After writing my “Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid” book, I have become very attuned to how my emotional state relates to my financial state. A big factor has been about issues of trust (see sample chapter, link at right).
I will get into that more in future blogs, but there is one issue of trust I wanted to bring up before it gets forgotten, and that is, the most recent election.
I realize you are probably so glad it is over, and you probably don’t want to hear or think about it, but I have to bring it up for this reason: Something like $1.5 billion was spent on campaign ads shown all over the country, and many of those ads– I would say most, and certainly over 50% . . . were, in some form or another , a message that fostered mistrust.
For example, here in Massachusetts we were inundated with ads saying “Elizabeth Warren is not who she says she is.” I am not sure what that meant, but no matter– this message was repeatedly promulgated to a wide audience. And she is now a U.S. Senator. And of course many other candidates had the similar aspersions of untrustworthiness cast upon them, including the president himself, and of course “Washington” itself was endlessly painted as a den of liars and cheats as well.
So the election is over, the ads have stopped, the winners have won and are holding office, but . . . where did all that mistrust energy go? What is left within us, after our collective exposure to all those accusations and fear mongering? It didn’t just go “poof” on November 7th, with all parties saying the next day, “Oh gosh, we didn’t really mean it.” It was a form of emotional trauma, and it is still there, fermenting away.
One thing I realized after writing the “Rich Kid” book is that wealth is based on trust, and the less trust you have, the less wealth you have. We lost a lot of trust in our government and elected officials this past few months, and now with this self-created “fiscal cliff” we are left wondering if we will soon be trusting them even less.
You know, if the trust we have in the federal government drops to a certain level, the government will simply cease to exist. Not sure I am ready for that. Flawed though it is, I do not see a better system waiting in the wings. History teaches us that when citizens lose trust in a democracy, the next step is a dictatorship. And that, my friends, would be a major loss of our collective wealth.
© Justin Locke
