Albert Einstein, it is said, was asked on one occasion whether he carried a notebook to write down his ideas. “Why?” he remarked. “I’ve only ever had one idea.”
However, he did have a lot more pithy and wise things to say, the kind of utterances that stay in your mind. One that I’ve always felt kinship with was the comment that the human mind was far too important to fill up with facts. “I use a library for that.”
Another – and here I come to my point – was his famous proposition that: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it” (often glossed as, “from the same thinking that created it”).
We daily watch a capitalist world in unfolding crisis, where Einstein’s kind of visionary clarity is sorely missing. While the phrase “Think the unthinkable” seems to be much on economists’ and financial advisors’ lips, their “unthinkable” comes down to the hedging of outcomes in a world full of nightmare uncertainties. But their vision simply doesn’t go far enough. As Einstein, again, succinctly observed: “Logic will get you from A to B. But imagination will take you everywhere.”
We need imagination, not logic, in our present crisis. As is now all too obvious, the financial events of 2008 never brought about imaginative solutions, only the insertion of buoyancy tanks filled with the same kind of thinking as created the problems. The true “unthinkable”, of course, isn’t that the euro will collapse, or the Middle East fall into the hands of assertive Islamic governments on the back of the so-called Arab Spring, or Russia or China become the springboard of new conflicts over global resources. No, as Einstein suggests, the unthinkable unthinkable is the thinking that your present thinking can’t and doesn’t even think of. We don’t see much of that brand of novel and imaginative vision, except possibly in the manifestos of the Indignant Ones occupying the centres of financial and political power around the globe.
Without “thinking the truly unthinkable”, how are we to get out of this mess? And what exactly is the nature of the mess? It seems that Einstein had a view on that, too, as while trying to locate the source of the famous phrase quoted above, I came across the following, written by him sixty years ago:
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labour encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organised political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. (from “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review, 1949) [my emphasis]
Compare this damning analysis with Robert Fisk’s diatribe this week against the international bankers and financial institutions, and it is hard to insert a credit card between them. Fisk, as usual not sparing his punches, declares: “Bankers are the dictators of the west.” Isn’t that going a bit far? No, it seems, not if you subscribe to recent revelations about the tentacles of the notorious Vampire Squid, aka Goldman Sachs, reaching into every nook and cranny of the political and economic establishment. As JamesDelingpole blogged recently: “ ‘The governments don't rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world,’ claimed a shockingly outspoken trader, Alessio Rastani, on the BBC two months ago.”
Others have explored further among the squid’s tentacles with even more disturbing insights.
In a recent interview with the Sunday Times (November 6, 2011) Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein made the appalling joke that GS was doing “God’s work”. Perhaps this gives one a glimpse into the cynical, value-less landscape in which leading financial institutions now operate, and in which they reward themselves handsomely for failing in the one task for which their “mission statement” (allowing that they have any) might inspire them: namely, to be the unassailable pillars of security and honesty in a troubled and often criminal world.
I used to say to each of my children, as they grew up and got entangled in the debt society, “Always remember, my child, the bank is your enemy.” I was only half-joking. I believe they now know what I was talking about.
But even I was not ready for the amoral irresponsibility that currently seems endemic in the Olympian heights of the financial sectors, where doing God’s work reflects the worst human tendencies of the classical Greek divinities: lust, greed, bribery and revenge.
On God, too, Einstein had a phrase: “God doesn’t play dice”. No, he doesn’t. Gambling is an all too human addiction, played daily, as we now know, by bankers and traders, and paid for by our elected (or unelected) governments.
CJM
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