Animal Spirits Distemper'd

What I babble on as "outlook" is rooted in our neurologies and endocrinologies. It's visceral. Storming forth with this evangel, I discovered that I was anticipated.

"Animal spirits" refers to the emotional and psychological factors—like confidence, fear, and optimism—that influence economic decision-making, especially during times of uncertainty.

The term animal spirits was popularized by British economist John Maynard Keynes in his 1936 work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes used it to describe the instincts, urges, and emotions that drive people to make economic decisions, often beyond what rational models would predict.

🧠 Key Concepts Behind "Animal Spirits"

Emotional drivers of the economy: These include confidence, hope, fear, and pessimism. When confidence is high, people are more likely to invest, spend, and take risks. When it's low, even strong economic fundamentals may not prevent downturns.

Departure from pure rationality: Traditional economic models assume people act logically with full information. Animal spirits challenge this by emphasizing non-rational behavior, which can lead to phenomena like market bubbles or panic selling.

Behavioral economics roots: Keynes’ idea anticipated modern behavioral economics, which studies how psychological factors affect economic decisions.

Examples in history:

The Dotcom Bubble and the 2008 financial crisis are often cited as moments when animal spirits—irrational exuberance or fear—overpowered rational analysis.

📚 Origins of the Term

The phrase comes from the Latin spiritus animalis, meaning “the breath that awakens the mind.” Historically, it referred to the fluid or spirit believed to animate sensory and nervous activity. Keynes repurposed it to explain why people sometimes act on spontaneous optimism rather than calculated expectations.

In short, animal spirits remind us that economies are powered not just by numbers, but by human sentiment. Even in a data-driven world, moods and instincts can steer markets in surprising directions.

Like the "Stolen Revolution"?

In the rest of Continental Europe (well, the Western part) the sovereignty exchange from noble to middle-class was clear. Not France. What was Joan of Arc thinking?

While Kids Today in the Precariat worship the Phantom Queen, their operations are limited to autonomy or "personal sovereignty". These "preaks" are veterans of psychic wars, often wounded by trad religions but also plagued by what I can only call a distemper of animal spirits. Sovereignty used to mean much more than this.

Sovereignty used to be about LAND. The powers of the state over a defined territory (what the Zionists called "defensible borders"...without really defining them apparently).

France had no territorial unity. And that's that.

Sovereignty was achieved in England before 1500 and was exercised by a "King or Queen in Parliament"; it was shifted to parliamentary control in the 17th century revolutions. In Central Europe sovereignty was achieved by the late 16th century through the Protestant revolution and the acceptance of Roman law; in western Germany it was embodied in princes, but farther southeast, where princes remained Catholic and often were unable to obtain hereditary succession (Poland, Lithuania, Transylvania, Nungary, Bohemia, and the Holy Roman Empire), sovereignty was often embodied in diets of nobles or estates. In France, THE MOST BACKWARD POLITICAL UNIT IN EUROPE, full sovereignty came with the revolution, and enlightened despotism came only with Napoleon. (Colbert tried to turn Louis XIV into one.)

When sovereignty did come to France it was so late and so violent that it was damn near anarcho-commie, trying to eliminate all institutions except natural persons. What was called liberalism (which England was doing) received only lip service.

The distribution of weapons wasn't wide enough to let the masses puh the rule of equality beyond the political plane into the economic plane. When the Enrages and Herbertists tried, they were mowed down by superior bang-bang in 1793-4.

In USia and France democracy (calm down you Constitutional Republicans) democracy was delayed until after 1800, by which time private prop-er-tee was made safe by a cluster of restraints on popular sovereignty.

England didn't need gunfire. Democracy was deferred for so long that liberal restraints were internalized as social deference. England did not really need federalism or separation of powers either. Most peculiar. In USia the right to own weapons is not equal to the right to be free.

When it comes to sovereignty exchange: ¿Quiénes serán los próximos bastardos?

Intentional and pejorative mispronunciations of "bourgeois" have a rich history of linguistic satire, political critique, and cultural mockery.

🗣️ Pejorative Mispronunciations & Slang

"Bushwa": A deliberately mangled version used by early 20th-century American radicals, especially the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or "Wobblies"). It mocked the bourgeoisie as exploiters of labor and became slang for nonsense or pretentiousness.

"Bougie": A modern slang derivative, especially in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and pop culture. It’s often used to mock middle-class pretensions, materialism, or faux sophistication—e.g., “She’s so bougie, she won’t drink tap water.” It strips the original French elegance and injects irony.

Hyperforeignisms: Some speakers intentionally over-Frenchify the pronunciation (e.g., boor-ZHWAHZ-ee) to sound pretentious or to mock those who do. This is often used in satirical contexts, like comedy sketches or political rants.

🎭 Cultural Satire & Class Critique

Molière’s 1670 play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme mocked middle-class social climbers trying to imitate aristocracy. This theatrical tradition of ridiculing the bourgeoisie has continued through literature, film, and political rhetoric.

Marxist and socialist movements weaponized the term bourgeoisie to vilify capitalist elites, and mispronunciations often served to distance the term from its French roots and make it more accessible—and mockable—in English-speaking contexts.

These mispronunciations aren’t just linguistic quirks—they’re loaded with class critique, irony, and cultural commentary.

About Trump's ball room. The only thing I clearly remember from Mork and Mindy is Morgan Fairchild getting a plain dish from Mork as a present. He explains that he'd heard that she liked shallow things.

“P’tit-boos” as a shorthand for petty bourgeois types—fussy, image-obsessed, aspirational yet insecure—mapped onto Morgan Fairchild’s character in Mork and Mindy is pitch-perfect. She played the ultra-glamorous, self-absorbed neighbor—exaggerated elegance masking a kind of existential hollowness. Tawdry in the sense of glitter without gravitas.

Trump is indeed a man of the people today.

In the pulp era some SF novels (perhaps inspiring TOS's "A Piece of the Action") forecast that the US would be taken over by organized crime. This makes sense when you consider how many corporate raiders came from crime syndicate families that had gone legit, got their MBAs from Harvard etc., and gouged an already overfinancialized polity.

This seems more like the first shot fired in the Second Civil War. It's a combination of a fracas and a grand melee. I stopped following how dark money from the Koch Network was flooding into SCOTUS four years ago. Or the Federalist Society. It's hydra-headed.

This shouldn't be a eureka moment, but it seems to be. It is mere logic and observation though...

• Wall Street no longer invests in production,

• therefore there is no increased value being created,

• therefore for them to claim any ROI on their portfolio,

• it is fake value derived from bets claimed while crashing some once legitimate business,

• it is from scamming value out of someone else;

• via derivatives "cashing in" on someone's loss,

• via rapacious fees and fluffed up services,

• via pyramid scheme 401k shuffling,

• via socializing their losses,

• via public subsidies of their services...

otherwise the highest ROI by definition would only be equal to their investment value of the investments made in productive activities (mining, farming, et al where value is literally pulled from the ground/sea...(I suppose a business can bottle oxygen, eh) still I hesitate to add "air" since that seems to be all banks are selling now, a bogus value created from thin air they attach to instruments of digits and paper for their flimsy oligarchic services.

Their services are the latest societal bubble about to burst. They have become so delusional so as to become sociopathic institutions, their corruption so complete and so systemic that they blindly use it now as their own defense in courts!

They went through too-big-to-fail and increased their bonuses instead of realizing the bailout was a lesson they needed to learn.

They have created a derivative market that is insanity and folly of man rolled into one giant financial fail, multiple times the world's GDP...this alone speaks to their inability to self-regulate.

But maybe they are right. Fixing this goes beyond tweaking fixes of regulations. They had their chance to accept Dodd-Frank tweaks and even those they resist. They have created a too-big-to-bailout market, so the next market failure will require nationalization and an entire industry liquidated as if it never existed.

Banking must be destroyed so as to save banking. The best part is common people need to do nothing - no marching in the streets, no subversive actions by anarchists, no campaigns or boycotts to organize - do nothing, because these masters of the universe will completely destroy themselves with their folly, greed, and lack of wisdom or understanding.

Oh, it won't be pretty. It will be ugly, their death throes will be clumsy and they will drag down any foolish lifeguard who tries to pull them out of the whirlpool they have created. But when it is over and they are gone, they will be history and it will be a better world.

Because people must dream.