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The financial crisis of 2008 may have come as a shock to the political and economic establishment, but it was always an accident just waiting to happen. Western economies were over-reliant on spiraling house-prices (and a resultant spiraling personal debt), which gave the impression that everyone was wealthy when in reality they weren’t. Naive belief in a future of never-ending economic growth meant that financiers never imagined that their chickens would ever come home to roost.
We shouldn’t be surprised when unsustainable financial models fail. It’s what they are destined to do. Nor should we be terrified for the future. It would be more terrifying to keep on blindly doing what we had done for decades, and ignoring the human victims and the environmental fallout that those policies have always created.
Will we learn from our mistakes? I don’t know, but at least we have opportunity to do so. Of course, the establishment soon tried to return to business as usual, but there are signs that the public debate is changing. There has been a groundswell of popular anti-capitalist movements in Western countries, and issues and ideas are now legitimately discussed within the public arena which had been considered to be highly unconventional just a decade ago.
Elections in Greece showed that many people simply don’t trust the old order any more, and the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party in the UK, despite unanimous opposition from the political and media establishment, shows a huge groundswell of people who are hoping for a change in the way things are done. Whether or not it will be achieved is questionable, but there is no doubt that there is a much greater opportunity and appetite to create a different way of living than we’ve had for a long time. Let’s make it count.
lyrics
For years we’ve been deluding ourselves with economics based on fantasy. For years we’ve been shielding ourselves from a truth that we just didn’t want to see. A lifestyle based on growth without limit - however did we think that would not end? A crash was bound to come and now we’re in it - no longer any need to pretend. But don’t worry - this could just be the storm before the calm. We should have seen this coming, so there’s no need for alarm. Don’t worry. This could do more good than harm - if it leads to some new thinking it will just be the storm before the calm. An economy that was built on nothing but hot air - it was only a matter of time before it burst. We can put something better in its place, but we must discard all the failed ideas first. An unrealistic way of living is what we were brought up to expect. The real world isn’t so forgiving - that’s why the economy has been wrecked. And if we learn the lessons properly we can collectively decide that we’ll do things very differently when we’re out of the other side. Yes, the future can be better - it doesn’t have to be so bad, so long as we don’t demand the return of things we never really had.
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