A Philosophical Take On Financial Disaster

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[O]ur institutions haven’t fessed up to their epistemic arrogance. They’re still “firing into the dark” while maintaining that they know what they’re doing. The very same people who led the global system into disaster are pretending to lead it into safety. Barney Frank, for example, is as honored as ever. Barack Obama was known to take calls from Franklin Raines on housing and mortgage policy matters. Raines “graduated from Harvard University, Harvard Law School; and Magdalen College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.” He was just the sort of guy who knew what he was doing.

Adding resources to a disaster is like reinforcing failure on the battlefield. It doesn’t help. That’s why “during World War 1, the more troops the generals fed into the machine guns the less confident the home publics were of victory.” Adding resources to a broken system only meant you killed more people. Things have to be done differently to make any headway. We’re not going to do that because we already know what we’re doing, right? In a few weeks, if the polls are to be believed, we are going to entrust the safety of everything to a new administration which believes the government knows best. Expect more “epistemic arrogance”, not less.

There was a time when people explicitly understood their ignorance. And they defended against uncertainty by relying on simpler, less interdependent systems for survival. In case snow blocked the roads they had hams, canned goods, dried beans and sacks of flour in the storeroom. In the event 911 didn’t answer they had a shotgun in back. Family was the insurance against unforeseen crisis. Nation was the refuge against enemies. Culture provided a standard operating procedure which everyone was expected to know.

We have abolished much of that because in our foolish pride, it became an article of faith that we no longer needed them. Canned food is now shunned for the preservatives that it contains. Bacon is bad because it has salt. Allah forbid that there’s a gun in the house. And who could be less ‘with it’ than a woman with five children and a husband who drives a snowmobile. Sarah Palin is hated by sophisticates because she is almost a cliched example of this kind of simplicity. Ha ha ha. Today really cool people live in big cities, dependent on power grids, power circles and power lunches. They imagine there’s no heaven, no countries, nothing to kill or die for and no religion too. Today the truly cultured person is expected to know nothing of his own culture and smattering of everyone else’s. Because they’re certain in their epistemological arrogance they’ll never need any of the things they’ve safely abandoned. Who needs a family when you’ve got a retirement fund?

Lenin once described Communism as “socialism plus electricity”. The modern version of Nirvana is “socialism plus Google”. When will we learn? Never, I fear, while pride and the desire for power rule the human breast.