#ATCF | Rapid inflation creates mobs

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today, we're gonna do an As the Crow Flies episode. That's when I sit down and talk about something that's been on my mind for a while. As you can see, we are in a new podcast studio because the Legacy Interviews have done so well that we wanted to upgrade our facilities. But rather than just jump in and do a podcast, I decided that an as the Crow Flies episode was probably well timed, and that's because as anybody that looked at the stock market in the last few days or the price of gas, you know that big changes are coming to our economy and our culture, and I actually think that things are about to get pretty bad. Now, one of my favorite lines from a book that I've ever read comes from Dune, and the line is, fear is the mind killer. I love this line because it expresses something that's true. You know, anytime we become so afraid of something, it paralyzes us from imagining all of the ways that we could make a positive impact or that we could change things, and instead, it focuses all of our attention on what might happen. So my goal here is not to create fear and anxiety about the inflation that's going to rip through our society, but instead before this fear has gripped us, I want to talk about how fear generates into mobs and how mobs can be dissipated through your own work, through something you can do to change the outcome that otherwise could be very bad.

Vance Crowe [00:01:37] Longtime listeners of the podcast know that one of my greatest fears is when a group of people can be whipped into a frenzy, and ultimately a mob mobs are soulless, immoral, and active blobs that can cause people to do things that they would never do if they stayed as an individual. When I was living in Kenya, I saw two people murdered by a mob that felt afraid and felt like justice wasn't being served in their community. Ever since that time, I've been afraid and really avoided emotional groups of people. I don't attend political rallies, I don't go to protests, and I don't even really like celebrations like when St. Louis won the Stanley Cup. That much emotion with groups of people prompts them to do things that they would never ordinarily do, and it somehow absolves them of feeling the responsibility for their own actions that it really concerns me. Now, as inflation rips through our culture and we watch things like gas, food, and healthcare reach unimaginable heights, suddenly people will see their standard of living go down below anything that they ever thought possible. When this happens, they will become afraid and angry and highly vulnerable to being whipped up into a mob. In fact,

Vance Crowe [00:02:59] I think one of the reasons I've always had this intuitive fear of inflation and why I've talked about it with so many of my guests is that I know inflation is a mob generating machine. It makes it so people look around for somebody else to blame for why this is happening, and instead of having complex, nuanced answers for what's going on around them, they instead try and find someone or some group to blame, and this will be accelerated and oxygen blown on by politicians who will say, no, it's the corporations, or It's these bad individuals, or it's my opposition, or it's some other country. They'll use everything they can to whip people into a frenzy so that they can be given political will, but this frenzy cannot be controlled. People will go on to take action in ways that we as a civilized culture can't really even imagine because it's so foreign to our way of life right now. But I am genuinely concerned about this, which is why I'm bringing it up with you, because once you are aware of what a mob can do, once you are cognizant that one, these groups of people can be whipped up and they can have their actions controlled by outside forces, then first you can avoid becoming a part of the mob, and that is perhaps the most important thing. But next, once you see that mobs can form, you can also do things. You can take action to try and dissipate their energy before it happens.

Vance Crowe [00:04:32] You can call up your friends and make sure that they're not heading to that rally. You can make sure that as people start to come up with really simple answers as to why this is happening, and give them new and nuanced ways as you feel, find people becoming angry and feeling disillusioned. You can look for ways for them to take that energy and that effort and turn it into work that produces value. These are the only things that can stop a mob. Once they form, you have to get away from them, and you should do everything you can to stay away When you start to see that it's gone to an uncontrollable level. Now, this may not happen for weeks or months or even years, but if inflation continues to skyrocket, it is almost inevitable that this will happen. And so one of the precautionary things that I think all of us can do is to join networks and tribes of people that are diverse in their nature. Now, I don't mean the standard kind of diverse that's being shoved down our throats by corporations and media. I mean finding groups of people that have all sorts of different temperaments. People that always look at the bright side, people that find opportunities, people that push you or challenge you, ask you questions, and are interested in either changing your mind or having you change theirs. I think that these happen naturally in our culture, and in the last few years, much of this is dissipated, but it used to be that people found these by going to church or belonging to a men's group or a sewing group or a parent teacher organization.

Vance Crowe [00:06:07] Places where you encounter people that think differently than you, but because you repeatedly see them, you can't just throw off their ideas. You instead have to grapple with them and hear nuanced ideas. If you are not a part of a community or a tribe of people that is pushing yourself to try something new and to get out of your traditional ruts of thinking, then I highly recommend you go looking for them. You can find them locally in service organizations or digitally in places like the Articulate Ventures network. Of course, I believe that this is an exceptional network. In fact, I spend a great deal of my time and I find that many of the people there challenge the way that I'm thinking. They push me to get out of my mind, and I can even hear them as I was writing down my thoughts on inflation and how this forms into the mob, because there are people around me that are always pushing me to look for opportunities to do better and to do more. And if you don't, if you aren't in a community like that, then consider joining the Articulate Ventures Network or some other community that will have this effect on you. I believe that this problem is real. I think that it is dangerous, and I think all of this talk about whether or not inflation will happen or won't happen or how bad it will get is obfuscating the most important thing, which is that people right now are facing an uncertain future, and that uncertainty will lead them to trusting people that can use their fear and their anxiety to create power for themselves.

Vance Crowe [00:07:41] In order to dissuade them. You have to be involved. And so I hope that as you are listening to this podcast, you're thinking about how you can take action and what you can do to be a part of it, and what you will do when the time presents itself because it's down to you and I to make sure that we make the changes that will impact the future of the world. So I am very excited about the future because we are doing these Legacy Interviews. I don't think all is lost, and I think there's many, many opportunities to make the future brighter, but as we look at the bleak, scary parts of the world, it is good for us to remember that when these things happen, we are responsible and only we can stop them. So thanks for listening and expect next week to come back to new podcast interviews and conversations that are worth listening to. Thanks and we'll be back next week.