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The Arithmetic of Delusion: Why Your Portfolio is a Rorschach Test for the Braindead

Buck Valor
Written by
Buck ValorPersiflating Non-Journalist
Thursday, May 15, 2025
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A surrealist oil painting of two business-suited investors sitting at a dinner table, one wearing a red tie and one a blue tie. Between them is a holographic stock market line graph. The red-tie investor sees the graph as a literal red pit of fire, while the blue-tie investor sees the same graph as a golden ladder to heaven. In the background, a faceless billionaire in a tuxedo pours champagne while holding a remote control. Dark, cynical, and cluttered with political debris.

Behold the latest carcass on the road to national collapse: the basic human ability to read a line graph. We have reached a point in our collective cognitive decline where the performance of the stock market—a supposedly objective metric of corporate greed and capital flow—has become nothing more than a Rorschach test for the politically lobotomized. According to the latest data on retail investing, your perception of whether you are getting richer or poorer depends entirely on which flavor of geriatric puppet is currently occupying the White House. It is a masterpiece of self-delusion, a symphony of stupidity where the conductor is a social media algorithm and the audience is a mob of people who think 'macroeconomics' is a type of artisanal pasta.

If you wear a red hat, the economy is a smoldering crater of 'woke' mismanagement, even if your portfolio is hitting all-time highs. You’ll stare at a green arrow and swear it’s a communist plot to devalue your dignity. If you’re a card-carrying member of the blue-hair brigade, the economy is a soaring eagle of 'equity-driven growth,' even as you’re forced to choose between paying rent and buying a single organic avocado. Both sides are equally divorced from reality, clinging to their narratives like drowning rats to a piece of driftwood. The numbers haven't changed, but the brains observing them have turned into partisan mush.

The Right has transformed into a doom-cult that fetishizes collapse. They have convinced themselves that the 'Deep State' is manually depressing the value of their crypto-wallets and gold bars out of spite. To the average Republican investor, a booming market is a 'sugar high' or a 'globalist illusion' because acknowledging prosperity under a Democrat would be an act of high treason against their tribal identity. They would rather see their 401k go up in flames than admit that the 'socialist' in the Oval Office hasn't accidentally caused the Great Depression yet. It is a form of financial masochism that would be pathetic if it weren't so profoundly annoying to anyone with a functioning prefrontal cortex.

On the flip side, we have the Democrats, whose capacity for performative optimism is truly a marvel of modern psychology. They will look at a market propped up by stock buybacks and the systematic exploitation of the global South and call it 'Bidenomics' with a straight face. They ignore the fact that the wealth gap is widening into a canyon that could swallow the moon, as long as the CEOs doing the swallowing have the correct diversity statements on their websites. For the Blue investor, the market is 'up' because the vibes are 'correct.' It doesn't matter if the average worker is drowning in debt; as long as the graphs are presented by a news anchor who uses the right pronouns, the economy is objectively flourishing. They have traded material reality for moral superiority, and the exchange rate is terrible.

This isn't just about 'disagreement.' It is about the complete and total death of the Rational Actor. Economics, in its naive youth, used to assume that people acted in their own self-interest. We now know that was a lie. People don't want to be rich; they want to be right. They would happily lose half their net worth if it meant they could post a smug meme about the other side's failures. Retail investing has moved from the realm of finance to the realm of fan-fiction. You aren't 'investing' in companies anymore; you're betting on your own hallucinations. You are paying for the privilege of being lied to by your own bias.

Consider the historical parallels, though I know history is a concept as foreign to you as 'nuance.' We have seen manias before—the Dutch and their tulips, the English and their South Sea bubbles—but those were driven by simple, honest greed. This modern madness is far more insidious. It is a mania of identity. The market is no longer a place to exchange value; it is a theatre of war where the casualties are logic and your retirement fund. You aren't looking for returns; you're looking for validation from a tribe that wouldn't help you cross the street if you were on fire.

The brokers and the billionaire class, of course, are laughing at you. They don't care if you're a MAGA zealot or a resistance warrior; they just want your transaction fees. While you're busy arguing about whether a 'woke' stock is a sign of the apocalypse or a triumph for progress, the actual owners of the world are quietly extracting what’s left of your future. They love your partisanship. It’s the perfect smoke screen. If you’re busy debating the 'politics' of a stock price, you’ll never notice that the house always wins and the game is rigged regardless of who is sitting in the dealer's chair. You are bickering over the color of the paint while the building is being foreclosed upon.

So, go ahead. Keep checking your apps. Keep interpreting the NASDAQ through the lens of your favorite cable news shouting head. Believe the market is down when it's up, or up when it's down. It doesn't change the reality that you are a pawn in a game you don't understand, being played by people who despise you. Mathematics is dead, and you lot are the ones who held the pillow over its face while chanting slogans you found on a message board. I'd say I hope you go broke, but you're already intellectually bankrupt, so it hardly matters.

This story is an interpreted work of social commentary based on real events. Source: The Economist

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