Rembrandt painted the Bill Gateses, Warren Buffetts, Queen Elizabeths, and Oprah Winfreys of his day. During the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company had propelled Amsterdam to the forefront of the world in terms of access to efficient information on the giant enterprises of the many nations. Appropriately, the man who succeeded Rubens as Europe’s greatest painter charged astronomical prices for his work.
But Rembrandt could not have produced his astonishing feats of realism in the portraiture of his years of supreme success without the formative effects of his Calvinist background, and particularly not without his fascination for all things Judaic – for even in the most academically formal of the portraits, his powerful imagination interpenetrated his subjects with the translucency of his more subjective work. A perfect blend of his two distinctive genres was achieved in Portrait of a Soldier, which was modeled on the profile of his beloved son Titus. In that small piece, the ideal that Rembrandt unashamedly cherished for his boy animates the melting, golden luxuriance of the treatment – part a knight in shining armor, yet part the young David of Israel – both a romantic King Arthur and an Emperor of the Spirit.
When the well-appointed but fierce queen of Rembrandt’s heart, Saskia, died, and life bared its bones to him, God gave him the beautiful but poor Hendrijke Stoffels, who became the love of his life and the inspiration of his work. But scandal undid him; the cruel response of his capitalist patrons to his plight turned his gaze inwards. He focused on his religion and on his art, the vehicle for his journey of spiritual insight.
Today free enterprise offers the only paradigm for self-actualization free of the vagaries of crime. Even a contemporary Rembrandt would have a better chance to make it in the USA than in any other country. Of course, spirituality has been transformed into a quest for economic value. Still, the freedom of the individual to pursue his interests is nowhere more empowering than in Anglo Saxon countries, where the coercive effects of social engineering associated with communism were until now but a vague threat, not a horrific fact of life.
Until now.
The ‘global meltdown’ – aggregated imbalances comprising the demise of the first phase of the process by which the global economy was established – the export-led initiating phase – will result in a difficult new era in which necessity, perhaps even extremity, will typify the constraint of entrepreneurial endeavor through a dynamic of domestic growth.
United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson has announced a need for multilateral consensus on the pressing matter of finding a coherent vision for a new global economic architecture. The new dispensation must correct the imbalances that resulted from the partnership between the USA and the Asian exporters, whose low wage labor caused the US current-account deficit to blow out and to release a tide of credit into Asia, whose banks in turn became contaminated by toxic US mortgage-backed securities, in which the Asians invested their export currency reserves. Even so, the global economy could not have become established without the stimulus of that partnership, which enabled other parts of the world to industrialize. Although during the past two decades the USA exploited elements of the arrangement in a fit of irrational exuberance, the market economy must not be blamed for the very evil that it is uniquely qualified to combat, given the chance to work optimally: error resulting from human frailty.
Other economic cultures, including those of Europe, India, and China, remain lagging in relation to that of the USA. Freedom of speech does not exist in countries where national economies are characterized by the dynamics of family businesses. A strict hierarchy has long been established, and newcomers take their orders from senior incumbents, politicians who entrench their own influence and who resent all forms of competition, viewing it as encroachment upon their domains. Rembrandt’s ‘capitalist patrons’ were far closer in spirit to the robber barons of today’s cartel business culture than to the spirit of any exemplary value investor of the market economy such as Warren Buffett. It is by no coincidence that Buffett’s refusal to advantage any member of his family is in part credited for his extraordinary success: only his iron discipline in maximizing shareholder value could have ensured the success of unexampled magnitude associated with everything that he touches.
Buffett stands alone against the tide of barbarism that had invaded Wall Street over the past two decades, sweeping away the distinction between the market economy and the cartel economic model. That barbarism seeks to overwhelm Christianity with Islam, democracy with communism, and the market economy with cartel economics. There are three important and interrelated reasons why the distinction between the two world orders must continue to be sharpened, and the Anglo-Saxon model must be extended by new exemplars of the caliber of Buffett and Bill Gates.
Firstly, true freedom of speech grants to those who live in the most advanced democracies a spiritual freedom never attained in other world orders, except in rare circumstances where – in palaces, city slums, or remote rural settlements – fortunate individuals of all eras lived protected against feudal and often brutish conditions that comprised their broader environments. And even in such cases, happiness existed only to be snatched away: the effects of unbridled seigneurial power, of pillage through rapine and murder, of migration, conquest, or personal betrayal, could at any moment undo a lifetime of ‘freedom’ spent in the captivity of a fiercely protected privacy. The greed that brought the market economy low to the everlasting detriment of the world, was extremely unfortunate. But a regime of savagery and murderousness is worse.
Rembrandt could escape imprisonment only as a result of the love of Hendrijke Stoffels, who registered him as her tenant. Robert Graves could write only in remote Majorca, where the ancient Mediterranean agricultural cycle continued to prevail in his lifetime. Yet today the market economy guarantees the absolute minimum of state interference in the private lives of citizens – while communism and cartel cultures perpetuate a rule of terror deriving from a barbaric bygone age.
Secondly, the mechanism of the open market removes the power of the spirit from transactions. In an environment where the aggregated impersonal interactions of supply and demand determine the price of products and services, far greater efficiencies obtain than in any market where a commodity could today cost three times as much as it cost yesterday, and where it could be available today but nowhere to be found tomorrow. In a market economy, extraordinary freedoms and ideas become possible – freedoms and ideas that previously flourished only in societies where the prerogatives of the essential human condition had been shielded from barbarism and crime by a combination of religious practice and an enterprising spirit – in societies such as the Amsterdam of Rembrandt’s day.
Thirdly, to the arduous and continual improvement of financial applications such as accountancy and the power of compound interest as civilizing powers characteristic of Anglo-Saxon peoples must be added the unique qualities that made the English language the universal medium of communication in a globalized economic paradigm. Robert Graves, the famous poet, put the matter in perspective in The Reader Over Your Shoulder, which he co-wrote with Alan Hodge in 1943 (Jonathan Cape, 1976 edition). The passage occurs on page 9:
‘A vernacular is a language of domestic convenience, compounded of the languages spoken by master and alien slave. It has a less complicated grammar and syntax than the languages from which it springs, but rapidly accumulates words as the slaves become freemen, and their children are born as freemen, and finally their great-grandchildren, marrying into their masters’ families, are accepted as cultured people with full rights as citizens.
‘English is a vernacular of vernaculars. The general European view is that it is an illogical, chaotic language, unsuited for clear thinking; and it is easy to understand this view, for no other European language admits of such shoddy treatment. Yet, on the other hand, none other admits of such poetic exquisiteness. Often the apparent chaos is only the untidiness of a workshop in which a great deal of repair and other work is in progress: the benches are crowded, the corners are piled with lumber, but the old workman can lay his hand on whatever spare parts or accessories he needs, or at least on the right tools and materials for improvising them. French is a language of fixed models: it has none of this workshop untidiness and few facilities for improvisation. In French, one chooses the finished phrase nearest to one’s purpose and, if there is nothing that can be ‘made to do’, a long time is spent in the Works – the Academy – to supply or approve a new model. Each method has its own advantages. The English method tends to ambiguity and obscurity of expression in any but the most careful writing; the French to limitation of thought. The late Sir Henry Head was once preparing an address on neurology for a learned society in Paris. He wrote it in what he hoped was French, but took the precaution of asking a French professor to see that it was correctly phrased. The manuscript was returned marked: ‘pas francais’, ‘pas francais’, ‘pas francais’, with suggested alterations; but almost every ‘pas francais’ could be matched with a ‘pas vrai’, (not clear, not strong) because the amendments in francais impaired the force of the argument.’
Permutations of the three defenses of the Christian West listed above inform the appreciation that Rembrandt’s great freedom of expression in unique representations of personal experience, and the mobility and power that he gained for his thought as a supremely gifted artist in an environment of privilege and abundant potential, afforded him access to the equivalent of the ‘poetic exquisiteness’ achieved by the great English love poets: William Shakespeare, John Clare, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Graves.
That freedom of expression today continues to characterize the Anglo-Saxon model of the open market economy.
As stated above, the quest for spiritual meaning has been replaced with the quest for economic value – two matters not so incompatible as they are generally thought to be. Many continue to think that art defies valuation in terms of monetary compensation. Yet only incompetent economists would fail to factor in all the elements and principles that go into the creation of a work of art – even the so-called ‘imponderables’ pertaining to works of supreme artistic merit. Simply, private ownership of supreme art should not remove them from the public domain, so that the broadest possible cross-section of people may continue to be enriched by its civilizing power.
Bill Gates was instrumental in the liberation of tens of millions of Indians from poverty, and in their entry into the middle class – having for several decades personified a way of life by which continual open technology innovation could galvanize a vast sub-continent into a mode of economic growth. Warren Buffett broke the world record for philanthropy after a lifetime in which he was denigrated as a ‘notorious miser’. Those two great men committed their lives to the creation of true economic value, by which the personal happiness and efficiency of a significant part of the human race were enhanced.
As a result, millions of people are free to discover the world’s spiritual meanings, and millions more are ready to overcome the cage of an arrested society in which abject poverty and feudal oppression have constrained them throughout all eternity.
The community of nations needs to think very carefully about the potential value to be tapped into by means of an intelligent restoration of the market economy model of capitalism. Freedom of expression makes life worth living, and communities that enjoy that power have the potential to create magnificent modes of being for the wonderment of the human spirit.
At the risk of provoking beyond the bounds of the brief adopted for this blog, I wish to extend the motif by which examples from art and literature cast light on the natures of respective economic models. Yet I need to warm to my theme: by the reader’s leave I shall boldly presume upon a passion for supreme poetry in a format selected for discussion on economic topics: by quoting one of the most intense poems ever written, I might galvanize the reader’s sympathies into support for a cardinal point in defense of the truly great cause that must constitute the theme of this blog in a time of difficulty and danger.
At the back of the book from which the passage above was taken, the following sentences occur:
“Sir Ernest Baker, reviewing the first edition of The Reader Over Your Shoulder in the Manchester Guardian, said:
‘The whole work trends to moral as well as aesthetic consequences. The writing of good English is a moral matter; and the muddle of our English style is the result of a moral muddle. The book is a national service.”
Other critics should have heeded Sir Ernest’s assessment, but did not – incapable of appreciating the full power of Graves’ arguments, they sought to ridicule him for daring to tell his contemporaries how to write. At last Graves deferred – in a poem published under the same title as that of the book that produced the oppressive avalanche of resentment. The white heat of disdain in the poem’s tone demonstrates that the critics would have done better had they read Graves with more care, for his reply to their criticism destroyed their reputations, which could otherwise have enjoyed a shelf-life of several generations in the slough of an uncritical vernacular consumerism:
THE READER OVER MY SHOULDER
You, reading over my shoulder, peering beneath
My writing arm – I suddenly feel your breath
Hot on my hand or on my nape,
So interrupt my theme, scratching these few
Words on the margin for you, namely you,
Too-human shape fixed in that shape:-
All the saying of things against myself
And for myself I have well done myself.
What now, old enemy, shall you do
But quote and underline, thrusting yourself
Against me, as ambassador of myself,
In damned confusion of myself and you?
For you in strutting, you in sycophancy,
Have played too long this other self of me,
Doubling the part of judge and patron
With that of creaking grindstone to my wit.
Know me, have done: I am a proud spirit
And you forever clay. Have done!
Graves published 125 books in his lifetime, of which at least a dozen number among the supreme masterworks of man. Also, he shared with the French composer Frederic Chopin and the French painter Eugene Delacroix a legendary love for a great woman on the island of Majorca on the south coast of Spain in the Mediterranean, where he lived: in their case the novelist George Sand, and in Graves’s case the American poet Laura Riding. Graves’s majestic statement exposed his critics as wallowing wholly beneath his station as one of the makers of the twentieth century.
The terrible rebuke expressed in the poem The Reader Over My Shoulder demonstrates, among several other things, why the power of the spirit is not to be admitted into the marketplace, where competition sometimes reaches levels as fierce as that here expressed in words by a great poet. Graves was a chivalrous champion of woman’s rights, and a true friend to humanity. His stature as a writer ranks perhaps with those of Sophocles, St. Paul, and Shakespeare. Yet, as will be shown by way of concluding, even he falls short of the requirements of the market economy – as would Rembrandt, in his unnecessary suffering, having lived in a still barbaric time unredeemed by the effects of the market economy, which has now globalized trade and liberated many nations.
Today rampant criminality, anarchy, and oppression characterize a trend towards the cartel economic model, in which covertly introduced hierarchies of influence prevent competition and entrench corrupt practices – yet those responsible for most of the damage blame the deleterious effects of barbarism and criminality on the spirit of free enterprise in all media interests under their control. Global Organized Crime has captured the media, and deploys them as a weapon of war against the Western way of life, which has become criminalized in its own public institutions.
That strategy of war is a function of the communist assault on Christianity, private enterprise, and democracy. But because the unconventional techniques of that martial strategy may not become known to the public, as a matter of statutory law – since the crime lords had usurped also the legal system and the medical profession, and have since that moment systematically abused aspects of medical science routinely deployed by the security services and legal institutions for effects determining matters of national security and international diplomacy – the public mistakes the criminalization of the most advanced tradition in the world, through dynamics by which an oppressive regime of political correctness is enforced by the mass media, for an expression of Divine Authority, not for the dirty tricks of the international Mafia in collusion with communism.
In South Africa, Mr. Jacob Zuma is perpetually retained in a regime of dangerously inadequate information through the machinations of concealed, malign manipulators of the media and of African affairs: he erroneously construes the causes for the rift in the ruling ANC as evidence of personal opprobrium and opportunism on the parts of unruly individuals, instead of welcoming the development as a vital step toward multiparty democracy. In his hostile stance toward those who disagree with views enforced upon his constituency to its detriment, Mr. Zuma unwittingly entrenches one-party hegemony in the very country whose recent upgrading to democracy has inspired the world. In the process South Africa is thrown to the wolves: covert global special interests and crime syndicates associating with strategic mineral resources cartels are emboldened by the culture of corruption facilitated by means of communism to claim ownership of all instruments of power, determinants of wealth, and amenities of life for themselves exclusively – a process that must certainly serve the giant economies of China and India, which require Africa’s fabulous wealth of strategic mineral resources, and must also serve British traitors of the West who have long associated with the criminal African blood diamond cartels that had wreaked a genocidal destruction of socio-economic structures in a dozen African countries during the past five decades.
Because the communists are unable to correctly identify South Africa’s traditional enemy in the present threat to its national security, they will be the last to discover the nature of the fraud, in which it is pretended that simple racist bigotry drives the conflict – and will continue to advance the interests of their enemy to the detriment of all Africans. Due to lack of access to efficient information, Mr. Zuma’s large and aggressive constituency fails to understand that those ultimately responsible for the deposition of South Africa’s president Mbeki in a communist Coup d’Tat had set a precedent by which Mr. Zuma could be got rid of at a day’s notice, on strength of any whim of the Mafia’s choosing. The government that Mr. Zuma’s constituency had deemed to be strengthened by the process had been put out of business.
Those who complain about the mess created by the ‘global meltdown’ should consider how things could have transpired under a global cartel regime, in which robber barons would conduct a rule of terror under a totalitarian regime of international communism, and in which criminality as a strategy of war would perpetually exacerbate socio-economic conditions in the interests of unconscionable Stalinist imperialists who scorn the very notion of humanity, yet abuse the mass media by blaming the market economy and democratic governments for the vagaries perpetrated upon the world by powerful concealed criminals who collude with international communism.
There, I have stated the theme for my blog with requisite conviction in this introductory section. The phrase ‘Kynge Artur is Nat Dede’ must serve as a metaphor for the market economy’s resilience, thus to strengthen its case against those who would profit from continual exacerbation of socio-economic decay – a destructive dynamic long practiced with great success in Africa, a continent suffering from the additional insult of representation by concealed, malign manipulators of the global mass media as being entirely responsible for its own destruction. The vagaries of that martial dynamic reached Great Britain with the advent of the New Millennium, and have now reached the USA.
Christianity is under siege from a covert global force making a bid for world domination. The Western media are a very large part of the problem.
