I find a lot of things disturbing about present-day society and culture; I suppose most people do. The thing I find most disturbing (because I think it’s largely responsible for most of the other things that disturb us on a daily basis) is the widespread and seemingly increasing fragmentation or atomization of society.
Certainly in Western culture, and perhaps increasingly in the rest of the world, we accept without question nowadays the notion that society is nothing but the sum of the choices and actions of individuals.
Political and economic theorists claim that this is as it should be, that each person should have maximum freedom to pursue his or her best interests, because in doing so we will all benefit each other by creating the best (and most prosperous) possible society. From a more psychological point of view (if that term is still allowable in this age of “behaviorism”), we must all have the maximum freedom to “express” whatever is unique about ourselves; and this, too, will redound to the benefit of society as a whole by enabling our “creativity.”
It’s hard to argue against “freedom,” of course, so these claims tend to be viewed as self-evident, and the debates tend to focus on how we can best enable (and who is the best enabler of) the “freedom” and “individuality” that are held up as such high values, perhaps the highest.
I would never argue against freedom or individuality as ideals. But I am compelled to point out that most of what passes for “individuality” today is illusory, and most of what’s called “freedom” is a lie.
What we have instead of individuality is individualism, which I’m going to define as “the assembling of a personal identity through selective self-identification with a collection of intellectual components such as beliefs, ideas, attitudes, interests or affinities, and physical activities, possessions and displays.”
The lack of real individuality, and the lack of real freedom, can be summed up like this: “I’m going to the mall to buy some individuality.”
In effect, we must make use of the materials at hand to assemble our identities. If our educational system and our mass media withhold certain ideas and promote others, they render us unfree to make fully informed choices about what we want to believe or know. And if most of us are persuaded (or, less charitably, programmed or brainwashed) into relying on certain kinds of material objects to “express” our personalities, where will we find the “uniqueness” we want to display?
I think this focus on fake individualism is nothing less than a betrayal of our true nature as humans, and this overemphasized so-called “freedom” is just the license to choose from a strictly limited menu, and therefore a kind of hidden totalitarianism. I will develop these claims in coming entries; the next one will examine not whether you and I are related, but how closely.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Thursday, December 4, 2008
No Layoffs for CEOs
Tomorrow’s report on the employment situation in November is widely expected to show a steepish increase in joblessness. The number of first-time claims filed for unemployment insurance benefits last month was about 2.2 million, or about 50 percent higher than in the same month last year and about 23 percent higher than in October, based on seasonally unadjusted numbers.
If overall unemployment rose by the same percentage from October to November, then the unemployment rate ought to have been about 7.4 percent last month, the highest level in about 15 years. Of course, the feds can tinker with labor force numbers and seasonal adjustments (November normally is a month that sees strong hiring in anticipation of the holiday retail season) and the actual reported unemployment rate may not be that bad; the Wall Street consensus is for a figure of just 6.7 percent, up from 6.5 percent in October.
Not contributing significantly to whatever increase does get reported will be the top executives of America’s largest publicly traded corporations, because layoffs never extend to the boardroom no matter how bad a job the managers have been doing. On the other side of the coin, the trillion-dollar-plus economic rescue plan to date hasn’t come anywhere near helping the average worker.
So who has it helped? Well, we might suppose that the shareholders of the nation’s biggest financial companies have benefited; those companies, which have been the biggest recipients of our money, might well have seen their shares fall even lower than they are now if Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke hadn’t generously shoveled our money into their vaults.
And just who are those shareholders? Regular folks like you and me, who’ve saved a penny here and there and patriotically invested in the companies that make America great, right? Um, no, not so much.
Bank of America, for example, the country’s biggest banking firm, is 55.5 percent owned by “institutions,” meaning other banking firms, big Wall Street brokerage houses and, yes, some pension funds and mutual fund companies. Citigroup is 63.3 percent institionally owned, and struggling insurer American International Group is 55.9 percent owned by institutions.
Just which institutions are they? In fact, it’s a pretty cozy little group: Of the top 25 holders of each of these three companies as of Sept. 30, 15 are the same ones in all three cases. Here’s the list:
AXA
Bank of New York Mellon
Barclays Global Investments
Barrow Hanley Mewhinney & Strauss
Brandes Investment
Capital Research Global
Capital World Investment
Deutsche Bank
FMR LLC
Geode Capital Management
Goldman Sachs Group
Northern Trust Corp.
T. Rowe Price
State Street Corp.
Vanguard Group Inc.
Note in particular that Goldman Sachs is the big brokerage house that used to be headed by Daddy Warbucks, I mean Henry Paulson.
This sort of thing helps explain why executives of these kinds of companies continue to receive unconscionable “compensation” packages no matter how the companies perform: because the biggest shareholders and the “independent” directors are all members of the same club or subculture. If anyone started holding one of them to reasonable standards, they’d all be in trouble.
If overall unemployment rose by the same percentage from October to November, then the unemployment rate ought to have been about 7.4 percent last month, the highest level in about 15 years. Of course, the feds can tinker with labor force numbers and seasonal adjustments (November normally is a month that sees strong hiring in anticipation of the holiday retail season) and the actual reported unemployment rate may not be that bad; the Wall Street consensus is for a figure of just 6.7 percent, up from 6.5 percent in October.
Not contributing significantly to whatever increase does get reported will be the top executives of America’s largest publicly traded corporations, because layoffs never extend to the boardroom no matter how bad a job the managers have been doing. On the other side of the coin, the trillion-dollar-plus economic rescue plan to date hasn’t come anywhere near helping the average worker.
So who has it helped? Well, we might suppose that the shareholders of the nation’s biggest financial companies have benefited; those companies, which have been the biggest recipients of our money, might well have seen their shares fall even lower than they are now if Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke hadn’t generously shoveled our money into their vaults.
And just who are those shareholders? Regular folks like you and me, who’ve saved a penny here and there and patriotically invested in the companies that make America great, right? Um, no, not so much.
Bank of America, for example, the country’s biggest banking firm, is 55.5 percent owned by “institutions,” meaning other banking firms, big Wall Street brokerage houses and, yes, some pension funds and mutual fund companies. Citigroup is 63.3 percent institionally owned, and struggling insurer American International Group is 55.9 percent owned by institutions.
Just which institutions are they? In fact, it’s a pretty cozy little group: Of the top 25 holders of each of these three companies as of Sept. 30, 15 are the same ones in all three cases. Here’s the list:
AXA
Bank of New York Mellon
Barclays Global Investments
Barrow Hanley Mewhinney & Strauss
Brandes Investment
Capital Research Global
Capital World Investment
Deutsche Bank
FMR LLC
Geode Capital Management
Goldman Sachs Group
Northern Trust Corp.
T. Rowe Price
State Street Corp.
Vanguard Group Inc.
Note in particular that Goldman Sachs is the big brokerage house that used to be headed by Daddy Warbucks, I mean Henry Paulson.
This sort of thing helps explain why executives of these kinds of companies continue to receive unconscionable “compensation” packages no matter how the companies perform: because the biggest shareholders and the “independent” directors are all members of the same club or subculture. If anyone started holding one of them to reasonable standards, they’d all be in trouble.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Bernanke Must Go
Some years ago (40, to be exact) I attended a rally for then-U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who was running against Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president. “Clean Gene,” as he was called, shared a bit of barnyard humor that has stuck with me ever since. My knowledge of farm animals is pretty limited, so I can’t vouch for whether it’s true on a biological or zoological level.
According to McCarthy, pigs are mostly insensitive to temperature except in their snouts. In Minnesota, where McCarthy was from, it gets pretty cold, of course. But because pigs mainly sense temperature with their snouts, as long as their snouts are warm, they believe they’re warm all over. So when a pig gets cold, McCarthy said, it will try to warm itself up by sticking its snout between the hind legs of another pig.
According to McCarthy, it’s not unheard-of to see whole herds of swine forming a kind of daisy chain, each with its nose up the backside of the one in front of it. And if there’s an unexpected hard freeze, an unfortunate pig farmer might come out the next morning to find his entire herd frozen to death in a circle.
McCarthy shared this somewhat indelicate information as a metaphor for the behavior of politicians, but it also strikes me as highly applicable to the way financial regulators and executives have been behaving lately.
Take, for instance, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Throughout the first half of this year, Bernanke insisted that the U.S. economy was not in a recession and stood a fair chance of avoiding one. While he acknowledged that the economy was weak and the financial system vulnerable because of mortgage-related problems, he expressed confidence that the Fed’s cuts in its key interest rate would be enough to prevent an actual economic decline.
We know now, of course, that Bernanke was wrong. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private nonprofit business group that is the quasi-official authority on economic cycles, the U.S. entered a recession a year ago this month.
What’s more, a lot of people have known that all along; even an armchair economist like me. Back on April 23, I wrote in my blog for The Post and Courier that “it would appear likely that we’ll look back at the fourth quarter of 2007 as the beginning of this recession.”
But Bernanke – who holds his job as Fed chairman because he’s regarded as one of the nation’s top economists – continued to insist that there was no recession and that a recession could, in fact, be avoided.
There are only two possible reasons why Bernanke kept saying those things: Either he’s an incompetent economist or he was being deliberately deceptive.
I’d probably opt for the latter explanation, because there does seem to be a kind of traditional belief in the financial community that denial of negative conditions will somehow make those conditions go away. (The real estate community took a somewhat similar approach early in the ongoing collapse of that market.) And there’s also the Straussian belief, widespread in the Bush administration, that deception of the citizenry is a valid policy tool.
However, it doesn’t matter which explanation you prefer. Either way, it’s clear that we have no good reason to trust Bernanke as a steward of our economy and financial system.
Bernanke’s partner in the ongoing economic Tweedledum and Tweedledee act, Henry Paulson, will be leaving office in January as part of the turnover of the White House to Barack Obama’s team. But Bernanke’s 4-year term as chairman of the Fed doesn’t expire until January 2010, and his 14-year (!) term on the Fed’s board will last until 2020.
The totally inadequate response of Bernanke and Paulson to the current economic and financial problems is reason enough to want them both gone. But now that we have clear, decisive evidence of Bernanke’s unreliability even on the level of Economics 101, it’s imperative that he be replaced as rapidly as possible.
Bernanke should do the honorable thing and resign, now. And if he won’t do that, then the new administration and the new Congress should do whatever is necessary to dismiss him for incompetence. All he has done is try to keep financial executives’ noses warm, but the economic temperature is still dropping.
According to McCarthy, pigs are mostly insensitive to temperature except in their snouts. In Minnesota, where McCarthy was from, it gets pretty cold, of course. But because pigs mainly sense temperature with their snouts, as long as their snouts are warm, they believe they’re warm all over. So when a pig gets cold, McCarthy said, it will try to warm itself up by sticking its snout between the hind legs of another pig.
According to McCarthy, it’s not unheard-of to see whole herds of swine forming a kind of daisy chain, each with its nose up the backside of the one in front of it. And if there’s an unexpected hard freeze, an unfortunate pig farmer might come out the next morning to find his entire herd frozen to death in a circle.
McCarthy shared this somewhat indelicate information as a metaphor for the behavior of politicians, but it also strikes me as highly applicable to the way financial regulators and executives have been behaving lately.
Take, for instance, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Throughout the first half of this year, Bernanke insisted that the U.S. economy was not in a recession and stood a fair chance of avoiding one. While he acknowledged that the economy was weak and the financial system vulnerable because of mortgage-related problems, he expressed confidence that the Fed’s cuts in its key interest rate would be enough to prevent an actual economic decline.
We know now, of course, that Bernanke was wrong. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private nonprofit business group that is the quasi-official authority on economic cycles, the U.S. entered a recession a year ago this month.
What’s more, a lot of people have known that all along; even an armchair economist like me. Back on April 23, I wrote in my blog for The Post and Courier that “it would appear likely that we’ll look back at the fourth quarter of 2007 as the beginning of this recession.”
But Bernanke – who holds his job as Fed chairman because he’s regarded as one of the nation’s top economists – continued to insist that there was no recession and that a recession could, in fact, be avoided.
There are only two possible reasons why Bernanke kept saying those things: Either he’s an incompetent economist or he was being deliberately deceptive.
I’d probably opt for the latter explanation, because there does seem to be a kind of traditional belief in the financial community that denial of negative conditions will somehow make those conditions go away. (The real estate community took a somewhat similar approach early in the ongoing collapse of that market.) And there’s also the Straussian belief, widespread in the Bush administration, that deception of the citizenry is a valid policy tool.
However, it doesn’t matter which explanation you prefer. Either way, it’s clear that we have no good reason to trust Bernanke as a steward of our economy and financial system.
Bernanke’s partner in the ongoing economic Tweedledum and Tweedledee act, Henry Paulson, will be leaving office in January as part of the turnover of the White House to Barack Obama’s team. But Bernanke’s 4-year term as chairman of the Fed doesn’t expire until January 2010, and his 14-year (!) term on the Fed’s board will last until 2020.
The totally inadequate response of Bernanke and Paulson to the current economic and financial problems is reason enough to want them both gone. But now that we have clear, decisive evidence of Bernanke’s unreliability even on the level of Economics 101, it’s imperative that he be replaced as rapidly as possible.
Bernanke should do the honorable thing and resign, now. And if he won’t do that, then the new administration and the new Congress should do whatever is necessary to dismiss him for incompetence. All he has done is try to keep financial executives’ noses warm, but the economic temperature is still dropping.
Friday, November 28, 2008
More Trouble Ahead?
The stock market mounted a fairly impressive rally this week, amounting to a rebound of about 17 percent off the Nov. 20 low. It also moved off the deeply “oversold” levels that were showing on some indicators I look at, some of which were at levels comparable to the market crashes of 1929 and 1987.
However, as of Friday, my short-term indicators were showing that the Dow has in fact moved into “overbought” territory. That’s not very worrisome in itself; these indicators almost always hit steeply overbought levels on any rebound from a sharp decline, and they can remain in overbought territory for some time while the index continues to post new highs for the move. But it’s at least a sign that the strongest gains for this move may already have been made and there may be some degree of pullback due.
Possibly more troubling is a divergence between the Dow industrials and the Dow transportation average. Back in the spring, in my former blog for The Post and Courier (which I gather has now been taken offline), I identified a Dow Theory sell signal after the transports hit a new all-time high while the industrials remained well below their own record high. The current situation isn’t nearly as significant, but it may be another signal that a downdraft lies ahead: The industrials as of today are back above all their October lows, while the transports remain below the short-term lows set on Oct. 9 and 15. In other words, the transports haven’t recouped as much of their losses as the industrials have.
Last spring, I was wondering how it was possible for the transportation average to rise to an all-time high at the same time fuel prices were doing the same thing; now I’m wondering why the transports are looking weaker than the industrials at a time when fuel prices have been falling pretty hard. It strikes me as an imbalance with at least modestly bearish implications.
There are plenty of possible news hooks due next week that could spark a decline, but the one that analysts and economists are the most worried about is Friday’s report on the national employment situation for November. Given the increases in weekly initial claims for unemployment insurance this month, it’s likely the unemployment rate will have risen substantially.
Of course, that’s already bad news for people who’ve lost their jobs, but from the perspective of economists and brokerage house analysts, the report will be bad news because it will suggest that “consumers” (who of course are mostly workers) will be spending less in the weeks and months ahead, further hampering corporate profits. I’ve never figured out why the bean-counters and MBAs always want to respond to slower sales by cutting jobs and then can’t seem to understand why their sales drop even more, but I expect we’ll be seeing more of that kind of head-scratching next week.
However, as of Friday, my short-term indicators were showing that the Dow has in fact moved into “overbought” territory. That’s not very worrisome in itself; these indicators almost always hit steeply overbought levels on any rebound from a sharp decline, and they can remain in overbought territory for some time while the index continues to post new highs for the move. But it’s at least a sign that the strongest gains for this move may already have been made and there may be some degree of pullback due.
Possibly more troubling is a divergence between the Dow industrials and the Dow transportation average. Back in the spring, in my former blog for The Post and Courier (which I gather has now been taken offline), I identified a Dow Theory sell signal after the transports hit a new all-time high while the industrials remained well below their own record high. The current situation isn’t nearly as significant, but it may be another signal that a downdraft lies ahead: The industrials as of today are back above all their October lows, while the transports remain below the short-term lows set on Oct. 9 and 15. In other words, the transports haven’t recouped as much of their losses as the industrials have.
Last spring, I was wondering how it was possible for the transportation average to rise to an all-time high at the same time fuel prices were doing the same thing; now I’m wondering why the transports are looking weaker than the industrials at a time when fuel prices have been falling pretty hard. It strikes me as an imbalance with at least modestly bearish implications.
There are plenty of possible news hooks due next week that could spark a decline, but the one that analysts and economists are the most worried about is Friday’s report on the national employment situation for November. Given the increases in weekly initial claims for unemployment insurance this month, it’s likely the unemployment rate will have risen substantially.
Of course, that’s already bad news for people who’ve lost their jobs, but from the perspective of economists and brokerage house analysts, the report will be bad news because it will suggest that “consumers” (who of course are mostly workers) will be spending less in the weeks and months ahead, further hampering corporate profits. I’ve never figured out why the bean-counters and MBAs always want to respond to slower sales by cutting jobs and then can’t seem to understand why their sales drop even more, but I expect we’ll be seeing more of that kind of head-scratching next week.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Off Balance
The economic news the past few days has been pretty thoroughly awful: a bigger decline in third-quarter gross domestic product than previously estimated, declines in consumer spending, sales of new houses, industrial production, consumer confidence, etc. etc. Yet the stock market has been rising.
Some of the financial media are attributing the gains to “bargain-hunting,” or speculative buying of beaten-down shares in the belief that the selloff of the past several weeks was overdone. But that strategy would have to be based on an additional belief that the economy won’t continue to deteriorate, and I don’t see much indication that any such belief is widely held (whether true or not).
Another possible cause of the rebound: Maybe investors have decided that the steps being taken by Washington to stem the economic washout will actually work, finally – at least as far as Wall Street’s needs are concerned.
For example, this week Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson announced that we (you and me, taxpayers) are going to give the nation’s fourth-largest banking company, Citigroup, an additional $300 billion in loan guarantees and a $45 billion cash infusion, on top of the $25 billion we already handed them in the first round of “TARP” investments, which of course did us no discernible good.
Citigroup, as of Sept. 30, reported total assets of $2.05 trillion. You would think that might be enough to enable them to cover their own bad bets. And indeed, the company reported total liabilities of just $1.92 trillion, leaving them with $126.1 billion in stockholder equity.
However, like many other large financial companies, Citigroup has what it refers to (in its latest financial filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission) as “off-balance-sheet arrangements.” As the name implies, these “arrangements” enable companies to take liabilities off their balance sheets by setting up a separate business entity, called a “special-purpose entity,” or SPE. The liabilities are, as Citigroup explains, “recorded on the balance sheet of the SPE and not reflected on the transferring company's balance sheet, assuming applicable accounting requirements are satisfied.” Although SPEs were used by the notorious Enron Corp. to deceive investors and regulators, they’re perfectly legal when used appropriately.
So how much has Citigroup taken “off-balance-sheet” by this method? Again, according to its latest filing with the SEC, the company’s “total involvement” in off-balance-sheet arrangements was $1.29 trillion at the end of September.
Now, it’s very unclear how much of that “involvement” might end up back on Citigroup’s balance sheets if it were required to “consolidate” it, as the Financial Accounting Standards Board has suggested it might decide to decree. But just for the sake of argument, if we suppose that the company were forced to put the whole amount back on its statement of liabilities, the effect would be to drop its stockholder equity from a positive $126.1 billion to a negative $1.16 trillion.
Based on its officially reported positive equity, Citigroup currently has stockholder equity per share, or “book value”, of $23.13. In normal times, stocks of major companies customarily sell for a multiple of book value, but Citigroup’s shares currently are trading below book value. Today’s close, $7.05, was just 30 percent of reported book value; at the low on Friday, before the latest handout was announced, the stock closed at just 16 percent of book value.
On the other hand, if my hypothetical numbers above were used, Citigroup would have a book value of minus $212.87 per share.
So maybe the reason Citigroup’s shares are selling below reported book value is that investors are worried that Citigroup may, indeed, have to “consolidate” some significant portion of its off-balance-sheet liabilities, which would mean its current reported book value is a wee bit unrealistically high. And maybe that has something to do with why our Secretary of Wall Street is so anxious to hand the company big piles of our money.
Some of the financial media are attributing the gains to “bargain-hunting,” or speculative buying of beaten-down shares in the belief that the selloff of the past several weeks was overdone. But that strategy would have to be based on an additional belief that the economy won’t continue to deteriorate, and I don’t see much indication that any such belief is widely held (whether true or not).
Another possible cause of the rebound: Maybe investors have decided that the steps being taken by Washington to stem the economic washout will actually work, finally – at least as far as Wall Street’s needs are concerned.
For example, this week Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson announced that we (you and me, taxpayers) are going to give the nation’s fourth-largest banking company, Citigroup, an additional $300 billion in loan guarantees and a $45 billion cash infusion, on top of the $25 billion we already handed them in the first round of “TARP” investments, which of course did us no discernible good.
Citigroup, as of Sept. 30, reported total assets of $2.05 trillion. You would think that might be enough to enable them to cover their own bad bets. And indeed, the company reported total liabilities of just $1.92 trillion, leaving them with $126.1 billion in stockholder equity.
However, like many other large financial companies, Citigroup has what it refers to (in its latest financial filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission) as “off-balance-sheet arrangements.” As the name implies, these “arrangements” enable companies to take liabilities off their balance sheets by setting up a separate business entity, called a “special-purpose entity,” or SPE. The liabilities are, as Citigroup explains, “recorded on the balance sheet of the SPE and not reflected on the transferring company's balance sheet, assuming applicable accounting requirements are satisfied.” Although SPEs were used by the notorious Enron Corp. to deceive investors and regulators, they’re perfectly legal when used appropriately.
So how much has Citigroup taken “off-balance-sheet” by this method? Again, according to its latest filing with the SEC, the company’s “total involvement” in off-balance-sheet arrangements was $1.29 trillion at the end of September.
Now, it’s very unclear how much of that “involvement” might end up back on Citigroup’s balance sheets if it were required to “consolidate” it, as the Financial Accounting Standards Board has suggested it might decide to decree. But just for the sake of argument, if we suppose that the company were forced to put the whole amount back on its statement of liabilities, the effect would be to drop its stockholder equity from a positive $126.1 billion to a negative $1.16 trillion.
Based on its officially reported positive equity, Citigroup currently has stockholder equity per share, or “book value”, of $23.13. In normal times, stocks of major companies customarily sell for a multiple of book value, but Citigroup’s shares currently are trading below book value. Today’s close, $7.05, was just 30 percent of reported book value; at the low on Friday, before the latest handout was announced, the stock closed at just 16 percent of book value.
On the other hand, if my hypothetical numbers above were used, Citigroup would have a book value of minus $212.87 per share.
So maybe the reason Citigroup’s shares are selling below reported book value is that investors are worried that Citigroup may, indeed, have to “consolidate” some significant portion of its off-balance-sheet liabilities, which would mean its current reported book value is a wee bit unrealistically high. And maybe that has something to do with why our Secretary of Wall Street is so anxious to hand the company big piles of our money.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
All Outside
I pulled out C.G. Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (volume 12 of the collected works) last week for the first time in several years. It’s a large book, and a lot of it is aimed strictly at the practicing Jungian psychologist and is fairly unintelligible. However, the opening essay, “Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy,” is a lot more interesting than it sounds. Anyone who’s read Jung’s “Modern Man in Search of a Soul” or “The Undiscovered Self” will recognize some of the same themes. Here are some points I consider exceptionally well-put:
“Western man is held in thrall by the ‘ten thousand things;’ he sees only particulars, he is ego-bound and thing-bound, and unaware of the deep root of all being. ... The Western attitude, with its emphasis on the object, tends to fix the ideal – Christ – in its outward aspect and thus to rob it of its mysterious relation to the inner man.”
“Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the world. But if the ideal is wholly outside, then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently he is more of a fragment than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables him, quite literally, to ‘cast his sins upon Christ’ and thus evade his deepest responsibilities – which is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. ... If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing.”
“It may easily happen ... that a Christian who believes in all the sacred figures is still undeveloped and unchanged in his inmost soul because he has ‘all God outside’ and does not experience him in the soul. His deciding motives, his ruling interests and impulses, do not spring from the sphere of Christianity but from the unconscious and undeveloped psyche, which is as pagan and archaic as ever. The great events of our world as planned and executed by man do not breathe the spirit of Christianity but rather of unadorned paganism. ... Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside – in image and in word, in Church and Bible – but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old. ...”
“The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity. Christianity must indeed begin again from the very beginning if it is to meet its high educative task. So long as religion is only faith and outward form, and the religious function is not experienced in our own souls, nothing of any importance has happened. It has yet to be understood that the mysterium magnum is not only an actuality but is first and foremost rooted in the human psyche. The man who does not know this from his own experience may be a most learned theologian, but he has no idea of religion ....”
“Western man is held in thrall by the ‘ten thousand things;’ he sees only particulars, he is ego-bound and thing-bound, and unaware of the deep root of all being. ... The Western attitude, with its emphasis on the object, tends to fix the ideal – Christ – in its outward aspect and thus to rob it of its mysterious relation to the inner man.”
“Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the world. But if the ideal is wholly outside, then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently he is more of a fragment than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables him, quite literally, to ‘cast his sins upon Christ’ and thus evade his deepest responsibilities – which is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. ... If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing.”
“It may easily happen ... that a Christian who believes in all the sacred figures is still undeveloped and unchanged in his inmost soul because he has ‘all God outside’ and does not experience him in the soul. His deciding motives, his ruling interests and impulses, do not spring from the sphere of Christianity but from the unconscious and undeveloped psyche, which is as pagan and archaic as ever. The great events of our world as planned and executed by man do not breathe the spirit of Christianity but rather of unadorned paganism. ... Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside – in image and in word, in Church and Bible – but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old. ...”
“The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity. Christianity must indeed begin again from the very beginning if it is to meet its high educative task. So long as religion is only faith and outward form, and the religious function is not experienced in our own souls, nothing of any importance has happened. It has yet to be understood that the mysterium magnum is not only an actuality but is first and foremost rooted in the human psyche. The man who does not know this from his own experience may be a most learned theologian, but he has no idea of religion ....”
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Imagine This
Imagine a world where no one ever dies, no one ever suffers any pain, no one ever loses anything they have, no one ever has to say goodbye to someone they love. Imagine a world where everything is always in flower, radiant with sunshine, suffused with warmth and pleasure, echoing with happiness. Imagine a world where every taste of life is delicious, every stroke of fortune is warm and fuzzy, every word is encouraging, every sight is a delight to the eyes.
Imagine such a world if you can, if you wish – and then forget it.
The world in which we actually live is very different from Paradise. People die daily, many for the wrong reasons. We all suffer pain. Everything physical passes into nonbeing, so we inevitably lose whatever we have, and anyone or anything we love will be ripped away from us sooner or later. The seasons change, the world rolls along its complicated path, and we take from it what we must have, if we can.
Accepting that we live in such a world is wisdom. Believing that we can live in the imaginary world of endless, perfect self-gratification is foolishness.
The Founding Fathers of the United States were philosophers. There’s an important distinction to be found in the words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The distinction is this: We have a right to pursue happiness, but not a right to be happy.
Further, each of us has a right to define happiness.
But if we decide to define happiness as Paradisal existence, free of any of the consequences that common sense would admit are integral to human existence, then we are asking too much. What we must acquire and spend to obtain such a life is too costly for ourselves and everyone around us. My Paradise creates your Hell.
Imagine such a world if you can, if you wish – and then forget it.
The world in which we actually live is very different from Paradise. People die daily, many for the wrong reasons. We all suffer pain. Everything physical passes into nonbeing, so we inevitably lose whatever we have, and anyone or anything we love will be ripped away from us sooner or later. The seasons change, the world rolls along its complicated path, and we take from it what we must have, if we can.
Accepting that we live in such a world is wisdom. Believing that we can live in the imaginary world of endless, perfect self-gratification is foolishness.
The Founding Fathers of the United States were philosophers. There’s an important distinction to be found in the words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The distinction is this: We have a right to pursue happiness, but not a right to be happy.
Further, each of us has a right to define happiness.
But if we decide to define happiness as Paradisal existence, free of any of the consequences that common sense would admit are integral to human existence, then we are asking too much. What we must acquire and spend to obtain such a life is too costly for ourselves and everyone around us. My Paradise creates your Hell.
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