The Crash of 2008 as a Learning Experience

The blame-game hasn't stopped. Was the crash of ’08 the fault of bankers, Congress, regulators, the media, or the people? Blaming others feels good when it defends against our participation in the fiasco.

Even though bankers may have broken the law and need more regulation, we’re all part of the problem. Deficiencies in human consciousness caused the crash. Our intelligence is impaired by unresolved negative emotions that produce collective occurrences of self-defeat or self-sabotage.

Even if we regulate the banks more stringently, as we should, we’re in danger of acting out our propensity for self-defeat in other areas of life, notably with nuclear proliferation, genetic manipulation, and environmental degradation.

We’re not to blame for being dysfunctional or neurotic. Human nature has fundamental flaws, though these can be resolved. It’s obviously crisis time on planet Earth, time to answer the call to become more conscious.

We can start by seeing and acknowledging our own contribution to the problem. We can’t prevent institutional corruption or overcome passive inaction when we neglect to address personal dysfunction and our negative emotions such as anger, distrust, dissension, envy, fear, and hatred. These emotions corrupt family, community, and national life, as they also block us from having the power or will to achieve reform.

The Importance of Psychological Truth

The social science of economics produced a trillion-dollar bust when the American financial system went over the edge in 2008. The financial chicanery engineered by Wall Street was staged and directed by a circus troupe of economists who graduated from (and taught at) America’s top universities. Will some of these economists do the honorable thing and, before they pack up their tents and pet theories, tell us exactly how their so-called scientific discipline produced so much falsehood?

Yes, we have a legitimate gripe with economics. But we can be equally disgusted with the field of psychology. It is producing its own brand of second-rate information and subprime factoids that are preventing us from getting to the heart of our personal and national dysfunction.

Academic psychologists have borrowed their knowledge from books. They have not plunged into their own unconscious mind to discover essential truths about human nature. Instead, they have run off with their so-called scientific method to count all the correlations dancing on the head of a statistic. Hence, they flood the marketplace of ideas with second-rate and misleading information.