Everyone is aware of the present financial crisis, seemingly born in the so-called "housing bubble" in the United States and then spreading outward into the financial markets where new kinds of financial instruments were being bought and sold that we are now learning had no real value.  What stands behind this sequence of events, what can it tell us about the present, and perhaps the future?

Dear Friends,

Everyone is aware of the present financial crisis, seemingly born in the so-called "housing bubble" in the United States and then spreading outward into the financial markets where new kinds of financial instruments were being bought and sold that we are now learning had no real value.  What stands behind this sequence of events, what can it tell us about the present, and perhaps the future?  In order to answer these questions, we have to (in my experience) actually start in the past.  We have to have a sense of what happened before this moment of crisis, perhaps as far back as the founding of the United States.

At the same time, it will help to keep in mind that if Rudolf Steiner were to be speaking about this, he would also be talking about events in the world of spirit, the world of the invisible.  He might give us some lectures of the kind published under the title: The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness.  In this he just wants us to keep in mind that events in the social-historical are also inter-penetrated with activies by invisible beings as well as by the dead.  Further, that impulses counter to a progressive evolution are always present.  Since we cannot ourselves see this, we need to be careful in how we form pictures about the Crisis in Finance, perhaps neither assuming either that too much evil or too much goodness is operating behind these scenes.

To return to history...

A very good book (or three books actually) to help with this is Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, which besides being a very entertaining read, is also a carefully examined effort to understand the history of money and of markets, as these emerged in the last days of the times of Kings and Queens, before the Western democracies were born (late 17th Century - 1680's to early 18th Centry - 1730's).  Natural Science was just emerging, not yet in its full 19th Century flowering, and peoples ideas about money, wealth, power etc. were just then beginning to break free of the older religious world conceptions as well.  Kings and Queens discovered they needed the money people in order to finance their wars, and the money people were glad to oblige (often had no choice actually) as long as a profit could be made.

Various cities in Europe tended to be either centers of trade, or centers of finance.  In the former the markets involved the movement of goods, and in the latter the markets involved the movement of wealth (whether precious metals, currencies or other kinds of financial instruments).   As the Kings and Queens were in their last days (the American and French Revolutions were on the social horizon), the money people chaffed under the harsh rule of the Nobles (the blood lines of the aristocrats).  To be a person of import in those days was a matter of blood, and one could be extremely wealthy and simply be seen as a tool to be used by a financially broke Noble in the pursuit of his or her passions.

Out of this background then, when the social-political revolutions arose, in spite of freedom and democracy being the idea of many, there were quite a few, who were far less altruistic in their leanings.  While we seemed to have replaced the aristocracy of blood with democracy, a second aristocracy actually replaced the previous one, this one of wealth.  I have called this aristocracy: The Lords of Finance.

The main effect of their work during the time of the founding of political democratic institutions was to keep their world - the world of finance - as much as possible from coming under the thumb of democratic political powers (who the Lords of Finance just saw as a different kind of dominance that had once lived in Kings and Queens, but which now resided in presidents and parliments).  America's Founders were not asleep here: "The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy" Thomas Jefferson.

For a long time the Lords of Finance remembered what had led to the American and French Revolutions (ostentatious displays of wealth and arbritary abuses of power by the aristocries of blood), but eventually this memory passed.  At the same time, these new centers of wealth and power (the Lords of Finance) applied the wisdom and cleverness their money could buy to more and more consciously manipulating political institutions and the general public.  Some years ago, John Maynard Keynes, a deep economic thinker wrote: "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all."

In spite of that warning, and with the cooperation of bought and paid for political leaders, the Western democracies made a religion out of economics, and began to worship the bottom line and a mystical non-existent creature called: "the free market".  The wool had already been pulled over everyones eyes (and even liberal economists played along), such that when Central Banking came into existence in the early part of the 20th Century, this theft of the People's true power to regulate rules as regards interest and the amount of currency in circulation was passed to a private banking institution which disquised itself with the name: The Federal Reserve.

Real thinking about economics more and more disappeared into the religious haze of mystical free markets, and finally this haze became so thick that it produced very strange economic consequences, soon to affect us all.

For example, ten years ago Congress asked the Federal Reserve to look more closely at regulating the housing market (any one not asleep to the recently busted dot.com bubble knew that housing values were becoming more and more inflated.  Following their mystical religion, the Fed left this market alone, and so the impulse to speculation (always the bane of unregulated markets) took hold and as a consequence of hazing thinking and a tendency to look the other way, the speculators and cheats had a field day.

Now this housing bubble is not the real issue, for it simply disguises the deeper bubble, which is called (lamely and falsely): international liquidity.

When Central Banks became the norm, the so-called expansion and contraction of the amount of currency in circulation fell into the hands of the Banks, where unregulated it could be used as a quite interesting tool that mostly favored the very very very rich.  They acquired the ability to basically print any amount of money, and loan it to other banks which then loaned it out commercially.  They had to couple this capacity with the one to set basis interest rates (what the media mostly focuses on), because printing money is automatically "inflationary".  So a private banking institution now gets to create US currency (and this is true elsewhere throughout most of the world - Central Banks create money out of nothing with no government oversight or regulation).  This essentially fake money (not related to the transformation of any nature substance - which creates real wealth) then gets loaned commercially (mostly credit cards and the like and also junk bonds etc), and loaned to governments (buying US Treasury Bonds, for example).

Over the 80 plus years of Central Banking this creation of fake capital has fueled the rise of the global economy (an economy of mostly consumer goods), which has floated up above the normal places of purchase and exchange of goods to become this huge huge huge huge huge bubble of international fake money capital liquidity that is used by the Lords (and their favorites) to buy and sell big corporations and via the intercourse with dictatorships, to buy and sell the world's natural resources out from under the peoples whose land is necessary, and whose labor is essential.

Largely undisciplined speculation drives these "markets", which became so lost in their hazy mystical "derivative instruments", that even the pieces of paper (supposedly representing actual wealth such as housing loans) became themselves fake.  The same with corporations, beginning with junk bonds, which are not backed by anything except the salesmanship of the financial houses trying to purchase the public traded companies and the avarice of the lending institutions.  The world economny became not only a place ruled by fake money and speculation, but a house built on lies, built on lies built on lies.

Now the game has reached the stage where all the bargins, made by the Lords of Finance with the Devil (Ahriman), have become due. Cold calculated speculation (instead of warm hearted fair trading of real goods to meet actual human needs) in a consumer economy is a house built on sand.

In effect a very strange act on the World's Stage is about to end.  The curtain will fall, and then rise again, and a new Stage Setting will be present.  Ordinarily we call this the end of one civilization, followed by the birth of a new one.

As individuals ride the waves of this crisis, something remarkable becomes possible.  We can see this already as more and more people appear to be victims in the housing crash, where their home is forclosed upon, and Circumstance reduces their consumer driven lives to its bare essentials.  The middle class is falling into the working poor, and the working poor are falling into the true poor and the homeless.  Materialistic culture (in terms of possessions) is descending into chaos.

Yes, social chaos is absolutely essential for new social form to arise, and in Civil Society and other similar impulses radiating out of the bottom (this has actually happened everywhere in the world, but never makes the news), moral freedom (the Consciousness Soul) arises.  See also Tom's recent contribution on Rudolf Steiner and the New Generation: http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/2353 .

The world is a Mystery Temple for the unfolding of latent capacities of the i-AM.  Unfortunately, the anthroposophists (which if awake) might actually help this situation, are themselves mostly clueless.  Having worshiped their guru (reading books and engaging in the intellecual play of conceptions) instead of developing their own soul life (practicing the teachings). don't understand what they see in the social, or do they really know what to do about.

The social itself is actually telling us.  We are entering a post-literate world, transitioning through a individualized technical based one (the Internet), to once more discover the true value of oral culture.  In Ages Past, wisdom came from the top down through Story Tellers, Poets and Bards.  In the future it will come from more ordinary story tellers, poets and bards, because everyone can become such (the Fifth Epoch culture rises from the bottom up).  Anthroposophy will no longer be transmitted in books by Rudolf Steiner (which will disappear as will most of literature), but instead Anthroposophy will live where ever someone has mastered The Philosophy of Freedom, and learned how to use their own creative intuition to craft wisdom stories for the future.  Centers will exist where Steiner is remembered, but the essential basis of the new civilizations oral culture will be individual intuition and creation.  Here is some Steiner and Tomberg on the matter:

from the book: "Education As A Force For Societal Change." Rudolf Steiner

"In the future, social life will depend upon cooperative support between people, something that happens when we exchange our ideas, perceptions, and feelings.  This means that we must base our general education not just upon ideas taken from science or industry but upon concepts that can serve as a foundation for imaginative thoughts.  As improbable as this may seem now, in the future we shall be unable to interact in a properly social way if we do not teach people imaginative concepts.   In the future, we shall have to learn to understand the world in images."

And for Tomberg fans, we have this quote from his: Anthroposophical Studies of the Old Testament:
"At the present time, the mission is different (the mission being the method correct for the average student of mystery wisdom in a particular epoch).  It consists in a thought knowledge endowed with vision achieved through the development of the forces of the conscience in order then to live powerfully in the creative word."]

joel