October 9, 2008--Pooped

I've exhausted myself watching cable TV all day and am falling victim to the MNBC-syndrome: things are bad enough but watching the Dow tick down every two seconds for 10 hours a day is a killer. It's like being in a hospital ICU unit, all hooked up to monitoring equipment, and watching your every heartbeat on the monitor. That can’t be a healthy thing.

Observing myself acting in this seemingly unhealthy way, I am trying to figure out the role of emotion in all of this. The mechanism that gets me and so many others behaving in ways that rational market analysts and financial advisors say "makes no sense." Ours, befuddled, included.

I'm coming to conclude that they are right . . . but that so are we.

That acting emotionally, for example, not trusting the markets to correct themselves, with all the current massive interventions, not to trust the wisdom and logic of the blind hand has a logic of its own. That the great supposedly self-organizing system--the meta-economy--which is supposed to make sense since it is driven and globally directed by literally trillions of individual, “rational” choices and decisions, that within it, defining it, there is supposed to be a collective wisdom at work, that this too is a necessary but insufficient explanation for how the market part of the economy functions.

The same kind of creative, culture-shaping, millennia-long self-organizing system and effort that is responsible for the creation and evolution of languages is claimed to be the cultural insurance we need to trust in the direction of all things (the economy very much included) because the human species, survival-oriented, is always individual-by-individual, as well as tribally, is to be depended upon to seek and find ways to survive. And, this view assumes, survival depends on rational choice-making.

Yes, but also no. We tend not to trust the role of emotion in anything other than love and sex and poetry and thus see them as cultural embellishments separate from the mainstream of man’s real purpose—and I am here using “man’s” to talk about all humans intentionally since I see this view to be equally anachronistic. We have difficulty seeing much logic in emotional behavior. When we see it at work in “serious” situations we look sideways at it with a deprecating smile bemusement.

But why would we have this powerful capacity as well as our ability to reason if it were not biologically necessary? It is not an incidental cultural artifact found in history and now only in societies that can afford and tolerate it as a luxury.

Emotion of course drives us to procreate—obviously essential to species survival—but since nature is if nothing both profligate and efficient, there are other roles, other functions assigned to emotion-motivated behavior.

It could be then that every other Dow-tick is the result of emotion at work. And the ones between based on rational analysis. I do not thus trust only the reason of what they proclaim on TV or what our financial advisors are promoting.

I trust the blended wisdom of our aggregated minds and hearts.

In that way, and in only that way, we will get through this and survive.