It’s All Upside Down

(and we know it)

MC Escher understood the madness.
Up is down, inside out is outside in, right is left and theft is might and nothing is what it seems, though that is all we have, and we try to make sense of a world that is incomprehensible. 

And the people who build this rollercoaster whirligig house of mirrors world are as confused as the rest of us.

“I don’t know; it’s just the way we . . . it’s just how things are.”

Here’s the story that started it:

Someone we know was looking for a house to rent in a seaside town. He wanted to be able to go to sleep listening to the waves breaking.

He wasn’t working—kind of retired but working on the next adventure. The new business would do well when launched and he could do it remotely but there was no current business income (because ‘working on the next adventure ‘). But he had a stable rental history, regular payments from other sources, a solid bank account and his superannuation. 

He’s an upstanding, community-minded citizen. He’s intelligent, friendly and entertaining and well-liked by his acquaintances and friends. He’s done good work with people in need and helped to change many lives. And he has a dog.   It should be easy, right? Even with the dog. He’d be a welcome addition to the community.

None of this was of any value in finding a place to live. And as far as we know he’s still looking.  So is the dog.

None of it counted because these things aren’t in the Application Form. And so our friend was reduced to nothing more than a few data on a pdf document.

But surely we have a system that helps people who need shelter. We’re a society that looks after the people who make up the society.

Just joking.

No. Of course we don’t.

We have an economy. Our economy permits or causes (as of 2016) upwards of 116,000 homeless people in our ‘system’ .

We’re greedy. We’ve always been greedy. From long before capitalism was imagined. When it comes down to it, particularly in the face of uncertainty, we look after ourselves and our close families and we unashamedly massage the egos of those who can help us. And anyway the homeless are not our problem (and also it’s their fault for being poor/not working hard enough/being lunies).

Our economy is supposed to provide for the needs of the society through the magic of the Hidden Hand. But it doesn’t work like that. The hidden hand ultimately feeds the desires of the already rich and powerful.

The ‘purpose’ of the Economy isn’t even to serve humans, The purpose of the Economy is to serve … the Economy. If humans are inadvertently benefited that’s a happy coincidence.

What happens is that once a ‘society’, a group, a tribe, exceeds Dunbar’s Number—150 people—society becomes less and less personal until it’s not personal at all and simply generates cold statistics about people.

Because there are so many of us we can’t relate to everyone.

Even at the high end, the ‘power’ end, people with an unusually large frontal cortex, the human brain’s ability to forge real relationships collapses at about 600 people. So almost everyone else is a cardboard cutout for us, and we use our cardboard cutout ideas of what other people are like, so effectively that we think we already know what they’re like. It’so effective we think it’s real. 

Then, of course, those cardboard cutouts lose their humanity completely and morph to become mere data points.

The Game

The real estate game (to get back to that!) is a digital system which is entirely about money. 

A real estate company—like all other companies—is not human, or really about people, nor in a sense are they really operated by people. Like all other companies it is a document on a register with a number. It is a document of incorporation, a documented set of policies and procedures.  

There are no real people involved. Automatons (called Property Managers) go through the motions at the operational end; drones (called  ‘Lessors’, ‘Owners’, or  ‘Customers’) at the other end, and in between is the ‘Product’, also called the ‘Application’. We know this because our friend received an email from the Property Manager saying, “So sorry but the owner went with another Application.” This is even worse than ‘Applicant‘, which is already about as 2-dimensional as ink on a colourless cardboard cutout can get.

The idea is to siphon money (as data) from someone who has some to someone who wants it.

There is also a risk management document.

And it’s all about Risk Management:

• Does the Application have enough money?
• Has it had enough money before?
• Will it keep having enough money?
• Does it have a data history of handing over its money on a regular basis?
• Is the Application willing to forego its right to privacy? 

the Opportunity, the Bribe, the Temptation

Some Applications are willing to hand over even more money than requested. When an Application is a bit desperate to defeat other Applications it can take the opportunity to divest itself of a bit more money by bribing the ‘Customer’ with an offer of a higher rent or a larger payment in advance.

Naturally, as required by the rules of the game, the Property Automaton will explain to the Application that such bribery is not encouraged. However, as the Automaton will also explain, the final selection of Application will be up to the Customer. 

We look forward to hearing of the first Customer in history to resist the temptation of more money than they expected: “Oh no, I don’t think it’s fair to the other Applications. I’m really not interested in the money, I just want to help people.” 

Renting out a house, a Unit, a townhouse, a “villa”, is not about helping people to find somewhere to live. It’s all about wealth and status and all those other things like comfort and reducing financial anxiety.

This is all normal. It’s the way we do things. We’re used to it, we understand it, we participate in it as one of the automatons. And it’s shit.

Gaslighting

The goal of gaslighting is to gradually undermine the victim’s confidence in their own ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or reality from delusion, thereby rendering the individual or group pathologically dependent on the gaslighter for their thinking and feelings.

Gaslighting induces cognitive dissonance in the victim . . . and may facilitate development of confusion, anxiety, depression, and in some extreme cases, even psychosis. After the victim loses confidence in their mental capacities and develops a sense of learned helplessness, they become more susceptible to the victimizer’s control.

The world has been gaslighted since forever. Not just, or mostly, about real estate. Obviously. But about the entire political/economic/social system. Many if not most politicians are and have been professional gaslighters since forever. They lie and twist and distort and misrepresent the facts to convince us that the reality is they are working incredibly hard for our welfare in everything they do. When they’re not. Not even slightly.

Priests are even worse. Indeed, they were probably the original inventers of gaslighting.

We’ve been taught to think the way things seem is the way things are. We’ve learnt to believe that the narrative we have bought into is reality. It’s not. It’s just not.

It’s not so much White Supremacy as Supremacy supremacy.

Amongst all this there are good people. Great people. Including good people who work in real estate.

My friend looks forward to meeting them.