Is Life A Short Squeeze?
The Metaphysics of GameStop
If you haven’t followed the Gamestop Stock story you should. Whether you find the story entertaining, horrifying, or something in between, it’s paradigmatic of an era in which virtuality (internet buzz) makes reality in its own image.
My question is what theological, spiritual, and existential metaphors this story stirs up for you?
Initially, I thought of the Tower of Babel (The Tower of Bubble?) as a metaphor for something that is artificially propped up but unsustainable. Read through the GameStop story, the Tower of Babel crashes because it’s built by people who only care about reaching heaven but are indifferent as to how they get there and whether they’ll stay there. They want the “head” of the tower to reach heaven, but nothing more. It’s not about displacing God, but optics.
But then I thought that, from a spiritual point of view, this entire life is a kind of bubble or “short squeeze.”
We humans are like Redditors informally collaborating to prop up the value of worldliness even though death will eventually win out, proving it all for nought (ashes to ashes, dust to dust).
Still, for those who can get in and get out, perhaps wordliness is a worthy buy—climb the mountain of materialism in part 1 of life and then climb the mountain of meaning in part 2, as David Brooks suggests in The Second Mountain. You just have to time it right.
But the metaphor breaks—because what does it mean that God is the institutional investor that, through our conspiring, loses (at least in the short run)? That sounds more like Descartes’ evil demon than Anselm’s perfect God—who would never be outsmarted by a bunch of Redditors. On the other hand, maybe this is how God “feels” during times of human horror—when it appears that the world is upside down. Fundamentals have been hijacked by speculation. The brazen—but not the righteous—rule.
What did work better for me was imagining GameStop to be a stand-in for belief, a parable about how heresies become orthodoxies until they are eventually undone by fundamentals.
Value depends on time-horizon.
If you take the long view, GameStop is over-valued.
But, stretched over a century or a millennium, most of us don’t get to see the GameStops schemes exposed—we live in bubbles, and to reject them on that basis is to lose, to be naive. For in the short term, they are valuable. If you short something valueless prematurely, you lose.
This is perhaps a way of saying that in the long-run naturalism (realism) wins out against positivism (nominalism), but in the short-run, which is all we have, positivism wins.
This tension is even reflected in Jewish law in myriad ways.
One example: Before Passover, Jews burn their leavened bread and pronounce that any leavened bread in their possession should be considered as dust of the earth. And yet the pronunciation—which alters the legal status of crumbs—doesn’t change the chemical fact that they are crumbs.
We’d be fools to go and search for crumbs after we’ve done the ritual—and yet the embarrassing fact remains, what if we should find a crumb we’ve pronounced non-existent on Passover? According to realists, we’re in trouble. According to positivists or nominalists, we’re fine. Value is whatever we say it is. In the nominalist paradigm, on which I’ve written before, all value is manipulated.
Life is one big metaphysical short squeeze. The question is what do you do with that information? Knowing that the bubble may not pop in your lifetime, knowing that it may be profitable to accept the bubble rather than poke or challenge it, what do you do? Is this the meaning of the ancient teaching that we should be “in the world, but not of it?”
What is Called Thinking? is a practice of asking a daily question on the belief that self-reflection brings awe, joy, and enrichment to one’s life. Consider becoming a subscriber to support this project and access subscriber-only content.
You can read my weekly Torah commentary here.