Talking with Charles Hugh Smith, writer, self-employed economic critic, and author of the long-running blog Of Two Minds, mapping the intersections of capitalism, self-reliance, and moral decay from his homestead in Hilo, Hawaii…
Twenty-plus years of writing against the grain, on questioning the incentives that hold our systems together and the fragilities hidden beneath them.
His work challenges both the doom-and-gloom survivalist fantasy and the techno-utopian promise, arguing instead for local community, reciprocity, and a return to something like integrity in how we organize our economic lives.
On growing tobacco as a doomsday crop, on investing locally even when the returns aren’t optimal, on strengthening the place you actually live, on the turtle instinct and why it fails, on community as the only real prepping, on systems that are self-liquidating, on the role of the critic as heretic, on the Overton window, on self-employment as a different lens on the economy, on the second matrix, on getting sucked past the event horizon of geopolitical finance and never coming back, on social media as plutonium exposure, on kindness and integrity having zero incentive in the system, on the waste-is-growth landfill economy, on progress as secular religion and challenge as heresy, on Marx as a Judeo-Christian moralist seduced by scientism, on immigration as voting with your feet, on Hawaii as microcosm, on UBI and bad poetry, on the Asperger model of self-drive, on manic depression as a prerequisite for writing that has no market, on high-touch work as the thing AI can never replace, on the wait person as part of the meal, on labor-backed currency, on Berkeley co-ops and the immediate emergence of corruption and arbitrage in even the smallest markets, on Taoism as the action of inaction, on not depending on AI without being against it, on diagnosis or prognosis, on the moral universe that AI does not live in…
Excerpts
On Fixes
I don’t think that tweaking some regulation is really gonna fix this thing.
On Criticism
I think a lot of readers would say I’ve been wrong about everything… but the role of the critic is to open the Overton window. I’ve been wrong about the status quo being able to exist or continue as if nothing had ever happened.
In other words, whatever it’s been thrown at it, financial crises, war, whatever, it just grinds on. And so that I think has surprised me to some degree, but I still think that doesn’t mean that it’s as durable as people think that the fragilities are just being hidden behind systems that.
On Immigration
So whatever you’re gonna do with immigration, it has to be upfront and fair, or else people are gonna find fault with it for good reason.
On Heresy
We’ve identified progress with expansion of consumption and technological innovation… I consider them equivalent to religious beliefs, because when you challenge those beliefs, you get a response akin to a heretic. We’re gonna burn you at the stake for challenging progress.
On AI
We live in a moral universe. And AI does not live in a moral universe.
