24 February 2015

What Then Is Your Point, Mr. Potter?


"The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too."

Stephen Covey, The Speed of Trust


"The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality... And they do not ask questions."

Chris Hedges, The Careerists
 
If, as Jamie Galbraith has put it, economics is 'a disgraced profession,' what does it matter, when almost all the professions from medicine to law to finance have also given themselves over to the darkness of this world in high places?
 
Can they be so aloof that they do not see it, see what they are becoming?  See what they serve?

Are they such bystanders that they can no longer even see themselves and where they stand?

Can such a lack of self-awareness be attributed to the blindness of egoism? Or some more profound denial of conscience that rips the very fabric of their reality and its consequences?

Have we finally approached the tipping point of corrosive indifference in our leadership and the careless few, again?

Have the wages of supreme narcissism and exceptionalism finally come to be paid with a third financial crisis, and then another?  And finally the unleashing of madness?
 
It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for a stipend?
 
And when the hard winds of nemesis start howling across the land, where do they think it will end, and who and what do they think will remain standing?