2012: Year of the Great Reckoning?
Michael Thomas, retired Lehman Brothers partner, thinks it might be. From his Newsweek column titled “The Big Lie.”
“… the convulsion to come won’t really be about Wall Street’s derivatives malefactions, or its subprime fun and games, or rogue trading, or the folly of banks. It will be about this society’s final opportunity to rip away the paralyzing shackles of corruption or else dwell forever in a neofeudal social order. You might say that 1384 has replaced 1984 as our worst-case scenario. I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in this country, I would have told you that you were nuts. And I would have been very wrong. What has happened in this country has made a lie of my boyhood.”
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Mark,
Thanks you for that incredible excerpt. The quote about 1384 is the best thing ever! I would only add that in some everyday ways people were probably freer in 1384. The Middle Ages were not as “Dark’ as many think them to be.
You and I may not agree on much, but we agree on this.
Well, that’s not nothing, Peter. Happy New Year!
Lust for power has been the basis of establishing the social order since the beginning in order to survive. Then it evolved into an identity of superiority vs inferiority with the development of the neocortex still fueled by primitive survival impulses. The lust which drives one to attain power now is a deep fear of being nothing in one’s eyes and in the eyes of others. Nothing can fill the void of that nothingness except giving to others what God has given to us. God Bless and Happy New Year.
My two favourite commentators at Vox Nova on one post!
A good way to begin the New Year! God bless and Happy New Year to you both!