>This World is Built on Lies
Vladimir Rojankovski
© Vladimir Rojankovski, 2020
ISBN 978-5-4498-5721-7
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Copyright © 2019 by Vladimir Rozhankovskii. Cover copyright © 2019 by Rideró. Rideró supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce creative works that enrich our culture. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. Rideró [email protected] First Edition: February 2020 The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Rideró provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.ridero.ru or call +7-800-5001167.
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You, you may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
It has become easier to influence events
than to understand what is going on.
For the longest time, we thought that as speech became more democratized, democracy itself would flourish. But in 2018, it is increasingly clear that more speech can in fact threaten democracy. In the digital age, when speech can exist mostly unfettered, the big threat to truth looks very different. It’s not just censorship, but an avalanche of undistinguished speech – some true, some false, some fake, some important, some trivial, much of it out-of-context, all burying us.
Gratitude
My special thanks to Brad Golding, my Australian friend and co-thinker who helped me sharpen my expressions and polish sentences. I am also thankful to my former mentor and true true true American friend Rebecca Baldridge, CFA. I want to pay special tribute to all my on- and offline friends – Andre Tkachenko, Michael Ermak, Ross Stukalov, Gennady Sorokopud, Elena Ryabova, Alex Rabinowitz as well as my son Ilya who have been by my side as this book progressed, and encouraged me to carry on.
This book is neither a fiction story nor your typical manual for how to get $30 per hour working from home or treat an incurable disease. Although it may look like something remotely addressing any types of our pragmatic needs, I hope this book will be more than leisure time spending. People around the world have been suffering from chaotic geopolitics and cooling economies for a dozen years, and will face a dozen more years of the same lukewarm ways of living unless we start changing them by ourselves. In the era of the Internet and, consequently, better, faster and more meaningful methods of communication, there will be no place for propaganda and any kind of fakeness, and this will happen pretty soon. Are we ready to accept this new reality? How can we make our governments and politicians work to genuinely improve our lives rather than to aspire to their own career ambitions? Are technocratic governments achievable, or is there is an alternative way to make the existing ones more efficient?
The head of the International Monetary Fund has recently warned that the global economy risks a return of the Great Depression, driven by inequality and financial sector instability. Speaking at the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington, D.C. in January 2020, Kristalina Georgieva said new IMF research, which compares the current economy to the “roaring 1920s” that culminated in the great market crash of 1929, revealed that a similar trend was already under way. While the inequality gap between countries had closed in the last two decades, it had increased within countries, the IMF found.
I am pretty certain that this book won’t be welcomed by either the Russian mainstream or in the US mainstream establishments, and it will most likely evoke harsh criticism. Moreover, I expect many readers to quit at this line wondering what makes this guy entitled to spreading his judgment. In fact, starting an honest conversation about the chaotic nature of the changes the world is undergoing, is well overdue and can no longer be postponed, and this is where my contribution as a multicultural multilingual (yes, that includes the Ukrainian – the USSR republic where I was born – too!) would be somewhat appropriate and useful.
l invite you to a holistic discussion about something seemingly less conspicuous but, at the end of the day, more important for each and every one of us. Thank you for being my loyal reader and God bless you!
Preface
When I was younger, I never followed international political events, because I considered politics to be inferior to the economy and finance. I was addicted to learning about world markets and the economy, but the global tug of war has been intensifying and more and more overshadowing everything to the extent that today we can no longer see the world markets and the principles of free trade in their original formats. Today the global markets are driven by rhetoric and, sometimes, the actions of top politicians more than at any time before, let alone by fair valuations.
Yet another reason for the change in my holistic worldview is the sad story of my cross-continental relationship with my parents and younger brother who now live in Nevada, and to whom our annual Christmas family-unity visits were, until recently, a no-brainer. Whereas for many people with same cross-destinations, this issue might be mostly economical, in my situation, although the ruble, along with my ruble-expressed income, devalued by 50% since the beginning of 2014, this is not the main obstacle. The diplomatic wars instigated by governments and the overall atmosphere of growing mutual mistrust are.
My valued prospective reader will most likely raise at least three questions addressing the issues of this book: a) why I think I have something to say? b) given that, why is this book so short? c) assuming the far-flung conclusions, why is it so much country-specific?
“Why me” would be the most difficult question to tackle. I hope the evidence and concrete cases presented in this book will be very much intuitive and familiar to most of us, so my role here is not anything prominent, i.e. just to summarize stuff while avoiding, as much as possible, being opinionated. I feel eligible for this kind of work through my extensive periods of living and working in various countries around the world such as Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. I figured out that most people – even those who are fond of traveling – still prefer to settle somewhere to build their consistent careers assuming uninterrupted smooth CVs, but this is certainly not the case for me.
The reduced format of this book owes much to my own experience tackling finding time to read many masterpieces of various valuable authors. My Amazon Kindle app is stuffed with unfinished readings of books by Jeffrey Sachs, Thomas Palley, Madeleine Albright, Naomi Klein, Peter Schweiser and Stephen Roach. I feel upset with myself, but there is not much I can do about it: I hope to finish them when I am retired at the latest. So I have committed to respect the precious time of my respected readers, and not waste it for lengthy narration devoted to anything secondary beyond the essence. Since this is not a fiction book nor a biography per se, I will try to be as concise as I can, merely following a classic reporting approach – let’s say, using a British business school template (one of which, the University of Kent, I had the honor to attend): Define objective, find information sources, collect and analyze data, present support cases and draw a conclusion.
Finally, it is, indeed, very country-specific. This book should have included more case studies from the US – China and the US – Europe