A Conversation with Russell Redenbaugh

Silence and Dispute

Beckoning us to consider listening, philosopher Gemma Corradi Fiumara writes:

In the widespread benumbment produced by an excess of words, … we give up the right to be taken seriously, at the same time withdrawing from the responsibilities that this would involve. When we agree to go along with the [speaking] of an interlocutor who admits that he is obliged to say just about anything, we give up the right to consider the other responsible for what he is saying. …

The intense cultural activity of the west might seem to be intent on perfecting its own languages, in order to refine them in such a way as to be able to ‘break into’, and conquer the arena of knowledge, thus attaining the last word in a variety of areas...

In the linguistic skirmish that lies beneath every field of cultural life, ever new attempts are made to falsify inconfutably or demonstrate conclusively a variety of issues and above all else to reveal the ‘absurdities’ of others. The most enlightening word is supposed to be the one which imposes ‘silence’ for a certain period, establishing itself as the last word as it marks in fact the various cycles --waves, fluctuations, fashions -- of our modes of reflection. Lakoff and Johnson point out that: 

"We don't just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack … It is in this sense that the ‘argument is war’ metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing.”

Looking at the situation with the modesty of the listener, we might, however, recognize that each word has a consequence which might be able to live within us better than it can in the (battle) field in which the last word has been said. And whatever the last word is unable to exhaust involves a consequence, just as any subsequent word does. It is possible that every work is followed by another and it would be more enlightening to experience it from the very beginning as the last word but one. … [I]n the parsimony of listening the ‘last word is the foundering of the silence of the one into the silence of the other: faced by the revealer of the unspeakable, we must abstain from speech.’

-- Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language, page 105ff

 Chauncey Bell: “How do we listen to what we have never listened to before?”

 Russell Redenbaugh: “It’s not in the words...

The listening we are talking about here is listening to the present in anticipation of the future. It’s a new kind of crystal ball: reading the world. This is an orientation of listening. In his book The Way the World Works, Jude Wanninski says that ‘all change happens at the margin. Which straw broke the camel’s back? It’s not the last straw; it’s all of the straws combined.

“Say your spouse arrives home half an hour late: the kids are fighting, the dinner’s burnt, the washer broke and the repairman never arrived, your spouse who’s been home fielding all of it -- their mood is dissolving. The moment is an accumulation of all of the insults. The partner who argues in this moment knows they will get to sleep on the couch if they’re lucky.

“As an investor, I learned decades ago the importance of listening to the invisibles: listening to what’s not obvious. I call this practice reading the world. It could be called listening to what the world and the future are not saying. It is not prediction; it does not rely on a domain of stable recurrence. And that’s a good thing because the world of stable recurrence is over.

“In both cases. you’re listening to what’s not being said. If it’s obvious to the public it’s obviously wrong. Let’s take Bitcoin. What is it good for? People say: “I don’t know, but it’s a really good thing.” Bitcoin… nobody was listening to ‘what do you do with it?’ Instead of going with the crowd, we’re asking: how do we make money from the disappearance of this craziness? 

“From the end of WWII the world was in a pattern of stable recurrence. The forces of geography, demography, geopolitics and military power shaped this world. There were of course business cycles and recurring uncertainties and mistakes. But the future was, in a general way, very predictable.

One thing that could be predicted would be that the US, which mastered the seas, would continue to make the world safe for commercial sea traffic for friend and foe alike. The payment we required was that our allies supported us and not the Soviets, and that the non-aligned did not misbehave too much.

“This produced Pax Americana. We saw small regional conflicts because as Winston Churchill said, there will always be wars as long as there are more dogs than bones. But largely the world was safe for growth, business, prosperity and a new generation of babies. 

“This arrangement began to fray in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was further seen to be extinct around 2019 as the US became not only the world’s largest producer of petroleum, but a substantial exporter. Economically this meant we no longer needed to keep the world safe or to bring Persian Gulf oil to ourselves and our allies. This rearranged many political alliances of convenience. These forces — demographic, geographic, climatological, geopolitical and domestic policy-based — are inexorable and would have played out over 10 or perhaps 20 years, with many conferences and Powerpoint presentations. We could have slouched into this new reality.

“COVID was a catalytic event, accelerating these slow-moving changes. COVID accelerated the reverse of globalism. The future will involve regional, not global, supply lines. This will produce more security and higher production costs. The world since 1945 has been a place of growing population; in recent decades we are witnessing the collapse of fertility rates. Demography moves very slowly, but irreversibly. The dependency ratio — indicating the number of people unable or not allowed to work — is now an adverse ratio in many countries. The cost of borrowing money has collapsed and — except at the government level — has not produced an eagerness to borrow money. As interest rates fall, the idea of investing becomes more attractive. When it is easy to borrow money, instead you want to preserve and protect. What does this mean? We are at the end of an era of stable recurrence. And for this we need new skills...”

Author, investor and world Ju Jitsu champion Russell Redenbaugh will speak next Wednesday, June 16, as a guest in the Mobilize Masterclass. Join us -- we have a few spaces left -- here: https://www.mobilize.network