Kierkegaard and the future of capitalism...

Deep and interesting article on economy / bailout....



An excerpt:

So much of the health of a capitalist economy resides in a seemingly intangible but obviously very real commodity: confidence, the psychological enabler of risk. The financial news has been full of stories about the “flight to safety” on the part of individuals and institutions. The irony, of course, is that the flight is only a time-buying maneuver. The “safety” sought is ultimately dependent on the dynamism of the whole, which means that today’s safe investment is tomorrow’s prelude to financial uncertainty if not, indeed, financial panic. Simple prudence may have dictated the initial flight to safety. But hoarding is both an unattractive personal quality and, ultimately, an imprudent financial strategy. There is a lot of cash sloshing around the world’s economy now. It’s time to put it back to work.

I mentioned the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard in my title. I had in mind a passage from his anatomy of despair, The Sickness Unto Death–not, I have to admit, one of the world’s cheeriest volumes. But in his description of a certain form of defiant despair, Kierkegaard says something that I think has pertinence to our current situation. The species of despair he has in mind here (for despair, like most human follies, comes in manifold varieties) shows itself as a revolt “against the whole of existence.” “It is,” says Kierkegaard,

as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and that this clerical error became conscious of being an error . . . . [I]t is then as if this clerical error would revolt against the author, out of hatred for him were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, “No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer.”

An unproductive attitude, I think you will agree. But does it not illuminate something about the emotional weather on Wall Street?