What If Everyone Followed Socrates?

QUESTION: Hello, Mr. Armstrong.

Some years back, I asked what would happen if everyone knew about the ECM.

You provided an answer on your blog.

Now, that the trader version of Socrates is soon to be made available for the public…:

What happens to the trading community (market makers / service providers / traders) when you (through Socrates, of course) unleash a tsunami of profitable traders into the market?

Best regards

TG

ANSWER: The same thing. That is like saying what if every person became Republican or Democrat or Conservative v Labour. Human nature would never allow that. Besides. The vast majority of people reading this blog are not traders. It would be great to assume you could conquer the world like that as Marx did since we in the West even endorse Marx without saying we do. Government try to manipulate us raising and lower interest rates through their central banks and have NEVER been able to ever succeed even once. Paul Volcker in his Rediscovery of the Business Cycle explained:

“Not much more than a decade ago, in what now seems a more innocent age, the ‘New Economics’ had become orthodoxy. Its basic tenet, repeated in similar words in speech after speech, in article after article, was described by one of its leaders as ‘the conviction that business cycles were not inevitable, that government policy could and should keep the economy close to a path of steady real growth at a constant target rate of unemployment.’”

Larry Summers in this Bloomberg interview admitted that economists CANNOT predict anything because the system to them is “too complex” like weather. My hope for Socrates is that it stops this manipulation of society that only causes wars, depressions, financial crisis after financial crisis, all because we have people trying to rule the world who are brain-dead and are only interested in filling their own pockets. Let’s get real here. They impeached Richard Nixon, said he was unfit for office and accused him of erasing 18½-minutes on one tape on June 20, 1972. Hillary would not turn over anything until it became public that she had a private server. She erased 50% of her emails claiming they were personal compared to Nixon’s 18½-minutes on one tape.

Hillary worked on Watergate and tried to deny anyone a lawyer to prevent cross-examination of their witnesses. Here we are precisely 34 years  (4 x 8.6) which should be the peak in Hillary’s career from the time she tried to deny Richard Nixon a lawyer. Hillary’s rise is the example of how bad politics has become. Hopefully, this is the major high in corruption and it will be downhill and exposure from here on out.

Socrates, if followed, would establish how to LIVE with the cycle instead of aggravating it. Socrates cannot alter the cycle even if everyone followed it for then the same cycle would still exist. If society used the Economic Confidence Model, then it would be like the story of Joseph and the Pharaoh and you would plan for the decline that is inevitable and thus you survive the downturns.

Richard E. Nesbett wrote a good book entitled “The Geography of Thought, How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why.” He attributed his work to a Chinese student who said: “You know, the difference between you and me is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it’s a line.” He goes on to quote him:

“The Chinese believe in constant change, but with things always moving back to some prior state. They pay attention to wide range of events; they search for relationships between things; and they think you can’t understand the part without understanding the whole. Westerners live in a simpler, more deterministic world; they focus on salient objects or people instead of the larger picture; and they think they can control events because they know the rules that govern the behavior of objects.”

We are handicapped in the West because we think everything is a straight line. We as a society have never looked at cycles. I became friends with Margaret Thatcher because she instinctively understood cycles. Maggie spoke at our World Economic Conference which in itself was a major endorsement despite the fact the the “free press” try to ignore our work and only support government and the bankers to the destruction of their own posterity. Maggie told our attendees that government thinks in trends, but it should consider looking at it in cycles.

The ECM appears in everything from the 25,800 year cycle (3 x 8.6) of the Precession of the Equinoxes to the birth of a volcano in 8.6 years. It is government’s manipulation that causes the business cycle to expand in amplitude, not time. So the boom and bust is becoming much more pronounced with each cycle. If the world followed the ECM instead of Marx, you just might get your life back and that would be something worthwhile to leave your posterity as a legacy. Government and the press only care about maintaining power today and could care less about the future for they see the future as just a straight line where they alone rule the world. Their personal self-interest causes blood in the streets and creates the cycle of Revolution.