Just finished reading the Debt Generation by David Malone which tracts his growing realisation of the great con by the financial elite on the rest of us that we are living through. I went immediately to his blog Golem XIV to read what he is saying now. It is not happy reading. Here is an excerpt..
See how easy we have been to judge debt laden economies such as Greece, Ireland and Iceland as the gullible conduct of the masses. We have accepted the myth that the guilt lies with those who got in to debt, rather than those who made the foolish loans in the first place. It’s not the done thing these days to renege on one’s debt, no matter the complicity of the lender. We are being conditioned to conclude that the public deserves the austerity, as if it were a mess of their own making. Freedom can be a cruel mistress when she turns on her suitor. So when the loan shark’s knife is turned to our throats, will we submit so obediently?
The 20th century brought stark warnings of what we should be fearful of; Orwell’s state repression and Huxley’s self-conditioned triviality. It also brought two prominent theories of human nature to the fore. To Sartre, the human spirit needs unleashing from the shackles of constraint. To Skinner, the human intellect and contribution to society can be improved by rewarding constructive behaviour and punishing the harmful. Viewed from this standpoint the late 20th century would best be characterised as the overt promotion of individual freedom, mobility and opportunity, yet the covert exertion of behaviourist control methods, which actually constrain liberty, concentrate wealth and obliterate opportunity. The gap between rhetoric and reality is just getting wider and wider. It is in effect little more than “sell freedom, buy control”.
We have been suckered in to a con trick known as “bait and switch”. The bait was being sold an opportunistic expansionary future, meanwhile those with the real foresight and power base are conscious of a harsher and constrained future, and so have bought our compliance through a sedative mass culture and financial debt peonage; a masterful sleight of hand. The current practice of financial gerrymandering is merely a smokescreen for “keeping up appearances”. It is about deluding the man in the street into thinking that all will be rosy in the future, therefore he is justified in getting further into debt. But it’s an asymmetric pay-off matrix. The debtor is taking all the risk with little scope for reward, whereas the creditor takes no risk, yet legal entitlement to all gains. (link to full article)
