Posts Tagged ‘obfuscation’

The last part of this series I wish to devote to what I regard as the most insidious and venal aspect of the Game –that being what I refer to as the ‘knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing’ syndrome. the gigantic marketing machine of the Game, pumps out an endless stream of images of the good life – beautiful, svelte, youngish people, bearing their teeth in the midst of orgasmic joy. They thank their Creator not for being alive, but for being who they are. All that is subtle or serene,; all that might ennoble or inspire us; is drowned out by all the noise.

The Game’s architects, not content to simply bombard our senses, go to great lengths to prove to us that our seeking something more than their fabricated reality they ram down our throats is sheer folly on our part. Polemicists like Richard Dawkins devote years of study and hundreds of pages of text to enlightening us, helping us to see that our faith in something innately good in our fellow man is completely misplaced. When one person gives another a helping hand, with no apparent benefit to themselves, we are not allowed to simply take it one face value as being a spontaneous act of kindness. They must somehow taint it the selfish impulse. The Selfish Gene, no less! It well may be that there is not an ounce of human kindness in Richard Dawkins, but why must he condemn us all to the same fate.

Such books are presented as breakthroughs, yet the main thrust of Dawkins argument was anticipated by Freud over 70 years before, Nietzsche before him, and Schopenhauer before him. This is precisely the kind of seductive logic employed by the snake in the Garden of Eden. In pulling God down from the heavens, they seek to ascend to the Heavens and take their place. In the 19th century, Gogol wrote a famous parody entitled The diary of a Madman. It is a first hand account of a day in the life of low level clerk in Saint Petersburg who wakes us up one morning believing himself to be the King of Spain. This would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that those around them show no inclination to share his delusion. Clinging to their own sense of reality, they fail to see him as anything more than a low level clerk. even when the clerk is taken away, and incarcerated in a mental asylum, he still clings fast to his delusion, feeling a kind of pity for those around them in a kind of ‘Forgive them Lord they know not what they do’ sort of way.

Maybe Dawkins has it all backwards; it is not we who are deluded, but they themselves. The only difference is that in our world the ‘Kings of Spain’, instead of being incarcerated, sit atop thrones!

At some point in the course of our journey through life, we all encounter those people who simply cannot think ill of others. So pure of heart are these folks, that even entertaining the notion that those who do harm to others should do so out of malevolence, rather than misguidedness, is simply unfathomable. These good Christians will steadfastly maintain that those who steal, those who lie, those who manipulate others, suffer from a distorted worldview – they basically mean well, but either through mental defect, or lack of education, are not able to fully think through the consequences of their actions. Ever since childhood I have been frustrated and intrigued by this particular quirk of the Anglo-Saxon culture. I have come to refer to it as the ‘see no evil’ syndrome.

Over the last few months I had the privilege of having lengthy discussions with two prominent members of the London Financial scene, one an international risk management specialist, the other the dean of a prestigious business school. Both men are acknowledged experts on corporate malfeasance, regularly invited to give keynote addresses on the topic.

In both cases the discussion was most enlightening and stimulating. However, when I broached the possibility that much of this malfeasance was the result of collusion at the highest levels, meticulously planned and choreographed, rather than the result of a few bad apples in a basically sound system – both men had a conspicuously similar reaction- finding the notion simply inconceivable, and the suggestion on my part tasteless and off-putting.

The position shared by both, delivered most eloquently, in exquisite prose, and Oxbridge accents, was that this was all the result of gross ineptitude at the highest levels. I, incredulous, argued that it would seem beyond the boundaries of plausibility to imagine that people educated in the finest academic institutions, with decades of experience behind them, could have, let all what has come to pass take place out of sheer oversight.

Looking back, in my naiveté, what I was failing to see was the positioning of those I was speaking with in relation to the big Game – the dean being a gatekeeper to, the consultant, a gray eminence for the very Players who perpetrated the 2008 Crash.

At the risk of coming off as a tad ‘negative’, I would suggest that this ‘see no evil’ attitude is far from benign. This brings to mind a memory from my time as a builder, when I had occasion to ask an architect (British, as it turns out) to explain the principles behind chimney constructions – specifically, how one ensured that the smoke from the fire went up the chimney instead of into the room. The architect’s response was the following: “Entire books have been written on the topic of chimneys”. He delivered this sentence with such profound solemnity, and with such self assurance, that I immediately aborted any further investigation, convinced that the knowledge I was seeking was the sacred domain of an elite sect of geniuses who guarded their secrets closely (lest this knowledge should fall into the wrong hands, and the world would be consumed by chaos).

The motivation behind this high minded stance, in fact the mandate of these esteemed experts, is to obfuscate the problem, rather than fix it. Experts at blinding us with science, generously spicing their rhetoric with the jargon of high finance, they wax poetic on the complexity of today’s financial world, and the difficulty of sorting all of this out.
All this posturing on the part of esteemed experts is meant to distract us from the ugly reality- that being that the system spawned by these poseurs is rotten to the core, and beyond redemption. No new set of regulations, no new investigative committee, no change of government, will ever set it right.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.[1]