The Market

The DOW took a rather abrupt dive today, one that made stockholders around the world shudder. If Voltaire were alive today, I've no doubt that he would readily adapt his famous quote to say 'If the market didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it'. In all fairness the level of commitment and uniform faith that the world is starting to have in this phantasmagoria is unprecedented. Hard to believe we once walked on the very same earth with the same bodies completely unencumbered with such an omnipresent concept as the market to dictate the nature of reality to us. From back alleys in Haiti to Wallstreet and on into the streets of Mumbai, the market is King. No government can last long against the onslaught of economic calamity. Indeed the EU is proving that even well established nations are little match for the forces of financial expediency. Money flows from one corner of the earth to the next like lava, destroying and reshaping all in its wake. Esoteric numbers, graphs and statistics wielded by a discordant crew of crazies we call economists does little to make anything resembling sense out of this madness. At this phase in the game it does no good to point out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. Sure the people at the bottom are always ready to listen to any radical that dares make promises, but this leads to nothing more than class skirmishes that can lead to concessions, but never victory. The union of the worlds workers was not done through socialism or international communism; it was the market that bound them all together. When I was young I decried Capitalism as the mother of all evils, the well of death and sure sign of the impending Apocalypse. Now I can't help but marvel as nations fade away, race becomes insignificant, religions are discarded as trash and the scramble for money approaches all encompassing proportions. The idealists dreamed of a brotherhood of man- liberte, equalite, fraternite. What we ended up with is a world where liberty is obsolete, equality is an economic impossibility and fraternity is a joke that politicians never tire of telling (eg 'my fellow Americans'). I type all of this without any trace of regret at the path that mankind has chosen to sprint down with the passionate panic that so defines our species. Idealist intellectuals have this habit of painting human beings as helpless little peons in need of guidance and tutelage. I choose to take a different opinion of homo sapiens. People work together out of some innate instinct to network. Only language, religion and race has ever proved really effective at pitting otherwise identical groups of people against one another. All three of these are being eroded daily by the mighty market. We all wanna get rich- the market makes us rich- we all must adhere faithfully to the market. Of course this is all the western side of the deal. Not sure if factory workers in Dhaka really have all that much faith in the market, but they probably acknowledge that international financiers in far off skyscrapers control their lives. We as people have this amazing ability of collectively agreeing upon things which don't exist anywhere except in our minds, and the market is just another manifestation of this talent.