“[Where Can We Get Any Fiat]” asks Maya MacGuineas. Studies in Cultural Tourettes Syndrome.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

New TV ad challenges presidential candidates to [Neuter the Fiat]

Where Can We Get Any Fiat?

Good lord!

There's a whole organization dedicated to nothing more than to Neuter the Fiat. Don't these people ever stop and wonder what their own words actually mean?

Or are they stuck in a OCD loop that requires them to spew the same Sophistic phrase repetitively, in a peculiar variant of Tourette's Syndrome - with no association to functional meaning whatsoever? Maybe they can't help themselves ..... but we can help ourselves, and save them from themselves too.

Here's an example of a Sophist verbal tic:

"Accountants using double-entry bookkeeping arbitrarily call creation of fiat currency by expanding Public Initiative a 'debt.' Is that Public Initiative 'your' fiat currency? Then your fiat currency is YOUR debt. You must destroy it ... before it destroys YOU!!!"

"Our financial savings are our 'debt,' right?" Ok, semantically. If you're into sophistry.

"So we must ACTUALLY destroy one to save ourselves from the other, right?" Huh? Only if you can't tell the difference between sophistry & reality.

Can't we just say "Yes, and no, respectively" instead of an obligatory & nonsensical "yes & yes?" Or have citizens lost the ability to address nuance?

[Time for an intervention? Someone trigger the siren. Wooeeeoooh! Calling Captain tinfoil. Calling Captain tinfoil. (Listen, Cap. Can we gracefully & quietly usher these Neuter the Fiat people out of public life, before they hurt themselves? Their kids shouldn't have to witness their parents making such fools of themselves in public.) ]

They're terrified of the imagined Sophist Monster that ate up CurrenCity?

Is this nothing more than an unfortunate case of Tic Fiscaleroo, which most would rather not talk about?

Tics - a part of Tourettes Syndrome or TS - occur when statistically rare variants of neurological wiring occur, in parts of the central nervous system evolved for triggering patterns of multi-component behaviors or multi-muscular complex movements, ranging from thoughts to vocalizations and on to a wide range of simple to complex physical movements or behaviors.

Cultural Tourettes Syndrome

Similarly, Cultural Tics and Policy Tics - collectively referred to as Cultural Tourettes Syndrome or CTS - occur when statistically improbable associations are allowed to be expressed in constantly evolving policy offices or, worse, national "leadership" institutions. CTS is observed whenever people arbitrarily expressing deranged associations are allowed to operate, unchecked, in policy or governance institutions.

The remedy? Aggregate fortune balances personal misfortune - if we let it happen.

Historically, individuals with TS die sooner and propagate at lower rates that those with more common neurological wiring patterns - which tends to protect aggregates from accumulating large proportions of people with less nuanced control over impulse triggering.

Analogously, aggregates with CTS tend to disappear after following deranged Sophists off of cultural cliffs. Long term, all aggregates are dead. In the meantime, it's up to us to contemplate ways to minimize the number of deranged thinkers allowed in policy offices and leadership positions, and to provide checks & balances to protect us when statistics dictate their occasional appearance in minimal numbers. Presuming you want your aggregate to survive, that is.

Sure there are things to fear and avoid, but they're usually not the ones we first imagine. Cultural life and death depend on the distributed ability to separate form from function.