"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.They kill us for their sport."William Shakespeare, King Lear
It is easier for those who would be as a god to display their godly powers by crafting the simulacrums of life without vitality, such as asset bubbles.
They lack that which is essential to create organic life and growth, which is the wisdom of love.
I suspect that we will see a fairly painful reckoning in the markets, probably within the next twelve months, but maybe not just yet.
While the lines of 'support' hold, the Fed has the wind at the back of the financial paper markets.
If you wish to know why there is no organic, broad-based recovery in the US, and probably the UK and Europe, listen to this short explanation from Elizabeth Warren here.
As you might have gathered from some of the quotes, I was rereading portions of Chesterton's book Eugenics and Other Evils, what was then called 'scientific government.'
I was particularly struck by one of his observations.
“Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.”
What Chesterton refers to as 'abnormal innocence' is the willing naïveté of an ideology or theorists who suspend their experience and common sense to promote a particular ideal as the basis of a solution. And of course the abnormal sin is evil, and not of the ordinary kind. And the dupes are its deceptions.
In retrospect it is remarkable that he so deftly gets to the bottom of the social movements of his day, and almost predicts with stunning accuracy the adoption of mass sterilization and eventually mass euthanasia of 1930s and 1940s.
But we see similar examples even in our own time, if not of the same degree.
The notion that people will act in perfectly good and rational ways is absurd when you say it that way. But it is at the heart of so many of the economic theories that have plagued us in the deification of the modern markets and money in the past twenty to thirty years.
This includes the massive confiscation and transfers of wealth through the abuse of financial paper, and the persecution and abuse of whole peoples and even nations through the tyranny of debts.
Dangerously willful delusions often open the door for great suffering and injustice. And the irony is that they are so often enabled by the well-meaning sophistry of idealists, who would crush reality into meaningless to enable their models to roll forward with the greatest expediency.
“I had thought of calling the next sort of superficial people the Idealists; but I think this implies a humility towards impersonal good they hardly show; so I call them the Autocrats. They are those who give us generally to understand that every modern reform will 'work' all right, because they will be there to see... And these people most certainly propose to be responsible for a whole movement after it has left their hands. Each man promises to be about a thousand policemen. If you ask them how this or that will work, they will answer, “Oh, I would certainly insist on this”; or “I would never go so far as that”; as if they could return to this earth and do what no ghost has ever done quite successfully—force men to forsake their sins. Of these it is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any more than the nature of a dog. If you let loose a law, it will do as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Such sense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled. But you will not be able to fulfil a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put into it.”G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils
Have a pleasant evening.
