The Great Reckoning
Our stories reckon our actions and our inactions. Our stories are channels carved through time that sequence and assemble chaos and agency. Our stories are not reality, they are just a facsimile of intent and observation, conveyed with frail hand. The alchemy of finance and capitalism has been revealed - catastrophically - as just another story.
As previously discussed, almost overnight, the very nature of capitalism was transmuted with a complete reassessment of the form and raison d'être of the mass accumulation of private wealth; the role of the state; and the role of taxpayers. In the USA every person is responsible now, far into the past, and far into the future, for the private profit of elites and for the concentration of that profit.[1] The emperor is naked, and his grotesque body is on sight for all to see.
What are the stories we will tell after this?
It is not merely our economy that has changed. Our paths of interaction have transformed. And this is not limited to shaking hands or participating in moshes and throngs - our social allocation of value and respect is radically redirected. We have lived under persistent illusions for decades - perhaps for centuries. Our notions of heroism, virtue, risk, and reward were wildly, calamitously confused. This is evident now on a base level in the fact that the minimum-wage local shopkeeper is revealed as delivering infinitely more social value than the algorithmic trading guru hunkered down in his sixty-million-dollar side home in the Hamptons.
One day many of us will emerge after months of lockdown and perhaps will question whether our endless consumption was the thing that we have missed. Whether we ever really needed that new car loan or to covet that fifth pair of designer shoes. Shop ‘till you drop.
But naked delusion is evident in our narratives too. What good is Thor’s hammer against a nanometer scale virus? Of what use are hollow-point bullets against incremental increases in atmospheric and oceanic temperature? As we recoiled from September 11, our story-tellers offered us the comfort of two dimensional men in preposterous suits vanquishing two dimensional evil on two dimensional planes. They served up foes that needed only the simplicity of violence for defeat. But profit motives do not wear capes. Broken health systems do not live in lairs.
There is a pervasive bankruptcy in the art that has conveyed our humanity. And now there is an obsolescence in it too. We face real death. Real death after an epoch where many harbored delusions of practical immortality. Nothing will be the same after this. Our old stories are anachronisms. Like old science fiction that failed to anticipate ubiquitous invention - that didn’t see cell phones coming; that fundamentally misunderstood how computers work. Our old stories are cathode ray television tubes transposed upon an apocalyptic present, in ultra high definition, full-color reality.
Our stories were the anesthetic that numbed us from real complexity. We created efficient systems that defined their efficiency only through the concentration of wealth. We let legal structures and algorithms supplant our agency and govern our policy. We were born naked as Adams and Eves, waking up in a garden where all our actions incited rot. Where the plants we grew for sustenance gained their own willpower, legal authority, and interests that were not aligned with our own.
Rather than a pesticide, our art became a mere disinfectant for the conscience of unscrupulous men and women who found themselves at the apex of this arrangement. Endowments and philanthropy were the soothing balms for the moral sin of avarice, and for dodging taxes to boot. We celebrated billionaires who made their fortunes willfully pushing poisons upon the populace, or through ravaging the unborn by digging up and incinerating coal and oil, polluting our skies and dimming our future - even when the damage was undeniable and the evidence irrefutable. To ensure profitability an information war was waged on an unprecedented scale in peacetime, leading to a befuddled generation who now wreak havoc as our policy makers in the post truth age of post reason.
Few generations get to see so complete an unraveling of their system. Few generations are granted the opportunity to build something new from so deep in the foundations. Our best weapon is a consolidation of will. A solidarity of intent and a recognition of our compassion. We must not forget that when the chips were down the people that matter the most in our society were not the ones that we thought they were. We must not forget that risk and reward were not things that our economy understood - that our alchemists understood - even the very “best” of them.[2],[3] The emperor is naked. We must not let him put his old clothes back on. He too must join us in the garden. There needs to be a reckoning.
We must find stories that do not play out on lazy ideological landscapes. We must find stories that detach the human from the digital while acknowledging the digital hybrids we have all become. We must find art that guides us to accepting a complex world, where consequences are incalculable, where malice and violence aren’t always the roots of evil, and where financial gambling and witchcraft should never again supplant the needs and necessities of human beings.
The fabric of our society has proven tougher than many would have dared to hope. Millions are on lockdown, foregoing pleasures to protect others. Friends and strangers and loved ones helping each other on an unprecedented scale. Driven not by economic self-interest, or religious belief, or race, or creed, or even by the sanctions of the state. Living in fear maybe, but not without compassion. Perhaps it is the social fabric that our storytellers should weave from and that our artists now should decorate. Let us re-clothe the emperor in that.
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[1] To some degree such a statement has been true throughout recent history, and one can readily find “too-big-to-fail” examples such as the bank bailouts of 2008/2009, or even in the effective bank bailout of 1917, when a prominent factor in the US entering World War One was the protection of Wall Street loans - most notably those made by the financier J.P. Morgan Jr. (and his various entities) - to Britain and France, who were on the brink of defeat to Germany, and therefore of credit default. However, the recent acquisition of corporate debt by central banks, and the scale and magnitude of current measures is without precedent as previously discussed.