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September 25, 2008

Hiding in Plain Sight

As I listened to George W. Bush’s highly improbable explanation of  the near implosion of the nation’s capital markets, I was struck by how doggedly he maintained the same unlikely pretense: that the  dire symptoms now afflicting those markets were produced by some mysterious new malady rather than a result of the incredibly dishonest competition  now dominating our modern world.  Didn't his administration  elevate oficial dishonesty to an art form during their brief, but disastrous uccupancy of the Oval Office? “My God,” I thought idly, “they’re really not much different than illegal drug markets.”

Next, I listened to pundits spin the day‘s events while never once questioning Dubya’s assumptions. No mention of endemic dishonesty; they seemed to think of the Great Depression as the worst possible disaster without realizing that the damage produced by a similar failure on today’s speeded up and overcrowded planet would be immeasurably worse.

This morning it finally hit me: There is very little difference between legal and illegal markets in the modern era because both faithfully reflect our human proclivity for dishonest competition, another characteristic we have extreme difficulty copping to for what may be the most existential of reasons: it would confirm, one way or another, that our species’ tenure on this planet is not unlimited.

All that’s necessary to adjust that concept to the modern world is to realize that, once it started evolving, Science would become an increasingly dangerous tool in human hands.

This is starting to add up to another idea people will  hate, so I’d better leave it right here for now.

Doctor Tom.

Posted by tjeffo at September 25, 2008 05:57 PM

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