(NaturalNews) To fully understand the insanity of modern-day delusional "everything is awesome!" thinking, you have to rewind to the years of 1998 - 2001. Back then, both the mainstream media and citizen masses were all riding the delusional mind game train that supposed we could all get rich by trading each other pieces of paper with larger and larger numbers written on them. It was called the "dot-com boom" and it was a wildly popular mass delusion that swept up nearly everyone.
The irrational exuberance of the time, you must understand, seems wildly insane in retrospect. But in the midst of the dot-com insanity, people were mortgaging their homes to buy dot-com stocks. Financial news hosts were telling us that "all the laws of economics have now changed" and that we no longer had to pay any attention at all to actual company earnings. The new paradigm, we were promised, would create money from nothing from the sheer valuation of dot-com companies that had no customers, no profits and not even any revenues. (Those of us who invoked the fundamental laws of economics and company valuations were immediately labeled "doom and gloomers.")
Ponzi schemes work really well... for a while
So the obedient masses dutifully mortgaged their homes, cashed in their life insurance policies and raided their own bank accounts to dump their money into dot-com stocks, encouraged by the belief they had suddenly become smarter than everyone else... even though everyone else was doing the exact same thing.
And for a while the scheme appeared to work, just as any Ponzi scheme does in its early phases. People seemed to be getting rich (on paper), and word soon spread to hair dressers and taxi cab drivers that they, too, could become "professional investors" by simply buying any stock associated with the dot-com boom.
It didn't even matter what company you bought because they were all skyrocketing in apparent value. You could quite literally borrow a zoo monkey to smoke crack and then throw darts at a stock ticker list duct-taped to your garage wall to determine your buy orders for the day. I remember being told by serious-sounding "financial analysts" that thanks to the dot-com phenomenon, pretty soon no one would ever have to work again because we could all just lounge around in luxury homes, buying and selling dot-com stocks that would always make us rich. The era of people actually having to work for a living was over, we were told.
It didn't matter what the company actually did... or even if it did anything at all. The mere fact that the company had a dot-com in its name was enough to make it an automatic "buy" across institutional and individual investors alike. And because stock values for all the people who currently own the stock is determined by the last price paid for even a single share, the dot-com bubble had everybody convinced they had all hit the jackpot. After all, according to the numbers they saw on their computer screens, they had just inherited a windfall of profits... and there was always more to come according to CNBC