The One True Thing

Until you see clearly how the rules of society work, you will be trapped within a system of control.

What you mistake for reality is instead a fabricated simulation, designed to keep you trapped right where the system wants you.

Your social conditioning, education, and family structures program you with a set of beliefs, values and norms — often unexamined — that “properly” align you in such a way that you focus your life and labor on keeping the existing social hierarchy in place and that you never deeply question this arrangement.

Put visually, your culture is in the shape of a pyramid. And what keeps you pinned to your particular layer is your belief system.

Every civilization has its own defining narratives that, while beautifully diverse, all generate exactly the same structure: a pyramid consisting of many more people at the bottom than at the top.

Every civilization throughout history had One True Thing that determined each person’s position on that pyramid.

In some past eras, it was royal bloodline. In ancient Egyptian culture, it stemmed from being a direct descendent of the Sun god Ra. And today, it’s a function of how much money you have.

No matter the marker, the pecking order is held in place because everyone accepts the rules.  They’re fully understood by the citizenry, and are only rarely questioned (usually at great personal risk).

But even though accepted as “100% true” by the participants of one culture, social markers often don’t translate when applied to another.

For instance, if you traveled back in time to the height of the Aztec empire with $1 billion in cash, your paper bills wouldn’t have any accepted value.  You’d probably have trouble acquiring even a single tortilla with them.

Your modern currency just wouldn’t be money to that ancient culture.

Similarly, the highest of the high priests of the Mayan culture, decked out in their amazing plumage headdresses would be granted neither power nor awe by today’s society. At best, they’d be valued as a curiosity; perhaps as entertainment in a traveling circus or Las Vegas show.

But under no circumstances would one of those high priests be granted a powerful spot at the top of our current pyramid. Why? Because the Mayan’s ‘One True Thing’ is not our ‘One True Thing’. Their system of religion-based power and control does not fit with our system of money-based power and control.

Trapped In The Matrix

Throughout all of civilized history, the ‘One True Thing’ absolutely ruled our way of life. There has been no escaping it.  Your position on the societal pyramid has been absolutely determined by your relationship to the prevailing social marker.

Due to ignorance and/or fear, the vast majority of people in every civilization never question their culture’s prevailing ‘One True Thing’. Instead, they live their lives as good, dutiful, compliant citizens. Largely because “that’s just the way it is”.

Further, because each layer of the pyramid is afraid of the masses sitting beneath it, its residents actually defend the system quite vigorously.  Each layer of middle management in this architected hierarchy works hard to keep things as they are, lest they lose their advantage over those below them.

This is why the police are busy clubbing, gassing and rubber bulleting Yellow Vest demonstrators across France. This is just one layer of management trying to keep the other (lower) layers from upsetting the whole pyramid.

This is just protecting their own self-interest. I seriously doubt if many of the police involved truly care about protecting the people who socially outrank them. They probably despise those elites just as much as the Yellow vests do.

But the cops are committed to vigorously beating the Yellow Vests because doing so justifies their existence within the cultural pyramid.  To do otherwise would be to more closely examine their own lives — and how unfulfilled, sometimes miserable and unprofitable they really are. That’s an existential trip most are unwilling to take.

They figure it’s best to just break out the clubs and get busy defending … something.

Self-Education Is The Path To Freedom From The Matrix

The ‘One True Thing’ that our current culture is fixated upon, just as surely as any prior civilization has ever been sure of its own explanation for the few being supported by the many, is money.

If you have it, you can literally live like the gods of old.  Every comfort is available to you, every freedom, the ability to go anywhere and do anything — without consequence.

It’s that powerful of an idea.

It doesn’t mean that people with more money are necessarily better than anybody else. But culturally, we willingly act as if that’s the case.

Now, given the importance of money in society, let me ask you a question; “How much were you taught about money in school?”

Were you taught how it is created by banks during the act of making a loan?  Or, that the Fed can simply create it into existence at will?

Were you taught the tax code? All those rules and wrinkles that can benefit you enormously if you know of them?

Were you taught which careers, investments, and strategies created the most wealth? Or which ones are tax-protected? Or which ones will condemn you to a life as a wage slave and tax donkey?

Did you have an amazing teacher that taught you about managing your personal income and balance sheets?

No?

Me neither.  None of that was imparted to me during my time in the education system (and I have an MBA and a PhD).

That information, while easy to learn and understand, is strictly withheld from public education for one reason and one reason only: it’s the language of the protected classes.  The rich have access to that information; the masses don’t.

If you want to move up and out of your economic layer, you have to learn that language. You have to self-educate.

Luckily this information isn’t hidden or forbidden. But you have to seek it out yourself. You won’t find it in mainstream resources — and certainly not in the news, especially the financial press.

The good news in our civilization is that there’s no reason at all for you to remain parked in whatever slot you’ve been assigned or fallen into.  You can break free and either move up — or even out of — the pyramid.

But first you have to understand the beliefs that keep you where you are.

As I write this I’m on the Real Estate Radio Guys annual Summit At Sea event (March 14-24), surrounded by very successful entrepreneurs and investors.

Two key themes of the conference are (1) learning how to be a successful real estate investor, and (2) unlearning all the unhelpful crap you were taught throughout your upbringing.

Learning the right things and unlearning the wrong things.  Education and beliefs.

One of the more delightfully blunt faculty speakers at this event is Robert Kiyosaki (of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame) who keeps drilling home the point that the education system is not designed to help you achieve financial freedom. Rather, it’s designed to slot you into the most heavily-taxed layer of the pyramid, and then keep you there.

The “employee” slot, no matter how well-compensated, is heavily taxed.  As soon as you break out of a poverty-level paycheck you quickly escalate towards an overall combined rate of taxation of about 40%.

But that’s not the worst slot from a tax standpoint.  That belongs to small business owners, hands down.

If you work really hard, become super successful, perhaps by becoming a doctor, accountant or a lawyer and own your own small enterprise, you’re presumably doing something that society really values, right?

If that’s the case, then why do you suppose that the government punishes small business owners the hardest via taxes?

If you own your own small business or practice, congratulations!, you are now taxed at about 60% (due to the addition of self-paid SS and other employment taxes).

Plus, you have all the additional burdens of running a small business (such as endless regulatory compliance like workman’s comp.) which are as numerous as they are petty and expensive.

Your culture would tell you that those are the burdens of success and that you should be thankful that you even have such problems as high taxation.  Neat rationalization, but it falls apart when you see the rest of the landscape.

What if you were to learn that there were other means of making money that would reduce your tax rates to 20%, or even to 0%?  Further, what if you learned that nearly all of the rich people were operating in these areas?  You’d probably think “well, then schools would find out and teach about those things, pronto!”

Well, you’d be wrong.

By far the vast majority of people learn that the key to success is getting a good job.  Further, they are taught that their house and their auto(s) are assets and that “investing” means putting their savings into stocks and bonds.

With a different sort of education, they would very quickly learn that assets put money into their pockets while liabilities cost them money.

This means that the house they live in and their car are actually money-burning liabilities.  With a quick education in balance sheet construction these items can be placed on either the liability side of their personal balance sheet or tucked up on their income statement as an expression of revenue and expenses (say, by comparing paying rent vs. the PITI+M payments of owning a home, or the cost of using Uber vs owning a car).

Investment property, on the other hand, is a true asset with cash flows and significant tax benefits.  Speculative investments require you to sell it someone later for a higher price, while true investments cash flow favorably over the course of the time you hold them.

The entire stock market has been transformed into a speculative arena by the horrible “leadership” of the central banks and political parties over past three decades.  But that’s where nearly 100% of the cultural marketing goes to keep everyone in the lower tiers of the pyramid firmly entrenched.

So few people learn about any of this in primary or high school where these simple concepts could be taught (but are usually not) that we can effectively say that nobody does.  It’s just not taught.

Or about how money is created in the system?  It’s a really simple concept yet after polling thousands of people over the years I can say with 99.9% confidence that you did not learn about the money creation mechanism in school.  Most people had to read The Creature from Jekyll Island or watch the Crash Course chapters on money creation to learn this vital information.

Now why, do you suppose, your culture does not go out of its way to inform you of the most important and useful information for getting ahead in life and understanding how the system of money works?  Why isn’t this pretty straight-forward, if not basic, accounting, financial and monetary information taught to everyone?  Why is it ‘the language of the rich’?

After all, this information is crucial to the one-true-thing that completely defines the “why” of the pyramid’s construction.

Well, for one, it might upset the cultural pyramid if too many people saw that their given lots in life were to principally work for the benefit of the people above them. Pyramids are most stable when the fattest layers are on the bottom and remain there.  We might as well expect the well-adorned high priest of old to say that there’s absolutely no connection between the daily ritual human sacrifices and the rains.  That sort of information is really dangerous to the way things are.

For another reason, people tend to defend the shape of the pyramid as doing otherwise would mean having to confront some possibly unpleasant truths about their own jobs and maybe even come to the realization that their lives had been spent in pursuit of something they didn’t even want or enjoy.  That’s an emotionally tough experience so it’s mostly avoided at all costs.

In other words, the belief systems surrounding the current mythology about jobs, careers, taxes, and money would be painful to expose especially for the people living within them.

Robert Kiyosaki makes the point that it’s perfectly fine if people want to live with a certain belief system that prevents them from ever becoming financially free, but why would you want them to teach those belief systems to you or your children?

These are not bad people trying to prevent you from getting ahead, they are simply keepers and defenders of the one-true-thing, no different than an up-and-coming Mayan priest, or a Roman Praetorian guard.  Their main job is to keep things just as they are.  Their entire system of beliefs is organized around how things currently are, and so envisioning themselves as outside of all that is really difficult.

Our one-true-thing is that currency and debt are the markers of true wealth.  Those who hold access to more of these markers get to do more things and live more luxurious lives and exert more power of the rest of us.  But the true function of these markers is to preserve the shape of the societal pyramid, keep the masses in their places, and facilitate the flow of labor and productive output up the pyramid to the few at the top.

This system is now breaking down and those who can escape it early have the best chance of making the most of their lives.  The ship is going down and if you are lashed to the mast, then you are too.  Young people all over the globe are saying “no more!” to this madness and have rightly concluded they have nothing to gain by participating in sailing this particular ship.

Those are the real purposes of the narrative of the one-true-thing.  Fortunately for you, to break out of the trap all you have to do is to see that it’s a trap.

The Path Forward

To this end, at Peak Prosperity we are constantly looking to bring you the information and ideas that can help you make the most of today and whatever future arrives.  Your self-education about what is truly going on and how the system truly operates is where your liberation lies.

To try and remain a good little participant in an obviously corrupt and failing system is soul crushing.

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society”

~ J. Krishnamurthy

We read daily of people who think they are suffering from some form of depression when they are actually demoralized.  Their inner cognitive map has broken down. They cannot find meaning or purpose in participating in the roles and tasks laid out before them by their parents, school, or work.

The bad news is that demoralization is highly resistant to either chemical or therapy based treatment.  The good news is that it is easily treated by chucking all the bullshit and following your own inner guidance for what your role should be in the world as it currently exists.  This is true for young and old alike.

We focus on the 8 Forms Of Capital, often leading with Financial Capital because building and protecting one’s wealth is clearly an important to being able to build other forms of capital.

While it will be a glorious day when free people can freely choose among competing money types, the current reality is that you can only pay taxes in the official government backed currency of your nation.  So, like it or not, we have to keep participating in that system.

Which means you are hostage, same as me, same as everyone, to the vagaries of your central bank and taxation authorities.

To the extent we earn and save what we call money (which is actually debt-backed fiat currency, but that’s a mouthful), we need to try and protect it and put it towards useful pursuits.  We strongly advise that any money in the markets be managed by professionals with a clear handle on the many true risks that exist in the “markets” as we like to call them due to their heavily deformed shape.

These risks include “bail-ins,” severe market downturns, counter party risk, and currency depreciation.  Each of these is the direct function of interventionist central banks that really did everyone a huge disservice by blowing The Everything Bubble as a response to their prior monstrous mistakes in creating first the internet bubble and then the housing bubble.

If your current financial manager(s) cannot speak to these risks, and offer concrete solutions to providing legitimate portfolio insurance, then you should speak to our endorsed financial advisors.  They are a class act and we routinely hear how pleased and delighted people are to talk to real humans who ‘get it’ and are not merely defenders of the one-true-way for Wall Street investing.

Peak Prosperity is also offering a series of webinars that are designed to get you up to speed on the basics of real estate investing in this very broad and diverse, tax advantaged investment asset class.

We are constantly learning more and more about the many ways one can participate in this area and plan to bring a variety of direct offerings to our members and readers as time goes on.  In the meantime, we’re going to continue to have experts deliver their knowledge to you in easily consumable form via webinars.

These will allow you to ramp up your knowledge quickly and easily from the comfort of your own home. However, you will definitely want to attend events like the summit at sea that we’re on because there’s a magic that happens when you are around other highly energized, curious and motivated people who have busted out of the trap and are well on their way to intellectual and financial freedom.

Once you do, there’s no turning back

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.

~ Morpheus in The Matrix

Where to Start?

We’re going to be writing about and bringing you the best information we can about such things as favorable tax strategies and investments that comport with you aims at Peak Prosperity.

If you are interested in real estate investing, start with out video series.  More to come there from us in the future. We’re also going to be looking for specific investments that could make sense as we did with Farmland LP.

We’d also recommend that you read these three books:

1. Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.  This book has transformed millions of minds by teaching the basics about finance and accounting in a very relatable way.  Your kids should read this while they are still teenagers.
2. Tax Free Wealth by Tom Wheelright.  This explains the basics of how each area of life is taxed by the government, and does so in a way that kind of makes sense.  The government wants oil, houses and jobs to it tax advantages those activities.  But it needs money and so the entire school system is designed to feed people into the most heavily taxed areas.

Again, the information in these books is not hard to wrap your mind around intellectually. But for many, reorientation of their inner belief systems will be the most difficult part.

For example, if you’ve gone your entire life believing that school is the best preparation for life, you might find yourself challenged by the view that school principally teaches you how to productively inhabit a lower tier of the cultural pyramid.

Conclusion

We’re all going to have to be extremely nimble to thrive in the years ahead.  We’re going to have to be willing to let go of half-truths and falsehoods that no longer serve us or, worse, harm us.

As we’ve learned the hard way over the years, this is a process of both gaining new information and shedding prior beliefs.  The former is an intellectual process, the latter is an emotional dogfight.

To have the right skills to navigate we would highly encourage you to begin investing in yourself so that you have the right knowledge and the inner tools necessary to tame your inner landscape.

The powers that be have never been interested in freedom of the masses.  Ever.  Not 2000 years ago, not 1000 years ago, and not now.

There’s always a good reason. The rain gods must be appeased, the king must be obeyed, and now the financial and political elites have to tighten their grips on power in order to save the world.

There’s always a good reason which isn’t really a good reason at all, but a rationalization for why it’s a divine right for those currently on top to remain there.

The problem now, as many times before, the current arrangements are self-destructive, only this time on a global level. If there was ever a great reason not to keep things as they are, not even for a second longer, it would be the disappearing insects, the plummeting phytoplankton counts, and the increasingly wonky weather.

This is why it is imperative that you change yourself. Change always begins at the individual level.  The status quo never changes on its own because it had a brilliant new insight.

Change is brought kicking and screaming from the outside in, which is why we are thrilled to hear of the masses of students across the world striking and protesting.  That’s how the environmental movement forced necessary change.

That’s how minorities and women got rights in the US.  In example after example, the change began with individuals, with you, and then was forced upon the defenders of the one-true-thing who were all but certain that the whole thing would fall apart if, say, women got to vote.

All of this is to say, we don’t just want to help you preserve your financial capital, we want to help you become financially free.  Not with the goal of becoming rich, but with the goal of becoming free of the many delusions and illusions that are currently in defense of the one-true-thing.