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Once After a hard day’s forage Two bears sat together in silence On a beautiful vista Watching the sun go down And feeling deeply grateful For life.

Though after a while A thought-provoking conversation began Which turned to the topic of Fame.

Then one bear said, “Did you hear about Rustam? He has become famous And travels from city to city In a golden cage;

He performs to hundreds of people Who laugh and applaud His carnival Stunts.”

In her book ‘Casino Capitalism’ (1986) the respected political economist Susan Strange wrote:

“The great difference between an ordinary casino which you can go into or stay away from, and the global casino of high finance, is that in the latter we are all involuntarily engaged in the day’s play. A currency change can halve the value of a farmer’s crop before he harvests it, or drive an exporter out of business. A rise in interest rates can fatally inflate the costs of holding stocks for the shop-keeper. A takeover dictated by financial considerations can rob the factory worker of his job. From school-leavers to pensioners, what goes on in the casino in the office blocks of the big financial centres is apt to have sudden, unpredictable and unavoidable consequences for individual lives. The financial casino has everyone playing the game of Snakes and Ladders.”

Another philosophical issue underlying the current financial crisis is the collective inability of our financial institutions to discern value. Lacking discernment they bought huge quantities of complex assets that turned out to be worthless, and now they require the tax-payer to bail them out.

One of the complex financial instruments whose actual value the banks failed to discern is Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO’s). Sub-prime mortgages were packaged up as CDO’s and bought by the banks, creating the toxicity which the Paulson plan aims to hoover out of the US system, and which is undermining the British banking system so much that it needs to be partially nationalized at a cost of at least £50bn.

There are bigger ‘philosophical’ issues at stake than the systemic issues affecting the financial system. One important issue that receives little discussion within the mainstream media is ‘productivity’, and how little the global financial system, as currently organized, is concerned with maximizing human productivity and creativity. This is not a trival issue, as in fact the entire purpose of economics should be to deploy resources in the most effective way to enable and facilitate human productivity and creativity.

Henry Kissinger said that ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad name. Of course Kissinger is one of the genuinely bad ones, implicated in violence against humanity such as the carpet-bombing of Cambodia, the invasion of East Timor by Suharto’s Indonesia, and the overthow of the democratically-elected Allende government in Chile by the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet.

Nevertheless, it is worth distinguishing between good and bad politics. Bad politics is factionalism, manipulation, Machiavellianism. It is power-based, using power to get our way, exercising power to overcome the legitimate interests of others without due process or debate. It is the politics we are used to – the politics that has given politics a bad reputation.

Acceptance of the way things areAlthough there can be strength in wanting things to be different there can also be weakness. The strength may be compassion, because nobody should remain unmoved by other people’s suffering - we should all wish that conditions causing suffering be removed. The weakness can be because, from our own point of view, there may be much learning to be had from the way things are right now, so by wishing them to be different we are passing up the opportunity to learn. If we are annoyed and unhappy should we not wish for things to be different? Maybe not for our own sake. We should take a step back and allow ourselves to look at the annoyance and unhappiness in our mind, to experience it. We should recognise it for what it is, and we should realise that, although we are annoyed and unhappy, our mind is working.

In his book Psychoanalysis and Religion Erich Fromm draws a distinction between two types of religion: authoritarian and humanistic. He writes:

“The essential element in authoritarian religion and in the authoritarian religious experience is the surrender to a power transcending man. The main virtue of this type of religion is obedience, its cardinal sin is disobedience. Just as the deity is conceived as omnipotent or omniscient, man is conceived as being powerless and insignificant. Only as he can gain grace or help from the deity by complete surrender can he feel strength. Submission to a powerful authority is one of the avenues by which man escapes from his feeling of aloneness and limitation. In the act of surrender he loses his independence and integrity as an individual but he gains the feeling of being protected by an awe-inspiring power of which, as it were, he becomes a part.”

There are two basic approaches to stock market investment: fundamental analysis and technical analysis. A fundamental analyst studies individual companies in detail, looking at the quality of their balance sheets, the calibre of their management, the competitiveness of their products etc. Technical analysis, on the other hand, focuses on the performance of companies’ or whole sectors’ share prices in relation to the rest of the market, searching for historical trends that will indicate a good moment to buy or sell.

The labyrinth is a symbol of conditioned existence, known in Buddhism and Hinduism as samsara. The labyrinth is the prison we build for ourselves when we become alienated from our own nature. Whether we have ever truly been in harmony with our own nature is a matter for debate, but the prospect of escape from the labyrinth has appealed to humanity throughout history.

The labyrinth has its locus classicus in the myth of the Minotaur. On the island of Crete, Prince Minos was competing against his brothers for the throne. Minos asserted that the gods favored him, and he prayed to Poseidon, the sea-god (symbol of the unconscious mind in modern psychological terms) to send as a sign a white bull, which Minos promised to immediately sacrifice back to the god.