Alex Krainer
The
philosophy we embraced under I-System Trend Following is that a
lifelong success at investment management entails four essential
elements: truth, strategy, discipline and patience. Truth might be the
most difficult and the most important of the four, because we couldn’t
hope to forge effective investment strategies without discerning the
truth about the world we live in and about the systems within which we
must operate.
Most
of what we learn over the course of our lifetimes, we learn from others
- our teachers, mentors, historians, authors and journalists who share
their knowledge and experiences. It is, of course, up to us to choose
what to believe and what to disbelieve in the great abundance of
information that’s available to us. However, if people in power choose
to form a particular narrative and censor nonconforming views, we are at
risk of losing our ability to discern the truth and with it, our
freedom.
In 2017, I published the book “Grand Deception” in which I
warned about the gathering confrontation between Russia and the West
and tried to unmask the powerful networks in the West that were working
to orchestrate a great war between the two sides. Within six weeks from
its publishing, Amazon received a letter from an official at the U.S.
State Department demanding that the book be cancelled. Amazon complied,
no questions asked.
Je suis Charlie
This
took place only about two years after the famous terrorist attack on
the office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. European
leaders responded by staging a highly visible demonstration in the
streets of Paris, professing their undying commitment to freedom of
speech. “Je suis Charlie,” was their fighting slogan. They must have
seemed credible at the time.
When I shared the news about my
book’s banning with my friends and acquaintances, close to nobody was
alarmed that my freedom of expression was violated. Instead, they’d all
ask me what I’d written in it since the good authorities must have had
good reasons to burn the book: perhaps it was some loopy conspiracy
theory, or hate speech?!
Fighting disinformation for public good
By
today, the war on free speech, particularly among Western European
nations is obvious and undeniable. Government structures, think tanks
and the media have all united in a great front to counter the scourge of
disinformation and misinformation, declaring these to be great threats
to our societies’ health and safety and devising ways and means to
centralize thought policing and dish out severe punishments to all who
fail to conform.
In the U.S. under Biden administration,
the Department of Homeland Security declared heightened terrorism threat
due to misinformation and conspiracy theories. Of course, all this is
being done to protect vulnerable groups and to safeguard public security
and health from dangerous wrongthink that could undermine our
societies. But as Friedrich Hayek warned
us in his 1944 book, “The Road to Serfdom,” curbing the freedom of
speech is a symptom of totalitarian tendencies in society.
Hayek
wrote that all totalitarian states throughout history sought to destroy
freedom of speech so that the only true belief would be “the social
plan” imposed by the state. The outlines of that social plan are
becoming easily discernible today and it looks nothing like freedom or
democracy, in spite of people still insisting that Western liberal
democracies represent the “free world.”
Without free speech, we’ll have violence
Indeed,
by losing freedom of speech, losing our ability to discern truth, we
lose much more than just the possibility of formulating effective
strategies for investing or for any other endeavor in life. We risk
losing the very liberty to pursue endeavors of our choice. As Ayn Rand said, “Once a country accepts censorship of the press and of speech, then nothing can be won without violence. Benjamin Franklin
said that, “Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as
wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.”
In fact, I would go as far as saying that freedom of
speech should be regarded as our sacred birthright - one we should claim
and use unapologetically and without seeking anyone else’s consent.
This is a struggle that’s been imposed on us and I believe we have
little choice than to take it up. Conforming to any form of thought
policing should be firmly rejected because whatever limitations to
freedom of expression we acquiesce to today will embolden the
“authorities” to enhance in the future. In effect, we could leave an
unfree, totalitarian world for future generations.
Depraved degenerates in charge
Given
the shocking extent of depravity among those who rule our societies, as
we are presently discovering, we would effectively be leaving our
children and their children at their mercy, of which they clearly have
none. Whatever struggle we decline out of fear for our safety and
convenience, is the struggle our children will have to fight, only
against greater odds than ours.
When authorities start to burn
books, whether literally or otherwise, this gradually leads to far worse
outcomes. In Germany, the Nazis started burning books by Jewish authors
in 1934. Then as now, it was safer to keep quiet and say nothing. Or
perhaps wonder whether the authorities were in their right if such books
contained loopy conspiracy theories or hate speech.
But as we
now know, the Nazis didn’t stop at burning books - in another few years
they were burning people. And having protected themselves from public
scrutiny, they led Germany to an utter catastrophe. History never ended
and today we face similar dangers people faced in the 1930s. If we don’t
learn the true lessons of our past, we are liable to repeat them.
Without defending the freedom of expression, we can’t learn those
lessons.