Joe Biden and the Common Knowledge Game
July 1, 2024 | Ben Hunt
Common knowledge is why coronations and executions are held in public – not so a crowd can see the new king or the hanged man, but so a crowd can see a crowd seeing the new king or the hanged man. Common knowledge is why sitcoms have laugh tracks, why American Idol has a live studio audience, and why professional sports teams pipe in crowd noise. Common knowledge is why the Egyptian government fell in 2011 after a televised protest in Tahrir Square, why the Romanian government fell in 1989 after a televised protest in Palace Square, and why the Chinese government will arrest you today if you distribute pictures of a 35-year-old protest in Tiananmen Square. Common knowledge is why inflation has been non-transitory and persistent, why the US withdrawal from Afghanistan collapsed into a fiasco, and why the US response to Covid was so heavy-handed and ineffective. Common knowledge is why the 2024 Biden/Harris campaign has collapsed.
Make no mistake about it, the Biden campaign HAS collapsed in the wake of Thursday’s ‘debate’, even if – like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off – it continues to run around for a few weeks or months. At some point, whether from bad internal polls or donations drying up or the next inevitable gaffe or maybe even the November vote, the carcass falls to the ground. But the moment of death was 9:05pm EDT on Thursday, June 27th. That’s the moment where we all saw what we all saw, that Joe Biden is not mentally competent to be president of the United States.
This isn’t about Trump. This isn’t a political comparison or a performance comparison or any other sort of comparison. For the record, I think Trump was and will be a disastrous, profoundly un-American president. Since 2016, when I wrote that I thought Trump would defeat Clinton, I’ve been very clear that I think Trump breaks us. I think it’s very clear that Trump conspired to overturn a legitimate 2020 election that he lost. I think it’s very clear that Trump is always and in all ways About The Money. But this isn’t about Trump. This is about the moment in time that irrevocably changed what we all know that we all know about Joe Biden.
The dynamics of common knowledge formation are called the common knowledge game. Like all games it has rules. Like all games it has an equilibrium, which is a ten-dollar word that means it has a stopping point. Maybe not an end but a stopping point. Let me review those rules so you can see why I say the stopping point for this chapter in the common knowledge game we call American politics is the collapse of the 2024 Biden/Harris campaign.
You already know how the common knowledge game works, probably from the Hans Christian Anderson story about the Emperor’s New Clothes, maybe from the John Maynard Keynes story about the Newspaper Beauty Contest. The purest version of the common knowledge game is the story of the Island of the Green-Eyed Tribe, which I’ve written about four times at Epsilon Theory, starting in the original Manifesto and continuing in A Game of Sentiment, When Does the Story Break, and Sheep Logic. But I think it’s the real-life examples of the common knowledge game that really make it come alive, like I wrote about in Harvey Weinstein and the Common Knowledge Game.
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