The crisis of credit

"Der Vogel kämpft sich aus dem Ei. Das Ei ist die Welt. Wer geboren werden will, muss eine Welt zerstören. Der Vogel fliegt zu Gott. Der Gott heisst Abraxas."

(The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.) – Herman Hesse, “Demian” 1919.

Its been 30 years or more since I last looked into Herman Hesse. In that time I found Buddhism, and have had no need to seek for insights into the nature of truth and such in the writings of Victorian era Germans, but this quote has always stayed with me. And today, I think it’s worth dusting it off and putting it to use to describe what’s going on these days.

But first, what is going on? Simply put, the structures upon which we depend are falling apart and everyone who is paying even the least amount of attention is stunned. The part that has been getting the most attention lately is the credit crisis. In case you missed it, nobody has explained the so-called “Credit Crisis” as well as this guy. Check this out…


The credit crisis visualized

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

It's also available here on youtube.

If it’s all so simple, how is it that so many people are so surprised and confused? Well, some would suggest that powerful interests want them to be. But that’s not what I think. I think those who think of themselves as in control (and whom everyone else would probably agree are in control, and yes, I’m talking about you too President Obama) are even more in the dark then those with less stake in the system.

Here’s my two cents worth: It all comes down to the difference between the chick’s view of the egg and the shell’s view of the egg. To the shell, the integrity of the structure (which is remarkably robust, by the way) is everything. Its whole reason for being is to protect its fragile contents. The shell must be protected and every crack must be immediately patched, no matter the cost. The possibility that at some point in the near future it will cease to exist entirely is beyond heresy and borders on the criminally insane. To the chick, the shell has been its home for as long as it can remember, but now that the moment for it to hatch has arrived, the shell is just an annoying, temporary inconvenience.

The metaphor is as obvious as is the perennial appeal of Herman Hesse to adolescents and young adults. We all go through this process on the way to becoming adults and it’s not always an entirely pleasant experience. What is happening now is that the entire human experiment is going through a similar transition. We have been relying on variations of the same social structures for thousands of years and now they, along with the Holocene climate which made them possible, are breaking down under an assault that is as brutal as it is mathematically inescapable.

I know, I know. I can hear you thinking: “Whoa… that sounds like the 60’s!” Well, in the first place it was actually in most cases the 70’s, but yes, I agree it does. It’s taken me years to accept this conclusion myself, even though I’ve suspected it all my life. So if you’re having a bit of a problem with this idea, that’s ok. If you run away screaming and don’t come back, I understand that too, and it’s fine. If you want to argue and leave nasty comments, well, I understand and I’ll just delete them if they get out of hand, no problem there either.

But if you are like me and have a nagging feeling that something is going on, something rather threatening but perhaps momentous also, then stay tuned. In the next few weeks I’m going to walk slowly through the evidence as deliberately and thoughtfully as I can. It’s all out there on the web and has been out there for some time, and you may already have heard and seen most if not all of it already, and if that’s the case you might think this is just a waste of time, but wait.

I think we’re going to be OK in the end and I think I can prove it. So, I also think it’ll be worth your while to hear me out. But first, we need to look a little deeper into what is currently going on. There are several pieces to this puzzle and we’ll take them one at a time in the next series of posts.