Through a gla$$ darkly I

"Through a glass darkly" is how St. Paul described our normal perception of reality. Now, there is hardly any issue the good saint and I agree on, but I have to say that when it comes to banking and finance, this is one point upon which I believe the good saint knew what he was talking about.

It's too bad, actually. We like to consider ourselves educated people, but are we? Do we in fact know how things truly function in our world? Are we really informed? Do we have any real idea how institutions and organizations and people interact to produce this reality in which we find ourselves. I would like to think "yes", but the more I interact with and engage my fellow man, the more I think "no".

In one way or another and in various places both written and otherwise, I have tried to point out that that there is a need these days to reflect upon, and in the end question, things that we simply take for granted. In that case, it was our relationship to technology. Here, it is about our relationship to money, banking, finance and economics. In what follows, I will be referring to this subject by any of these terms. They are not interchangeable, but they are intimately related and it is really not all that necessary to painfully and excruciatingly keep them separate. They are different aspects of the same phenomenon, this is true, but my intent is to help understand the principles involved, because, if we don't understand the principles, we really don't understand the phenomenon at all.

I'm a big fan of principles. As a wise man once noted, "I stand on principle, because it's the only place where I don't get shit on my boots." He knew what he was talking about. Another wise man once told me that if you can't explain yourself to an eight-year-old, you don't know what you're talking about. I think both of them are spot on. Now, I don't think any of you are merely mentally equivalent to eight-year-olds, but it is nevertheless essential that we get down to essentials. And it is this level of simple, essential principles that I am aiming toward.

Let's face it, we go to school and the first things we learn – and rightfully so – are reading, writing and reckoning (arithmetic); that is, the good old 3 R's. Not everyone who learns them become critics, authors or engineers. We don't need to. It's not about being an expert in any given individual field of study; we go to school to help us understand the world in which we find ourselves, to make sense of what is happening around us, but above all else, we go to school – or should be going to school – to learn how to distinguish the real from the crap. Too few can do this anymore, but that's another matter (and perhaps diary) for another time.

Note: This series was originally published in slightly modified form on the Daily Kos.