Edward Quince’s Wisdom Bites: The Atrophy of Decision

 

We live in an era of "Fed Watchers." We hang on every syllable from Chairman Powell. We wait for the consensus estimate. We wait for the "all clear" signal from the herd. We have outsourced our most vital economic function: the ability to decide.

Today’s lesson comes from the sci-fi epic Children of Dune by Frank Herbert. While writing about a galactic empire, Herbert perfectly diagnosed the modern investor's paralysis.

The Wisdom Bite:

“We’ve lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy—or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?”

Drifting in the Current "We allow the decisions of others to move us." Look at the market reaction to a CPI print. The entire capital allocation mechanism of the world pauses to see what the "others" (the Bureau of Labor Statistics) decide the number is. We are not setting the current; we are driftwood floating in it.

This is the loss of agency. When you buy a stock because "everyone says AI is the future," you have fallen upon a decision like an enemy—reactively, fearfully, without ownership.

Reclaiming Vitality Herbert reminds us that we are the ones who set the current flowing. The market is not an external god; it is the aggregate of our decisions. To reclaim your financial vitality, you must stop waiting for perfect clarity. You must stop waiting for permission from the pundits.

The Financial Takeaway: Originality is the only alpha. If you are waiting for the data to be clear, you are waiting for the price to be high. Reclaim the ability to make a decision based on your own synthesis of value, even if it contradicts the "current." As we’ve noted before, "Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally." Defy that wisdom. Make your own decision.