The stock market, if you learn about it and look very closely, makes little sense.
There are good intentions behind it, and in the abstract it’s a decent means of getting resources where they need to be while incentivizing economic productivity and participation.
But the incentives at play are often misaligned, the mechanisms by which it’s managed and balanced are off-kilter, and the agglomeration of finicky, ultra-specific and arcane rules and regulations have made the whole, ponderous behemoth a shambling hazard in a persistent state of disequilibrium and near-implosion.
Despite its countless imperfections, though, the stock market functions decently well most of the time, and even if you possess an awareness of how bogglingly bad it is at so many things, it’s still possible to glean both meaning and value from it. You can acknowledge that it sucks, but also do okay by investing some money in it.
This could arguably also be said of the economy, more broadly. And our governments, our meta-governmental organizations, and the ideologies and theories that prop up the way we organize and manage the world. We can be aware of the flaws in these systems and still participate in them: we can aim to do well according to their rules, even as we work to fix them.
We might decide to become lawyers, learn about the legal system over the course of several years, determine that our government is barely holding on and only remains standing due to judicious use of bandages, glue, and perhaps miraculous intervention, and then we might struggle until we figure out a way to cope with this reality—until we sort out how to function within a flawed system that we can now see at an uncomfortably high resolution.
It’s possible to work to repair, replace, or otherwise correct such systems from inside them. Many people step into the fields in which they work with precisely this goal in mind, in fact.
Unfortunately, the practicalities of everyday life tend to nudge us toward operating in greater alignment with the existing dynamics of these systems. And it becomes easier to justify behaving dysfunctionally—in ways that are rewarded by the systems of which we’re components—once we become beholden to the privileges, and wary of the punishments, they dole out.
Even those with the best of intentions can lose sight of their original purpose—can become conveniently near-sighted, the cracks they previously perceived blurred into obscurity, their actions perpetuating and propagating that existing dysfunction—as soon as those flaws begin to work in their favor.
The goal, then, is to strike a stance that allows us to wield more power than we would otherwise—power that we will ideally use to remedy some of the flaws we perceive—without, in the process, becoming dependent on the current shape of things.
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