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White powder capitalism and me
Aug. 19th, 2010 07:04 amBefore Andrew Weil was a food guru, he was a drug guru. The Natural Mind was a sane look at the chemicals we use to alter our consciousness, in which he pointed out that one reason we have problems with drugs is that we make them too good. Discovering that poppies and coca leaves have properties we find useful, we isolate the parts that have the desired effect and strengthen them by making them into white powders, which we then abuse. (Weil appeared to believe that this was the final stage, but American ingenuity has found a way to turn the white powders into worse substances, such as crack and high-fructose corn syrup.)
In the same way, the market is an essential property of human society, a way of creating value, sometimes at little or no cost. But ideologues have promoted it from a tool to a god: a "rational," self-correcting market that could run itself and everything else without human intervention. In the Wall Street nonfiction that I devour with the morbid fascination others give to vampire and zombie books I read about how the attempt to create a perfect market, ever more purely capitalistic, produced a bizarre structure of securities based on securities based on securities…like Alice in Wonderland ("This is what it is called; this is what its name is called…"), totally divorced from the actual goods and services the stock market is supposed to be about. That of course created the recent financial disasters we all know so well. If civilization survives, perhaps the one thing about today that will be looked at with the greatest mixture of condescension and horror will be the way America's economy came to depend on a continuing billion-dollar crap game among guys who thought the best thing one could possibly be was a Big, Swinging Dick.
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nellorat has mentioned, I have finally been forced to concede that my approach to life is not working and I need professional help. A big part of that is that I have taken the reasonable tactic of getting what one wants for minimum time, effort, and attention and made it into an all-encompassing Rule of Life that poisons everything around it, and I need to find out how to stop doing it.
In the same way, the market is an essential property of human society, a way of creating value, sometimes at little or no cost. But ideologues have promoted it from a tool to a god: a "rational," self-correcting market that could run itself and everything else without human intervention. In the Wall Street nonfiction that I devour with the morbid fascination others give to vampire and zombie books I read about how the attempt to create a perfect market, ever more purely capitalistic, produced a bizarre structure of securities based on securities based on securities…like Alice in Wonderland ("This is what it is called; this is what its name is called…"), totally divorced from the actual goods and services the stock market is supposed to be about. That of course created the recent financial disasters we all know so well. If civilization survives, perhaps the one thing about today that will be looked at with the greatest mixture of condescension and horror will be the way America's economy came to depend on a continuing billion-dollar crap game among guys who thought the best thing one could possibly be was a Big, Swinging Dick.
As
nellorat has mentioned, I have finally been forced to concede that my approach to life is not working and I need professional help. A big part of that is that I have taken the reasonable tactic of getting what one wants for minimum time, effort, and attention and made it into an all-encompassing Rule of Life that poisons everything around it, and I need to find out how to stop doing it.
