(2024-07-01) Hunt Joe Biden And The Common Knowledge Game

Ben Hunt: Joe Biden and the Common Knowledge Game. ....why coronations and executions are held in public – not so a crowd can see the new king or the hanged man, but so a crowd can see a crowd seeing the new king or the hanged man. Common knowledge is why sitcoms have laugh tracks, why American Idol has a live studio audience, and why professional sports teams pipe in crowd noise.

Common knowledge is why the 2024 Biden/Harris campaign has collapsed.

Make no mistake about it, the Biden campaign HAS collapsed in the wake of Thursday’s ‘debate’, even if – like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off – it continues to run around for a few weeks or months.

That’s the moment where we all saw what we all saw, that Joe Biden is not mentally competent to be president of the United States.

For the record, I think Donald Trump was and will be a disastrous, profoundly un-American president. Since 2016, when I wrote that I thought Trump would defeat Clinton, I’ve been very clear that I think Trump breaks us. ((2016-09-29) Hunt Virtue Signaling Or Why Clinton Is In Trouble)

But this isn’t about Trump. This is about the moment in time that irrevocably changed what we all know that we all know about Joe Biden.

The dynamics of common knowledge formation are called the common knowledge game.

Let me review those rules

I think it’s the real-life examples of the common knowledge game that really make it come alive, like I wrote about in Harvey Weinstein and the Common Knowledge Game.

Pretty much everyone in Hollywood knew that Harvey Weinstein was a rapist and a really bad guy, including his wife and his business partners and all the actors who wanted a role in one of his movies

But it didn’t matter that everyone in Hollywood knew that Harvey Weinstein was a rapist. No one’s behavior changed. No one shunned the guy

Behavior changes ONLY when we believe that everyone else believes the information.

the only thing that changes behavior is when the little girl (what game theory would call a Missionary) announces the Emperor’s nakedness SO loudly that the entire crowd believes that everyone else in the crowd heard the news. That’s when behavior changes.

Just like with Harvey Weinstein. Rose McGowan shouted out his evil so loudly and so publicly that everyone in Hollywood knew that everyone else knew, too. Harvey-Weinstein-is-a-rapist became common knowledge.

Only a victim with Missionary power (and that’s a really rare thing) has the option to not just go public with the story — because simply going public is not enough to change behavior — but to create common knowledge with the story by going SO public and SO loud.

Joe Biden was his own Missionary. Joe Biden was his own little girl who yells out SO loudly that the Emperor has no clothes.

It was hard to watch, wasn’t it? Excruciating, really, because we all knew exactly what we were seeing. We’ve all had parents or grandparents where we’ve seen exactly this sort of decline, and there’s no lecturing us about a ‘raspy voice’ or ‘a cold’ that can make us deny our own lived experience with our own loved ones.

Two things turned this shared perception into common knowledge formation.

First, we all knew that we were part of an enormous crowd watching this debacle on TV

Second, we immediately started hearing the crowds, large and small, roar their anguish and shock.

By the way, those panel conversations on CNN are highly scripted and meticulously produced. Everyone on set knew what John King was going to say and how he was going to say it.

Common knowledge formation is an equilibrium outcome. It is impossible to unring this bell.

Everything Joe Biden does for the rest of his life will be seen through the lens of last Thursday night.

You think Merrick Garland is feeling all warm and fuzzy right now about his very public vouching for Biden’s mental acuity? LOL. Biden’s cabinet officers are now in exactly the same spot as Harvey Weinstein’s business partners.

So what do they do? They bail. They distance themselves. They start waffling. They are ‘busy with crucial departmental business’ when the campaign asks for a photo shoot in the Rose Garden.

Obama saying it was a ‘bad night’ is a classic limited hangout, where you confess truthfully to a small thing to stop the questioning on a big thing. Obama can’t be seen as the guy with the knife, but he can absolutely give his boys Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes the green light to, if not stab away, then at least to distance themselves, their social media and their fundraising from the Biden campaign.

No Democrat who sees a future for themselves in politics is going to commit wholeheartedly to the Biden/Harris campaign now.

It’s the Hillary 2016 campaign all over again. It’s empty virtue signaling just as far as the eye can see

All that remains is the cope.

I knew Heather Cox Richardson when we were in grad school at Harvard. To see her descend to this level of party apparatchik cope at this point in our lives … ugh

Could the Democrats actually jettison Biden and run a mentally competent candidate for president of the United States at this stage in the electoral process? I dunno. You’d think Biden would also have to resign as president today if he does that, and hand over the reins to Kamala for 6 months in a caretaker role. Which actually isn’t a crazy idea. Let Harris be the first woman president as a consolation prize for not being the 2024 candidate, allowing her to position herself for a 2028 run? I think that could work, actually.

For the past few months I’ve been writing about the Great Ravine that lies before us. The Great Ravine is the end of an age. It is the end of the cheap money and cheap labor of easy globalization. It is the end of the unipolar moment of American dominance and its wars of choice and drone. It is the end of trust in our most crucial institutions – all of them! – charged with the core social functions of public health, public education, public finance and public safety.

What we all felt last Thursday night – the sadness, the shock, the disbelieving that this was actually happening, the familiarity of a private tragedy being played out in public on the greatest of stages, the wave of new common knowledge emanating like an earthquake from that studio in Atlanta – this is what the descent into the Great Ravine feels like.

The only way out is through, and the only way through is together. Not from above through a political party, but from below through a community. Find your Pack. ((2019-10-17) Hunt The Long Now Pt3 Is This Normal Asking For A Friend)

Jul08 update: American politics will never be the same after last Thursday night, and it's an important milestone on our roads to the Great Ravine.

• 1) A US election that will still be close, believe it or not, and will be even more vicious. A US election where both the winning side and the losing side will claim that the other guy cheated, and the winning side will unleash a tsunami of spending and tax cuts to buy political support.
• 2) A Phony War between Israel and Iran where both sides are actively planning an existential conflict, temporarily dormant today in the same way that the war between Germany and France was temporarily dormant in 1939 after Hitler invaded Poland.
• 3) A preventive war to come between China and the US, initiated over access to advanced technology and catalyzed by a technology embargo in the same way that the preventive war between Japan and the US in 1941 was initiated over access to oil and catalyzed by an oil embargo.
• 4) A new financial crisis stemming from the overleverage, regulatory arbitrage, self-dealing, balance sheet shenanigans, malinvestment, financialization and profound derivative basis risk that permeates the modern insurance sector.