Just a few weeks ago I posted a message here about how the teaching of sport in schools fostered an unhealthy competitiveness, where the need to get ahead of someone else replaced the natural urge to do as well as you can for yourself. I said that the mindless competitiveness encouraged in schools etc was harmful to society and gave the example of the road hog, prepared to risk his life and yours to be the person in front.  For a short while I thought that maybe I had overstepped the mark and erred on the side of personal ranting rather than ‘intelligent Satanic thought’ – and what the hell does this have to do with Satanism anyway?

Well, recent weeks have seen some vindication of the ideas I was driving at in my previous piece and has lifted the lid on a lot of other issues too that do have some bearing on current events, and indeed Satanism.

The financial meltdown we are currently facing is perhaps a unique crisis in that it has not been brought into being by an economic slowdown, by reductions in demands for goods and services, by inflation or by world events affecting market confidence.  The so-called credit crunch has come as a result of a small handful of people making money by selling mortgages to those that, in ordinary times, would not have been able to get credit at their corner store, let alone a mortgage.  All the while these people made money, they kept doing it, even though they knew they were defying gravity.  All the time they made money, the people hiring these traders encouraged them to make more, to lend more, and to package those debts and sell them on.

Instead of making prudent choices about how best to make money sustainably in the long term, the short-termism encouraged by the performance/bonus system operating in the world’s money markets led to testosterone-fuelled recklessness*. The markets, in their desire for bigger profits and bigger bonuses did the equivalent of overtaking on a bend.  The truck that met them coming the other way, was the fact that what they were buying and selling was not actually worth anything.  Everyone secretly knew that at the time, but the realisation (not 20 years since the Junk Bonds fiasco) was so shocking and profound it has caused some to herald the death of capitalism.

The people who were wheeling and dealing in Sub-Prime loans were not carried up in the excitement because they were regular Joes who had a shot at making some real money (as has happened in real estate booms and other bubbles) these were wealthy professionals who were being encouraged to sell more, then more again and then more again, goaded on by larger and larger bonuses and the promise of being a winner – the person in front.

Rational self-interest went out the window.  And here Satanism comes in.  Satanism, is based on rational self-interest and has disdain for the kind of herd systems that urge you to grab and keep grabbing for someone else’s brass ring.

Someone following rational self interest wants to improve their situation, but knows that some things which look like opportunities aren’t.  If you overtake on a bend, sooner or later you will meet that truck coming the other way, if you pay off your Amex with your Mastercard, and your Mastercard with your Diner’s Club, eventually you will be living on crackers and water to pay the interest, and if you keep trying to make money from selling things that are worthless, you will one day get found out as a con man.  Rational self-interest says you might be able to do these things once, but you’d be a fool to try and make a career from it.

So that’s how we got into this – how do we get out?  A belief that markets will sort themselves out has been prevalent for some time and if this belief was applied with absolute ruthlessness, the institutions that had bought and sold these lame dog financial products would be allowed to go to the wall.  This has not been allowed to happen because too many other institutions (pension companies etc) would go down with them and people who had not knowingly exposed themselves to risk would be harmed.  So we will never get to see exactly what would happen if markets were allowed to adjust themselves.  In the US it seems likely that some people will go to jail once the dust has cleared and the paper trail shows who was really repsonsible.  In the UK, where financial institutions are still in many ways run like a club, this seems less likely.  Some bank managers have fallen on their swords, but as they have retired on good pensions, it would seem their swords were safely in their scabbards.

From the Satanic perspective, we agree with Gordon Gekko, greed is good.  It is a powerful emotion which we can use to improve our life.  We want MORE so that we can share it with our friends and loved ones, so we can spend it with the butcher, the baker and the expensive scented candle maker. Like any emotion; lust, anger, love or fear, greed makes a good servant and a poor master, and a Satanist is first and foremost a master of himself – he indulges his desires as an act of will, not an act of compulsion.  The consequences of unfettered greed (although it wears Armani suits and drives a Porsche) are just as sloppy and degraded as the unfettered alcoholic on the street corner.  We have seen what happens when greed takes over: rationality is overturned and we are left with a financial hangover from which it may take decades to recover. Satanism approves of self-interest, but never folly.

And from the perspective of Satanic justice, nothing is for nothing. While there is wisdom in not allowing systems and institutions to fail, the cost of this bailout must be that those who should have been holding the reigns find their heads on the block.

* from a commercial banker here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7884365.stm