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.
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?!
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.”
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.
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.
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By Independent News Roundup