Everyone gets scammed sometime or another but not all scams are made the same. There is the enduring plain vanilla Nigerian letter, sleight of hand corporate rackets like Enron, sophisticated Madoff-type Ponzi schemes, and then there is the gigantic globalist scam that turns reality into the hoax. The globalist scam is a made in hell, never before invention of our times, a testimony to the destructivity of creativity.
All of us have been caught agape like a shoal of fish in the dragnet of the globalist scam and flipped over en masse. Those capable of it learn our lesson and swear we won't be fooled again. Maybe not by the same, or similar, scam. What if it is a very different scam the next time? We get conned once more, smack our foreheads and tiptoe ahead with renewed caution. Only to fall flat on our faces when an all new scam swoops down out of nowhere.
And so it has gone for three decades now. Nose greets floor with the monotony of a pushups routine. Each fall teaches us something, makes us that much more savvy. Yet we haven't been able to scamproof ourselves. Normalcy has come to mean spells of staggering around in a daze punctuated by monstrous upheavals of the previous new normal in a world gone mad. Is it heroic stoicism to get up or downright stupidity to get slammed down each time? Perhaps neither.
Lincoln declared you cannot fool all the people all the time. He must have assumed there is an ageless moral Rubicon which even the most unscrupulous will not cross to swindle the trusting. Or every individual possesses a minimum self-protective gumption to see through lies at some point. He lived in different times, in a world where morality and common sense still mattered, even if they fell short of the ideal.
Nothing stands still though. People, leaders, rules and tools of politics and commerce, information, technology, borders separating nations, the zeitgeist of societies...all are in constant motion from one state to another. Our world today is not the world of Lincoln. The moral touchstones of his world are not ours. The deceptions his people confronted are not the ones we keep running into.
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