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November 8, 2008

Wisdom in its madness

Even though I though the overall piece was a bit of an insane ramble, I thought that the following description of the TARP and capital injection was pretty good:

Magic, anthropologists have always known, is about what people throughout the world do when faced with uncertainty, catastrophic damage, injustice, illness, suffering or harm, while ritual (also magical in its logic) is performed to forestall or prevent these very things. Magic is not about deficient logic, childish mental mistakes, clever priestly illusions or other mistaken technologies. It is the universal feeling that what we see and feel exceeds our knowledge, our understanding and our control. Can we deny that the infusion of 700 billion dollars into our banks is a magical act designed to make our banks rain credit again? Has it worked yet? Are we discarding our belief in banks and credit as a result? Magic is a method for deploying modest technical means to address outsize ethical challenges. Human beings have always done this and always will. We might as well have a grown-up word for this set of practices.

We don't really understand our financial system well enough to know how to fix and reboot it. But our leaders seem to have a sort of magical belief that if we poor enough money into it we'll all be okay. And yes, I do think we should ask for our money back.

Thanks to Reason for the hat tip:
Pay No Attention to the Man behind the Curtain

Posted by OneEyedMan at November 8, 2008 10:00 AM

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