John Bardi

Just like a character in a Greek tragedy, we have been marching blindly towards our doom. And a lot like Oedipus, we have been blind to the steps we could be taking to save ourselves from doom–like putting common need above personal greed.

Of course, it takes a lot of idealism to do that, more than most people have. Significantly, the people who lack idealism do not say, “I do not care about others.” They say, “What can I do? I need my car to get to work.” In other words, the blindness that keeps us on the path to destruction is part of our ordinary humanness.

It is easier to accept our blindness and the doom it  brings when we realize it is part of our common humanity. But this also means that we are unlike Oedipus, whose march to doom was “set up” by an inexorable decree of fate.  With us it is not external destiny that “sets up” our relentless march to doom but something closer to home–namely, the fact the we have been looking at the world through filters of falsehood and lens of deception provided to us by the financial masters of the universe. As a result we simply do not “see” the ethical hollowness and active inhumanity that are at the core of our economic systems. 

But wait.

The most serious economic crises in living memory has changed the world. The magnitude of the shock of it has smashed the false filters and ripped off the distorting lens. In the resulting bright light and clear illumination we have begun to see that what we had been taking as “the way the world works” was actually only “the way the world was being worked.” When enough of us saw that, the future changed.

Even so, the financial masters of the universe are already telling us that since their fortunes are at stake, the priority of government must be to restore economic growth to pre-collapse levels. Environmentalists warn us that this means green initiatives will have to be shelved and that our steady march to catastrophe will now turn into a panicked rush.

But what if both are wrong?

What if the cosmic transforming clarity that the collapse brought to us has let a critical mass of us see that “bailing out” the people, institutions, and ways of thinking that created the collapse in the first place will not solve the problems revealed by the crash. Just the opposite, in fact. Since the science of saving ourselves is coming along nicely, it is now clear that our problem is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of class. In particular, we have not only cultivated highest possible level of the low life ever in history, but we now have a ruling class that is almost completely lacking in class. Accordingly, we don’t need to “bail out” the old but to bring in the new. In particular, we need a better class of people to be our ruling class.

The opportunity is now.

And it is happening. What was accepted as unassailable economic certainty only weeks ago is now being exposed as the disguised self-interest of the greedy.  Conversely, the mandate to put people before profit suddenly seems to be ordinary common sense. And to object that putting people before profit will only hurt people because doing so violates essential economic practices–this is now exposed as self-justifying nonsense because it was precisely these essential economic practices that led to the global economic collapse in the first place.  

It is time to “look again.”  As an example of looking again, read this recent article by an academic economist—http://www.monthlyreview.org/080721li.php

In short, the global collapse has moved humanity into a new world of ideas and possibilities. If we can now begin to act out of wisdom and not fear, we will be able to capitalize on this rare opportunity to step off the path to doom and begin to make our way of life sustainable.  And if we manage to do so, then the economic collapse will turn out to have been a good thing for the environment.