A run on our values

In spite of weeks of efforts, the fires have broken out again in Australia, while in the US banks and industries cry out for yet more funds to be poured on the financial conflagration. As of yet there is no end in sight to the real or virtual firefighting.

In the smoke and confusion, masks and helmets hide faces, and heroes and villains cannot be distinguished. Was one of the "volunteer firefighters" in fact an arsonist? Were all the "honest brokers" running a global Ponzi scheme? Do bankers now deserve their bonuses for their rarity, their brilliance and their farsightedness? Should brave firefighters relieve their stress with a cigarette on their breaks?

No doubt for his sharp-suited cool as he does battle in the face of great odds, the US president is being called Double O-bama these days. But sadly this may also be because US popular culture is demanding a slick hero right now.

We all want a hero, and we all want someone to blame. It's so much easier that way. We are all just Mr., Mrs. and Ms. Normal. We weren't watching when the banks started selling things with no actual existence. We didn't read the contract before we signed for the loan. We didn't know we built our house in a high-risk zone. No, we were on holiday, we were shopping, we were watching Big Brother, we bought it from someone else, we were doing something else, we weren't paying attention. Someone else is to blame. Someone rich, someone fashionable, someone poor, someone foreign. Someone Other than us is to blame.

But, if it's anything like the films, right about now, the superhero should be arriving -- flying in from afar.

Yet, isn't there always something unreal, something fantastic, about the superhero story? Waiting for the hero in human form who will come and save us from what we did, from our own foolishness, we feel no need to analyze where we went wrong. Until he comes we can just carry on being foolish.

It may be slower, but surer to stop craning our necks at the sky and start looking inward. Maybe we could start by changing what is in ourselves.

We could admit that before the run on the banks, there was a run on our values. Even now, we worship and emulate the glossy but trivial little nouveau saints we gaze at, where they wobble on the media platform. We ask the inscrutable mystics in the financial institutions to intervene for us so we will get our daily bread. We carve our idols and paint them, then crack them, then carve them again. The grass is dry all around us, but we refuse to see the signs, smell the smoke, until too late.

Throughout the world, our continuous spending and borrowing is driven by the greed and the envy we feel at the images of those we have never met and will never meet. We desire the admiration of others, congratulate their excesses, and allow mockery and contempt for people of modesty, virtue and frugality. We lack patience. We want what we want right now. We prize people for the material things they own, respect them for the numbers they control. Almost without fail we have gazed on those who have more than us and disregarded those who have less.

The latest economic crisis and the fires in Australia are not something strange, alien or new. They follow the same tracks humans have laid down throughout our history. Periodically, there is a run on our values, a recession in our rationality. Then the rain stops falling and the grass grows dry, just waiting for the spark.

But as history also shows, if the underlying cause of a disease lies deep inside us, so does the remedy. Instead of looking for others to blame, we can join with them to build. Instead of looking for someone to rescue us, we can look for others to rescue. Some things are stronger than roofs or towers, vaults or walls.

What we can see now, after all, is never the end of the story.