, respected around the world, seem to be crumbling amidst incompetence, incoherence, corruption and more.
The government, essentially unelected, is unpopular and ineffectual. Not that a properly elected government would make much difference. Sir Humphrey and the Blob still seem to run everything. The system seems set up to look after the system, rather than its people. The opportunities for change and reform that were first, Brexit, then Boris Johnson’s sweeping 2019 election win, have been squandered. The government is unable to carry out even its most basic function, which is to defend the borders.
The Bank of England has for many years been destroying the value of money. Inflation, which apparently was unforeseeable, is now at 9%. And that’s just official inflation – we all know actual inflation is higher. The Bank’s monetary policies, together with planning laws, have given us an intergenerational wealth divide which means anyone born after about 1985 can’t afford anywhere to live. They delay starting families as a result, and they have smaller families, with the long-term consequence that the local population is eroded away. This then gives rise to the argument that, as locals aren’t reproducing, we “need” immigration.
I can’t remember trust in the police, who seem more concerned with online wrong-think than violent crime, ever having been so low. I wrote that sentence before the David Carrick scandal. The courts are overwhelmed and the court system is both expensive and antiquated. The legal system is manipulated and exploited, only affordable to the very rich or very poor. The penal system is inadequate.
Google “NHS and news”, if you want to see what state healthcare is in. Radical progressive ideology has enveloped education. Even the armed forces have been afflicted by it. Universities are overpriced and increasingly irrelevant to the modern work environment.
The BBC, the national broadcaster, is loathed for its bias, and its output is, for the most part, crap. Luxury green ideology has left us with sky-high energy prices. Royal Mail only occasionally delivers - I’m still getting Christmas cards now. The trains are useless and expensive. Who knows how well the civil service is doing? It’s opaque.
The electoral process has become meaningless. You get the same blob whoever you vote for. Representative democracy is neither representative nor democratic.
I could go on. You get the point.
Everywhere that is not functioning involves (or has involved in its recent history) the heavy hand of the state. You could look at, say, shops, tech, restaurants or media – areas where the state is less involved – and user dissatisfaction levels are not comparable. Airports actually ran better when the border force went on strike. It’s as though the state is inherently incompetent. Why there aren’t more libertarians, I’ll never understand.
Meanwhile, all of these institutions are costing a fortune. Spending on most is at all-time highs. By the time you factor in inflation (which is a stealth tax - even the Chancellor recently admitted as much), taxation levels are comfortably in excess of 50%. That is to say: more than half of everything you earn is taken from you by the state to pay for stuff that doesn’t work.
That’s before we get to the tax on the future which is debt and deficit spending.
And then there’s the waste. Here is just one example:

Imagine how much better off we’d all be, if citizens, rather than the government, could choose where to allocate the money they earn. You spend your money better than they do.
Culture wars and mass migration
It’s not just crumbling institutions and state overreach. They call it the Culture Wars, but we are in the midst of a religious war, an ideological struggle. What Elon Musk calls “the woke mind virus” – an aggressive, radically progressive ideology born out of an obsession with identity politics – has taken over, especially within institutions and education, and is wreaking havoc.
From male rapists being put into women’s prisons to expensive green initiatives that actually damage the environment to a pandemic of cancel culture. Again, I could go on. I don’t need to spell it out here. You know what I’m talking about.
Small government and libertarianism solves this too, by the way. The virus would not be able to survive and spread without the oxygen of public money.
Meanwhile, the demography of the country has changed, and as a result, so has its identity (though few have yet realised that). Last year, 1.1 million people migrated to this country – that’s just the ones who were granted visas. There are plenty more that weren’t. In effect, roughly one in every 65 people you meet in this country only came here last year.
The London of the 1970s that I grew up in has vanished. The archetypical Londoner used to be the Cockney – the white working-class man or woman born within the sound of Bow Bells. Today the Cockney, once such an instantly recognisable English type and one that has had an incredible influence on Britain, barely exists. They’ve all gone. Almost every other UK city is on a similar journey to indigenous British white minority.
As the song goes, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”. Whatever we had has gone and we will never get it back.
It’s not just the UK. It’s the whole of Western Europe, and probably much of North America too. My German friend jokes that Buenos Aires will be the last European city.
On which note, it was incredible to watch the World Cup Final between Argentina and France. By the time the game ended and the substitutions had been made, it was, essentially, a match between Africans from Europe and Europeans from South America.
I am not “anti-migration”, by the way. If anything, I am pro it. In my National Anthem of Libertaria I argue for free movement. The mass movement of people is an inevitable tide in the affairs of men. People have always moved, and always will. But I also view conserving our culture, identity and communities as paramount, and the state is failing to do that. If such things were not state responsibility, but locals’, and people were empowered by lower taxes and the greater responsibility that comes with a smaller state, the outcome would be different.
Mass migration is inevitable. People think it’s going to decrease. It’s not. It’s going to increase. There are more people in the world than ever before and – whether it’s those displaced by war, by lack of water, by poverty, hunger or (probably the primary factor) lack of opportunity – more and more of them are on the move. Because of modern communications, more of them are aware of better lives to be had elsewhere. Because of modern travel, more of them are able to travel further and faster than ever before. As a result, we are in a migration of people of historically unprecedented proportions. It’s only going to increase.
Terrified of being labelled racist, Western governments have no coherent philosophy, let alone an actionable strategy, to deal with it all. Especially as both the public and the media have lost sight of the difference between what is legal immigration, what is illegal and what is asylum. Moreover, it has become impossible for all the shouting “racist” to have a grown up conversation about how much immigration we actually want - 100,000 a year? 500,000? Net zero? How pertinent is the Douglas Murray title: The Strange Death of Europe.
The world is changing fast. For good or for bad, the Britain we once knew has left Middle Earth. I don’t think anyone voted for it. I don’t see many leaders trying to stop it.
Locals who have paid taxes all their life and now receive inadequate services, or see that tax money being spent on these new Britons, while they go overlooked, not unreasonably feel betrayed, angry, frightened and more.
Accountable local government with local borders might be better able to act on the wishes of its people, and defend against this sudden influx that is disrupting so many communities – if so desired. But that is not possible with Britain’s remote, centralised, unaccountable state. Given its record elsewhere, when the state is in charge of borders, why should it be any surprise they don’t function properly?
A genuinely free market-driven economy might be happy with open borders and quickly able to adapt – more people to sell products to, a greater choice of people to employ – what’s not to like?
But the state systems – schools, hospitals, transport infrastructure – cannot cope. As Milton Friedman observed, you cannot have open borders and an expansive and benevolent welfare state. You can have one or the other, but not both. Yet currently, both is what we have (or are attempting to have). That’s why everything is falling apart. In effect, we are paying for ourselves to be colonised.
Maybe it’s multi-culturalism and expansive state welfare that are incompatible: the latter may only properly function in more mono-cultural societies, such as Japan.
(Similar arguments can be made about crime levels. They tend to be lower in mostly mono-cultural cities, especially in Asia, to those in the the more multi-cultural west).
Whether it’s Hull, Skegness, Mansfield or any other provincial town, when boatloads of young men from different cultures, with no instinctive loyalty to the UK or its ways (and sometimes a contempt for it), are dumped in a community and the community is given no say in the matter, and locals have no power to resist, any anger felt is pretty understandable. There are incidents when the young men are put up in four or five-star hotels, while there are locals, homeless, in tents outside. It is not what people want, nor what they voted for. As I say, representative democracy is neither representative, nor democratic. The model is broken.
Brave New World, digital nomad-ery, robot takeover — or something worse?
Finally, there are incredible developments in technology: the new worlds being designed for us by nameless, and, in many cases, slightly autistic coders in far away places, the extraordinary expansion of surveillance and the erosion of privacy. Those who have monitored ChatGPT will know that before long as much as half of the content on the internet will be generated by bots. But they are not neutral - they are politically biased. What are the implications of that and the extraordinary influence these nameless coders will have to shape the global narrative?
Never mind whose fault this all is, or the rights and wrongs of it all. We all have our ideas. Plenty of them. What I want to know is: where is this all going? I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
Many draw parallels with the Fall of Rome and the invading barbarians at the gates. Others say we are headed into totalitarianism akin to George Orwell’s 1984. Many of my Eastern European friends think we are making the same mistakes they once made and headed into some kind of 21st century Marxism. My Venezuelan friends think the same. Some see a new rise of fascism akin to the 1930s.
Some look to Isaac Asimov and the rise of intelligent machines (see my piece on ChatGPT, if you want to know just how advanced machine learning is now).
My genius bitcoin billionaire mate, who has long since disappeared somewhere remote in New Zealand, thinks we are going into a world where everybody is housed in Butlins/CentreParks/Club Med (depending on your socio-economic status)-type holiday resorts, with virtual reality headsets on all day, while robots do all the work. That vision tallies somewhat with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Another compelling scenario comes in James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg’s, in which they describe a two-tiered society. On one tier, thanks to advances in technology and communication, there will be a class of largely untaxed digital nomads, travelling from place to place, operating independently of nation states and government structures. Meanwhile, there will be a much larger class of people trapped in their nations, working in the physical economy (rather than the stateless digital one), heavily taxed and indebted.
Hard-money advocates argue that some kind of hyperinflation and the destruction of fiat money is inevitable, or that, with the emergence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the US dollar is soon to lose its reserve currency status, with major implications for the international balance of power. In that case Western Europe is probably going the way of once-wealthy Argentina.
“Great Reset” theory, in the wake of Covid and the vaccine furore - that powerful, yet secret actors and organisations, especially the WEF, are planning all of this - looks rather more credible than it once did.
There is also a persuasive argument that the expansion of NATO, Vladimir Putin’s ambitions and the conflict in Ukraine is going to take us eventually to nuclear war.
There is a lot to worry about. These really are incredible times.
So back to the underlying question: where is this all going?
The South Africanisation of everything
I was in the pub with my friend, the director Alex McCarron, the other night, when this subject came up. He had a simple but compelling answer: South Africa. The South Africanisation of Everything.
There are many parallels: crumbling institutions, widespread corruption, mass migration; failing rule of law, rising crime rates – especially violent crime; inadequate policing and reliance on private security; identity politics, siloed, ghetto-ised communities within a so-called multi-cultural country; race-based crime, justified because of history; many cultures, each with their grievances, thrust together and by no means living harmoniously.
It’s a credible scenario and one I can envisage. One small example: private security vehicles are ubiquitous in Johannesburg. You never used to see them in the UK. My friend sent me this image, spotted this in Notting Hill the other evening. I think such sights are going to get more and more become commonplace. It’s another symptom of a failing state.
My view is that we are going to see all of those above scenarios.
Nevertheless … things are better than we realise
In all of this negativity, in many ways, things are much better than we may think and the world is in a better state than it has ever been. We are living longer than ever. There are fewer people living below the poverty line than ever. The number of people dying from natural disasters is lower than it has ever been. Information technology means we have greater access to information than ever. 6.8 billion people now have a smart phone - think of all the possibilities that open up as a result. More than 80% of the global population now has access to electricity. With modern transport we are able to go further than ever, quicker than ever. The world is, as a result, more accessible than ever. We might not enjoy her status, but most of us live with luxuries Marie Antoinette could never have dreamed of. Life is so much easier for us than it was for our ancestors and we should be grateful to them for the benefits we enjoy, as a result of what they went through. Wonderful things are possible. There is much to be positive and excited about. There has never been a better time to be alive.
But something is missing. Something is wrong. We can all feel it.
Our belief systems are awry. I am sure it’s to do with the absence of religion. Naive worship of incompetent state institutions has replaced it.
Am I right about this? Please post your thoughts in the comments below.
And how do you navigate it all, as an investor, and protect/grow your wealth?
Gold and bitcoin are the obvious “anti-state” choices.
Meanwhile, if you want to listen to Alex and I discuss the South Africanisation of everything – that podcast is here.
Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. My current recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them.
My guide to buying bitcoin is here.
Make your Number One resolution for 2023 to listen to Kisses on a Postcard.
An excellent piece Dominic and I will share this as widely as possible amongst my public sector employed friends and family, at the risk of losing that friendship - which has happened with alarming regularity over the last two years when I point out to them that they generally don’t live in the real world when you are employed and influenced so heavily by The State.
I am also equally annoying everyone around me by trying to get them to read Life After The State (reckon I have generated my 10th download on Audible - surely that’s commission territory 😂).
Seriously, it is frightening how much The State is influencing everyday life at an all most subliminal level. It really is like a dead hand on the rudder of growth and freedom.
Let’s keep fighting the good fight.
Know what you mean Matthew. Got the same issue with my Wife, who has made it clear to me that openly talking about these issues causes her anxiety and they are not to be discussed. Talk about sticking your head in the sand to pretend a problem doesn't exist. Keeps telling me I have changed a lot over the last 3 years and become very unhappy. I point out the events of 2020/21 and what organisations like the WEF are openly saying, only to find myself labelled paranoid for wanting to discuss it. It's hard when it comes to friends, family and significant others not wanting to be informed, because doing so opens up potential outcomes that terrify them. Easier to pretend these discussions/presentations are not happening, and that organisations like the WEF don't wield the influence that they do.
Spot on
What you describe, is like the premise for the Matrix films.
Thanks so much Matthew!
Brilliant, as ever! My latest swear-at-the-radio favourite / indicator of a society with a dodgy compass, is a recruitment advert for the Metropolitan Police which has actors stating how marvellous it is to be a police officer because they can 'represent their community' ie whatever ethnic or sexual grouping they belong to - nothing whatsoever about fighting crime. Hmmmm, priorities.....? My Local Bobby sounds like a good idea.
I believe the predator class think they are getting away with it at the moment. They aren't - we are all talking behind their backs (witness the growth of alternative media) - and they will eventually reap the whirlwind for sure. How long before that happens though.....
Thanks Bettina.
Strangely, no one in those ads is representing the Christian, traditional family community . . .
The extractive elite is panicking. They have bet the farm on the Ukraine gambit and have come a cropper.
The days of the US dollar being the world reserve currency are numbered. Europe (Germany) is awakening to the fact that the U.S. regards the demolition of their interests as collateral damage. Welcome to the Great Game of the 21st century.
It remains to to be seen whether the clueless jellies running the UK will wake up to the fact that the US interest is not synonymous with that of the UK. Nothing is more important to these people than a man in a dress.
Hey Dom,
What a brilliant piece. I'm afraid the UK is more sectarian than anything we ever witnessed in Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s. You either believe in what your senses and your experience informs you, or you bow down to whatever you're told to believe in order to preserve your job, your professional standing, your family, your friends and acquaintances, in essence, your whole way of life. You're also right about this being fundamentally about 'religion' or something bigger than ourselves, bigger than our ego. Allan Stevo on Substack suggested a New Year's resolution of reading the Bible over the whole year. As an atheist, I jumped at the opportunity and am staying the distance. What a crock of shit Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers have been so far.......a lesson in Jewish propaganda if I ever read one. I believe the New Testament may be better, but I've always wondered how the Roman Empire declined, yet this new fangled ROMAN Catholicism thrived and of course became the richest empire probably until the British Empire. Anyhow, I've never read the Bible, so as I'm 60 this year, I thought it was time I did so. I've also followed Rupert Sheldrake for over a decade now and if anybody knows how our physical state of being combines with our spiritual sense of being, then it is him. His three books sit under my bed and I will read them this year too.
I hope you get 'Postcard' on the stage this year, but given that Phantom has just ended a 35-year run in New York, maybe the world needs to 'reset' before we get anything approaching normality re-installed.
Thanks so much! At least somebody is still reading ...
Something is indeed wrong, and after the events of 2020, it's clear that organisations and entities like the WEF and the Gates Foundation have far more influence over our National Governments than most of us had appreciated. I used to read articles poking fun at the annual Davos shindig prior to 2020, but in the aftermath of the Government response, it became clear that our Western 'Leadership' - with the exception of Sweden - were all singing from the same hymsheet and from where the music was originating. Unfortunately, enough of a proportion of our ruling classes have been captured for this to matter.
In terms of rasiing awareness, Russell Brand is doing God's Work IMO. He has a reach most of us can only dream about, and really is helping to wake people up. This commentary on a Davos presentation promoting brainwave monitoring chipsets, really does highlight the dystopia these people seem to want to take us into:
https://youtu.be/5v5vQm4epto
Speaking for myself, I am looking for an avenue I can unite with like minded people on to push back against the WEF vision, and I'm optimistic the organisation Jordan Peterson is going to be putting together in London is going to provide just that.
Very interesting piece. Thank you. I’m glad it ended by recognising the improvement in the world, else it might have sounded cantankerous.
Convenience may be the death of us. Over-reliance on tech for food, communication, entertainment, leaves us open to the dangers of anything from a solar flare to a cyberattack or state manipulation. (That’s before we touch on how most can’t switch their brains off from the overstimulation).
Lastly, universal basic income. An oddly compelling, yet worrisome notion that will almost certainly be rolled out in the coming years.
Offer all this, then take it away, and most of the west will be begging for the state to wipe their bum and give them warm milk at bedtime.
We escaped the UK to NZ some 20 years ago because we saw the writing on the wall. As soon as laws are required to coerce your population into not behaving as they wish to (all in the name of 'equality' etc of course) then you are on the slippery slope.
It's got a lot worse. Sadly NZ is heading in the same direction, with blatant apartheid now in progress under the Labour government: seperate Maori health system (not paid for by them, of course), race-based governance of water resources and so on. We are making plans to move on again.
As long as we can keep moving away from the incoming tide for 30 years, we should die before it swamps everything. After that, not my problem.
I'm curious, where are you planning to move to? I moved to NZ just over a year ago and hadn't realised the developing system of apartheid until I got here (as you say many parallel institutions, racial targets for the award of public sector contracts, discounted fees for university based on race, etc). My dilemma is where is better?
We need a twenty first century Great Awakening. Society bought the Lie that Science killed God, but the Emperor has no clothes.
Hi I liked the podcast and what has been said about the Great Decline. I think we are coming towards where there will be major change in the way we live and be but I don't believe governments and elite will have the control they desire we are coming to an impasse. Crypto-technology is something the elite have no control over. Yes governments will introduce CDBC's but they will run in parallel to begin with but the man and woman in the street will decide what is good for them and CDBS's will become redundant. They will experience and push back and we are already seeing early signs of this push back politically. The clash of people with police in Merseyside after watching an illegal migrant chatting up a 15year old girl out side her school who was staying in a local hotel. People no longer watching and listening to the BBC channels. Government will have no choice but to react or be pushed out. More and more people are calling for proportional representation and to remove the house of Lords. They are not just thinking it they are saying it. I believe we are in the early stages but government and elites will have to change themselves as they will have little choice. They will do as the Romans do. The elites are challenging democracy as they do not believe in it but the people in the street do. The new world is ours but we need not to be hysterical or fanatical in our responses. We have to face it down with our own responses and ignore what political establishment want us to do and do it our own way.
Dominic, this is an outstanding piece of reflection in which you have managed to capture the sense of malaise and impending doom in all its various guises whilst maintaining a balance of perspective. Our mutual friend Tim Price likes to quip “things are likely to get much worse before they deteriorate” and there is a very real case for the decline of the institutions of which you write having a way to go before they become entirely dysfunctional and collapse under the weight of their own inconsistencies and structural corruption. I will be sharing this in a repost to my readership and am grateful for your writing it.
Thanks so much Steven. (And that Tim line is really funny).
I'm sure most people of a "certain age" wrestle with this question. I expect all generations have done so. I know my Dad (God bless him) did.
So too, on that basis, did the Egyptians and the Greeks. The Romans and now some Brits are asking...not so much where is this all going but also, where has it all gone! If you're happy with the status quo then presumably there's no need to ask either question. Clearly many aren't happy.
I could not possibly begin to answer either question as to "where" but I'll offer the following to illustrate as to "why".
All great civilisations had/will have military power at their core. That power and influence at its peak can be likened to your best and perfectly fitted shoe. Snug and tightly done up, with a knot in the lace on top. With time (think decades even centuries) the shoe begins to flex, easing and slowly, slowly the lace undoes itself until....the shoe drops off. The one thing they had in common was that they all undid themselves from within. Liberalism. New ideas. New values. Neo-crap. Blah, Blah, Blah! Of course it's all been done before. Such leanings and beliefs ultimately result in a weakened/split society and military, with less influence and a gradual decline in the state and its living standards. Nothing new to see here folks. Move along please!
Yes, the Chinese must be watching the west and thinking we don't need to do anything. They are going to destroy themselves anyway. Europe already has.
Agreed. It is not in the stars....its simply inevitable. Regrettably.
Really interesting read! Thanks for writing it all so articulately and coherently, there's a lot to think about in your writing and it mirrors some of my own "politically unfashionable" opinions.
I've been thinking for a while now that a lot of the "woke" excesses and "safe and effective" lies have all been fueled by the hot air of the fiat currency inflation. When the debt-based money supply is rotten at core and social exchange becomes based on grift, corruption and dishonesty (rather than meritocracy and debate), then that somehow creates a corrollary effect in the human mind that cannot distinguish truth from fiction.
Example being, the woke cult and covid cult would never get off the ground if their adherents had to pay for their nonsense upfront from their own wallets – their fantasy thinking is all predicated on someone else paying the bill. Witness the widespread confusion the true-believers have about the dire state of the economy after years of lockdowns, closed businesses, furlough payments, vast taxpayer expenditure on pointless facemasks and "vaccines" that do not work, test and trace programs that embezzle taxpayer money into croney schemes etc. They don't understand that the ones who pay for this rubbish are ultimately themselves. But they soon will when the bank "bail-in" phase of the WEF plan begins.
Maybe a complete financial meltdown would be a good bonfire of the vanities and force everyone to rejoin the real world!
Thanks Rosie. Great points
Evening Dominic. Just reflecting again on your article and you ask the question why are there not more Libertarians. Before the events of the last three years, I assumed that most of the population would embrace a libertarian viewpoint. How wrong I was. I think the first realisation was in March / April 2020 when I was astounded about how compliant the general population were to being told to not work, stay at home and basically be happy to be deprived of basic liberties. Whether you were in favour of lockdowns or not - you would have expected a bit more kick back from the public. There was not.
Secondly is the influence of the MSM, in particular the BBC. The word ‘brainwashing’ comes to mind when you analyse the output from the MSM - if the narrative is repeated enough times, people eventually believe it. We do not have a mainstream alternative to the current narrative and that is dangerous.
Lastly is the size of The State. I had not realised until recently just how many people are employed directly or indirectly by the Blob. The State is almost a religion in itself and that is also very dangerous. The NHS is, I think, in the top 10 of the largest employers in the world. That is mind blowing.
People THINK they are free - in reality the majority just live in the blob bubble of faux freedom.
Keep up the good work Sir.
Hi Dominic. What a superb piece of writing. Your piece imo, clearly illustrates the way things have become. At best shambolic and worst downright sinister. I was having a few beers with some friends last night - guys and gals and everyone pretty much felt the same, but were somehow disinclined to voice their concerns. It’s as if people are genuinely afraid to state the obvious. I was reminded of the words of Upton Sinclair... “It is difficult to get a someone to understand something when their salary depends upon their not understanding it.”
Perhaps Edmund Burke states it better? “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good people do nothing.”
Keep up the great work.
Thanks so much Jonathan. You are very kind.
Been having the same thoughts as Edmund Burke. Think it would be a little hubristic of me to think of myself as a good person, but have been asking myself the question that if I died to find an afterlife and judgement of my actions in this life waiting for me, what the heck I'd be able to say to justify having done nothing in the face of the agendas being promoted by the likes of the WEF. My answer right now would ooze hypocrisy and cowardice...
I have a print of The Bayswater Omnibus on my wall. I will look at it now with renewed appreciation for a lost world.
I've only just read this. Basically sums up the thoughts of everyone I know (who actually considers the problem)
I am in agreement about the religious side, Christianity is the foundation of western civilisation. The removal of these values in the name of progress has been a disaster. The leadership of the church of England these days is basically a leftist political movement.
There is hope though, there does seem to be a renewed interest in Christianity. It's not mocked as it once was.
thanks Jimbo. I take your point about Christianity. I'm not sure it saves us though.
On point. I see things pretty much the same way. In awe of the technology renaissance and knowing there is something better beyond the horizon, but living through the dark ages is heavy. Thanks for the great insights!
thanks Kate !
Thanks Dominic, this is an outstanding bit of writing. On the one hand, it’s a depressing summation of the current situation and On the other hand it’s a reminder that each of us is not alone. Thanks for that, Dominic.
Dear Mr Frisby
Please enjoy this lovely short eloquent lecture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IfRmkCxyk8
( it is amazingly optimistic if you give its contents enough consideration )
kind regards , c
Hi Dominic,
What is your opinion of Tally as an easy way into investing in gold?
I met the guys who run it and liked them, but I've never used it.
It seems to be a good way to invest and save in gold for those (like me) who don’t have the immediate liquid savings to buy physical gold. Also for those who are a bit recalcitrant about crypto.
If you like Tally, you may be interested in Glint too. It is a similar system that allows its users to send electronic ownership of small amounts of gold as payments.
You also get a card you can use to pay from the account in shops I think.
https://glintpay.com
Thanks Gavin. yeah, I know the Glint guys.
Thanks for the nod, I will check them out.
Dear Dominic,
Enjoyed your piece except for the good news at the end! I think your optimism is misplaced. From what I can see, the explosion of information that is the internet, has corresponded with the spread of delusions among the mass who consume it, not a rise of clarity or realism. I suspect that on balance the ubiquity of smart phones around the world will also contribute to the spread of autistic decision making and not what used to be called reasonableness and an ability to asses real life risks with intuitive skill. The only sign for optimism that I can perceive is in a backlash against the technology, a kind of modern Luddism, of people refusing to have their lives mediated by tech, and insisting on face-to-face interaction. Even so, my money is on Reality defeating our delusions sooner or later, and it won't be pretty.
Stephen
Indeed!