This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Would you tell the truth about something to help the course of justice if it means you’d lose your job by means of corruption?”

I’ve just rewatched “The Big Short” — a film about the cluster of greed and stupidity that made a few people rich and millions poor and poorer. The housing market grew in a stupidity and greed bubble that collapsed in 2008, and a publicly funded bailout ensued while long-term financial institutions were wiped out of existence.

One quote I caught this time around that I’m stunned I missed it the first time I saw it, or at least don’t remember it:

“For every one percent the unemployment rate goes up, forty thousand people die.”

The nation learned nothing and did nothing to prevent this scenario from repeating. The CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) — a corrupt means of bundling bad debts into bad investments to profit from- was not made illegal. However, it has been a rebranded gimmick to create profits for those with resources and market exploitation expertise.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is again heading for a major collapse because the American public seems incapable of learning from its mistakes.

This time around, however, the collapse will not be fixed by stealing from a non-existent middle class after all being robbed by trillions per year for decades.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump named will add a few trillion more to the national debt and deficit, while twelve countries have already announced they no longer accept the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar is losing its status as the world’s currency, making it less secure while the cost of borrowing increases (while investing shrinks).

The next stage is a credit downgrade, and store shelves will be emptier than during the pandemic while product prices go on a gouge fest that will definitely trigger a recession. There is no avoiding it now. How bad it gets is still outside my wheelhouse, but I will not be surprised if it’s deep enough to create a full depression.

The unemployment rate will skyrocket, and the forty thousand casualties of unemployment will break one million.

All of this can be possible only because hundreds of millions are so willing to lie to themselves that they can’t risk facing reality and the prospect of losing the stability they count on to survive in a dystopia.

However, they won’t have any more choices because instability and outright chaos are inevitable.

The arc of history may bend toward justice, but that’s because the trajectory of injustice always bends toward chaos.

There is no way to answer this question honestly because context and circumstances are fluid and unique to each situation. What may be true for a person one day within a given set of parameters may not be true the next day with different variables at stake.

One may hope they will make the moral choice and accept sacrifice, but that’s the kind of self-serving thinking that people often indulge in when thinking they would jump on a grenade to save a crowd.

One’s belief about one’s selfless nature rarely matches reality.

At the end of the day, whatever choice one makes will always be a balancing act between benefits and sacrifices that becomes a lifetime burden to carry.