OUR BIGGEST PROBLEM: being eternally in denial about there being no such thing as eternity.

BY JOHN WARD 

“What goes up must come down” is a fundamental and general law with very few exceptions. But the human race, in almost all of its directions, metiers, callings and endeavours, seems to think that the “down” part is an exception so rare as to be homoaeophathic in nature.

Every empire in history has at some point gone stratospheric, and then fallen to earth faster than Icarus.

Every over-heated stock market has been presented as an infinite rise, but every ‘new paradigm’ ends up as “Buddy can you spare a dime” when it obeys the old rule….and collapses.

The mad Caledonian Gordon Brown boasted that he’d abolished boom and bust….eighteen months before  the greatest Bank bust in history began.

At one point some four hundred years ago, Christianity looked set to become the very first globalist business. Now it is in retreat, and the new kid chopping hands on the block is Islam.

In 1902, the British Empire was something upon which “the sun will never set”. In 1937, Hitler said the Nazi empire would last a thousand years. In 1958, Nikita Kruschev said Communism would rule the world forever. Even ten years ago, Blair’s theorist Lord Gould called ours “the Socialist century”. Now the neoliberals claim theirs is the only way, that only they are “correct”. Perhaps they should look back at political correctness itself, and observe how it has become increasingly ridiculed and rejected over time.

The biggest problem we face today as a species is our ability to deny the inevitable. This odd piece of wiring in our cerebral areas means that, ultimately everything comes as a shock to us.

Thus every inability of ClubMed countries to recover from austerity produces data that “surprised experts”. Nobody expects the United States of America to collapse under the weight of its obscene debts. China will forever be a capitalist tiger – a mere thirty years after we all expected Mao’s creation to be eternally Communist. Britain’s dominance of financial markets was last week described by one junior ministerial twerp as “a given”. And our favourite Brussels alien Herman van Rompuy once described the EU as “Europe’s obvious and perpetual economic future”.

What a terrible shock the next ten years is going to be. For some people.

Yesterday at The Slog: regime change in Spain…what might this mean?