It was the most spectacular surge in debt ever recorded in peacetime [the Covid response]. In conventional preconceptions, a flood of public debt on this scale presented a giant challenge to the balance between private saving and private investment. Government borrowing would suck scarce savings out of the economy, driving up interest rates, thus crowding out private investment. This was the economic complement to the naive conservative vision of the welfare state as being for poor people and the government as being a racket run by civil servants at the expense of the rest of society. What fiscal policy gave, the financial squeeze would take away. If this logic held water, 2020 should have witnessed gigantic crowding out. In fact it was the reverse. A huge surge in debt coincided with a historic collapse in interest rates for both public and private borrowers.
The first priority of German rearmament [by the Nazi government] was to escape the overwhelming threat posed by France and its Allies, who might intervene at any time. The longer-term objective was ‘possibly the struggle for new export possibilities [i.e. colonies], possibly–and probably better–conquest of new Lebensraum in the East and its ruthless Germanization. Certain that the current economic situation can be changed only with political power and struggle. Everything that can occur now . . . mere makeshift.’
The first person perspective is very passionate, it’s powerful and engaging, but it can also be dogmatic and unyielding. It is based on personal experiences in the world, things the stakeholder has witnessed and ‘knows’ to be true because they have seen them with their own eyes. This is often the approach of religion or faith, as well as certain die-hard political positions.
The “hair-raising superficiality” of evil as displayed by Eichmann suggests that evil is infectious.
The machines [communication devices like smart phones, etc.] that were meant to create time were consuming it instead. As we lost our ability to concentrate and recall, everything seemed new.
Combining this with Xenophanes’ analysis of relativism, one could say that “gods and men” exist through some kind of psychological projection of themselves: They are their own delusion. This idea, common in Hindu and Buddhist thought, occupies a position somewhere between philosophy and mythology; its philosophical status consists in the fact that it does not posit a beginning, but a moment-to-moment indwelling principle. Logical priority has replaced temporal priority; structure has replaced narrative—though the mythical subject is still present.
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