Painting by Ahn Gyeon (안견/安堅), Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land (몽유도원도/夢遊桃源圖), 1447.

2.1.11

No choice

2011. Another year. A step forward or one more wasted moment in a time without momentum?
Let's be frank. Things are going to get much worse before they can become any better.
Europe is at a crossroads, dangling over a financial abyss and a political crevasse. 
China is moving, leaps and bounds, through uncertain paths towards 'greatness'.
The US is torn between a progressive, but timid, leadership, and the constraints of a feckless population and the incredible greed of corporate America.
The rest of the world tags along, amidst sweat shops, growing inequality and emulations of the worst that capitalism has to offer.
Since the tribulations of 2008, we have been living on borrowed time, borrowed money, borrowed hope. 
We are feeling the full force of the foreseen -- and the unforeseen -- ramifications of the sub-prime crash, a veritable whirlpool which has pulled in sovereign finances, government expenditure, private debts and global confidence.
Less income, higher taxes, lower social benefits, more unemployment and greater hardship. In a word: more poverty. In an age of plenty, the poor get poorer, the middle class is impoverished and the well-to-do become richer.
We know how all this happened. We understand the direct and efficient causes, as Aristotle would say. But we do not fully grasp the depths of the root problem: capitalism in and by itself, as a system where markets are kept unregulated to satisfy the non-productive generation of wealth.
Speculative capitalism plainly counteracts the positive features of the keynesian model of socialised market economies. The real 'third way', the blending and trading-off between the State and free enterprise, has all but been replaced by the 'invisible hand' of market 'forces'.
This development, brought along by the bullish 1990's and early 2000's, reenacts, as if by déjà vu, the errors of the 1890's, 1920's, 1970's and 1980's.
When will we learn to avoid the same mistakes?
When will we see that a model that breathes on cyclical crises, and has become totally dematerialised in a financial Alice in Wonderland, is alienated from the palpable world, from the production of real value?
When will we recognize that capitalism, in its current stage of 'evolution', encourages the multiplication of parasitic investment and the accruing of profit beyond the 'realities' of the 'real' economy?
We should stop being complacent and all-accepting of the 'inevitabilities' of the status quo.
We must do something, each and every one of us, to start a movement for change. Transforming social and economic systems in a peaceful and democratic fashion is the ideal rite of passage for a truly civilised epoch.
Are we up to the challenge of belonging to such a brave new world?
We have no choice. As the Orator pointed out: "Cuiusvis hominis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare." (Anyone can err, but only the fool persists in his fault.)
I shall return to this issue shortly.
Meanwhile, happy new year!