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.

Society and the Inner Progress of the People

“The United States is becoming a broken society,” writes The New York Times columnist David Brooks. America needs a fresh political wind that would empower community leadership and restore trust in neighborhood associations. “The only way to restore trust is from the local community on up,” he concludes.

That conclusion is too simplistic. Human nature being what it is, people carry around a lot of unresolved negative emotions. These emotions are acted out just as easily in a family or community as they are in society at large. To create real progress we have to grow beyond this negativity. We achieve that by becoming more self-aware. That means we discover and then address the issues within ourselves that induce us to be selfish, greedy, fearful, and complacent. We also learn in an in-depth way why it is that we’re lacking in wisdom, compassion, and self-regulation.

It would be nice to restore trust in the local community, as David Brooks writes. But we also have to establish trust in our own self so that we can refrain from personal and national self-defeat or self-sabotage.

While most of us do have a positive, generous, and loving side to our nature, we also have a dark side that we’re reluctant to explore.