I don’t like the mind of the consumer.
I don’t like the mind of retail.
And I don’t even like the mind of the supposed “professional.”
Because all of them share the same trait: moderate consensus thinking.
They live in scarcity.
And scarcity breeds a form of social Darwinism — everyone clawing for the same explanations, the same signals, the same illusions of control.
Scarcity as a Mental Virus
What’s changed in the economy is not just inflation, not just prices. It’s the way scarcity has seeped into the mindset.
Look at consumer product reviews today:
Obsession with price over value.
Microscopic comparisons over a few dollars.
Hysteria over features that have nothing to do with durability, utility, or performance.
The signal is clear: scarcity has rewired consumers into consensus-driven survivalists.
They are less able to judge value.
They are more prone to chase narratives.
They are more fragile in their decision-making.
This is disturbing — not because of economics, but because of what it says about cognition. Scarcity collapses perspective.
Scarcity as Propaganda
I watch the CNBC travel clips where the big pitch about Asia is how cheap it is to live there.
“You can survive in Thailand on $2,000 a month.”
“You can live comfortably in Vietnam for a fraction of the West.”
The featured stars are always the same: former soldiers, dismissed professionals, teaching English as a fallback.
But the real question isn’t asked:
Does this economy give me the trajectory to make billions?
Does it provide the lanes of opportunity to be more than consensus?
Or is it just another centralized economy, where the only value proposition is scarcity itself?
That’s what most of the world sells: the romance of living cheap.
It’s propaganda for people with weak economics in the West, people without status who are told to find pride in “making it” somewhere else by cutting costs.
Scarcity as lifestyle. Scarcity as identity.
And the consumer mind laps it up.
The Rural Paradox
This is the same paradox you see outside markets.
Take the conservative in rural America. Owning a farm is treated as “low status” by our information society. Yet it represents pragmatic intelligence: survival, systems thinking, real-world feedback.
It’s the same dynamic with Trump. Consensus elites ridicule the signal, but it resonates because it’s tethered to practical realities they overlook.
Scarcity has made the elite mind fragile — abstract, performative, disconnected. Pragmatism survives where scarcity is handled directly.
The conclusion is simple:
Scarcity has made the consumer mind — retail or professional — consensus-driven, fragile, and blind.
The highest form of intelligence is not in consensus. It’s in the practical signal that actually bends and shows reality.
And the fact that the average mind can’t grasp that?
That’s not frustrating.
It’s proof I’ve already won.