Everything is an illusion! - is Cohen the everyman? Have we done his bidding?

What scares most people about the COHEN testimony is not so much the accusations of impropriety he has of TRUMP but the fact that you could probably hold the hearing endlessly by simply substituting names of the wealthy and or powerful and exchanging COHEN for millions of their subordinates.

I remember sitting through a dinner in Singapore with two CEO’s from rather large public companies railing about Julian Assange and how disgusting his WikiLeaks site is and the discredit that he is bringing Australia. Reading between the lines of the conversation, they didn’t give a damn about the journalist’s machine gunned by remote control operators — what they feared was that their own misdeeds may one day be public interest. These CEO’s were subconsciously projecting themselves into the realm of the accused.

COHEN type testimony is rare, and it usually comes after the person is exposed and they are through circumstance forced to open up about their motivations and those of their paymasters. We have seen it more than several times in the trading world usually after trading losses stack up. You may real one Jerome Kerviel.

The biggest rogue trader scandal in history hit Societe Generale as the French bank accused a junior employee of a fraud costing $7 billion. The country’s top banker dubbed the trader “a genius of fraud.”

The bank would have us believe that the employee was a criminal and they had absolutely no knowledge of his actions. Of course if his trades went the other way and made money. Well, of course it would have been under their stewardship.

I have been around public companies, private companies and professional managers now for a very long time, and I can’t help to observe the cliques that develop, and the code speak that comes along with it to mask behaviours that would be considered a violation of their employment agreement or normal company behaviours. Whether we like it or not we all get sucked into tow the line behaviours, mostly for own survival or ambition. Whether it’s something as simple as fudging the sales numbers, so the team hits their target and gets their monthly commission or sending threatening letters to a supplier to get a better discount or something more sinister such as silencing potential criticism and bonding with customers through bad behaviour — all this stuff is essentially normal daily occurrences for most workers in large companies throughout the world.

I don’t exactly know where this is going. Like the Jim Carrey movie “Liar Liar” there is no version of society that could work when everyone tells a truth, because everyone’s truth is different and sometimes to find commonality, we must find a middle ground between both truths. Some version of a truth that fits all.

But I do wonder a lot about just how young people of today are expected to view the world. They learn very quickly that nothing is to be believed. Social media, the pictures you see on Instagram and the very words you hear from a Presidents mouth are all untrue to someone if not themselves. They learn that there is essentially no truth. They learn that everything is grey and that facts are subjective.

You may remember a generation of angry youth who were dubbed Punks. They were cynical and educated and remade popular culture in an image of themselves, the results of which we still see around us today. The older generation of the time wondered aloud what was to become of the world once this generation finds itself in positions of influence. Well we know what happened. They all got jobs at banks and convinced the world that the only reliable store of wealth is real estate. As a result, ninety percent of the earth’s population are stuck servicing an asset that doesn’t generate any income for anyone except the banks. The wealth gap anyone?

The youth of today will find a way forward with their innate knowledge that most if not everything around them is nothing but a marketing illusion, but just how that manifests into a future reality is yet to be seen. It will be interesting at the very least.

Going back to COHEN’s testimony, what struck me the most was not what we heard, we already know what he was going to say — it was because his testimony was everyman’s testimony. This is the world that we live in. What he described was business as usual for the privileged and powerful.