Imagine That

Imagine That

I wrote this blurb about Imagination one year ago, in Things Fall Apart (Part 3) – Markets. I’m leading with it in this note because I want to show you the power of framing.


In the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman, Dream of the Endless must play the Oldest Game with a demon Archduke of Hell to recover some items that were stolen from him. What is the Oldest Game? It’s a battle of wits and words. You see it all the time in mythology as a challenge of riddles; Gaiman depicts it as a battle of verbal imagery and metaphors.

Here’s the money quote from Gaiman:

“There are many ways to lose the Oldest Game. Failure of nerve, hesitation, being unable to shift into a defensive shape. Lack of imagination.”

I love this. It is exactly how one loses ANY game, including the games of politics and the games of investing … including the metagames of life. This isn’t just a partial list of how you lose any truly important game, it is a complete and exhaustive list. This is the full set of game-losing flaws.

  • Failure of nerve.
  • Hesitation.
  • Being unable to shift into a defensive shape.
  • Lack of imagination.

Of these four, lack of imagination is the most damaging. And the most common.

In the comic, Dream and the demon Choronzon go through an escalating series of metaphors for physically powerful entities, culminating with Choronzon’s verbal imagery of all-encompassing entropy and Anti-life. Dream counters by imagining a totally different dimension to the contest thus far, by making the identity statement, “I am hope.” Choronzon lacks the imagination to shift over to this new dimension and loses the game, at which point he’s wrapped up in barbed wire for an eternity of torment.


It’s true, you know. A failure to imagine a new game is the surest way to lose the old game.

And we ARE losing.


In the Land of Self-Defeat  [New York Times]

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"What a fight over the local library in my hometown in rural Arkansas taught me about my neighbors’ go-it-alone mythology — and Donald Trump’s unbeatable appeal."


In the few days since this article was published, it has more than 2,500 comments from NYT readers, almost all of them tsk-tsk’ng the locals in one way or another. Some of them are much harsher than a tsk-tsk.

I get it. I feel the same way. It makes me ANGRY and SAD that this rural county does not support the local library.

Then again, this library is a freakin’ Taj Mahal that cost millions of dollars in what is a really poor county. And now the locals are ANGRY and SAD that they must pay MOAR to keep it. I get that, too.

We’re ALL angry and sad, Arkansas locals and NYT readers alike, and we are ALL convinced that we are entirely justified in our very strong angry and sad feelings about this issue.

And then it hit me.

We are ALL being played.

These emotions are done TO us. Intentionally.

Here’s the game …

None of us – not the Arkansas locals, not the author of the article, not the readers of the article – can IMAGINE a local library that is not built by government and maintained by taxes.

It’s not that we can’t execute on a plan or that we don’t have the resources to build a library separate from gov’t. Those things may be true, but that’s not the game. That’s not how we’re played.

The game is to prevent us from IMAGINING a library separate from government.

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Does this Arkansas community have a WE with the desire to maintain their library? It sure doesn’t seem that way, does it?

But that’s okay. We got this.

By ‘we’ I may not mean you. You may not want to be part of this ‘we’. And that’s okay, too.

But there IS a ‘we’ for this. It just needs organizing. It just needs a Pack.

By the way, I’d bet my life that there are Pack members for this project in Van Buren County, Arkansas, too.

A $1 million endowment with a 5% real return can fund the librarian this county needs. Not just for a year or two. Forever. $100 million can fund 100 librarians. $1 billion can fund 1,000 librarians. Forever.

Imagine the good that 1,000 librarians across the country could achieve, year in and year out. Imagine THAT.

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We are TOLD that the “real” story of this Arkansas county library is something-something about Trump. That’s it’s something-something about Republicans and Democrats.

The citizens of Van Buren County believe this. The readers of the New York Times believe this. The author of the article surely believes this.

I tell you this is NOT the real story of this rural county library. I tell you this framing is a Lie.

This framing is designed to make us angry and sad. This framing is designed to make us give national political candidates our $6.5 billion. Most damaging of all, this framing is designed to make us give national political candidates our IMAGINATION, so that we cannot even conceive of an alternative to political life that does not depend utterly and completely on their verbal imagery and metaphors, on their internecine battle of wits where WE are their fodder and feed.

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Make. Protect. Teach.

It’s a reframing of our political lives, without the … you know … politics.

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Imagine that.

Yours in service to the pack – Ben


Epsilon Theory looks at markets and politics through the lenses of narrative, game theory, and history. Sign up for our free weekly email here, and never miss an article.

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James Murphy

Corporate Development Executive | M&A | Strategy Development & Execution | Project Management | Real Estate Dev. & Mgmt.

5y

Completely agree. Our entrenched two party system only works when there is conflict. We need to refocus on growing the pie and not allocating the slices.

Rens Götz

Institutional Asset Owner - Investment Portfolio, Governance, Strategy

5y

Maybe it (the pack library) can even feature non government approved literature... On the other side, what's the Internet for if not to browse books?

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John Enrico

Agent of Change. Ahead of the curve through visionary leadership in IT, SCADA, Process-Flow Control, Consulting Engagement-Customer Support Management

5y

Ben Hunt Nice way to stir the pot. This toxic poisoning is not by happenstance. Our children look at us wondering what kind of country they are going to grow up in.  Meanwhile, populism thrives on divisive polarization by masking failure in blaming others. We have suffered divisive bipartisan gridlock (status quo) by design for decades.  Old axioms come to mind: Divide and conquer. United we stand, divided we fall.

Doug Coggins

Underwriting Counsel at Old Republic Title

5y

Superb piece, Ben. This is what happens when the game players lose control of the game. And I loved your close. 

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