Circle of life, circle of blame

There is nothing like a crisis to elicit that remarkable human deftness at laying blame and dodging it. Skill in the blame game, one supposes, helped our forebears survive group life ever since climbing down from the trees and venturing out onto the savannah. More than one must have escaped banishment and an early death—maybe even achieved prominence—by convincing the others, “I didn’t anger the gods and bring disaster; he did!”

Recent pronouncements about the storm in the financial markets fathom the complexities little better than our distant ancestors understood why floods raged or rivers dried up. Most, in essence, are variations on the age-old blame game, their targets the usual suspects of modern-day America.

Those greedy Wall Street bankers. Those speculators shorting the stocks. Those quants “playing with fire” with derivatives no one understands. Those clowns in the White House. Those good-for-nothing legislators. Those stupid regulators caught asleep at the switch. Those deregulators who let their cronies party on as the bubble inflated.

But maybe this flurry of finger-pointing obscures an inconvenient truth—that nobody really understood the size and fury of this storm until it was fast upon us.

Maybe derivatives, like fire, can help us when used well. Maybe greed on Wall Street could not have flourished without greed on Main Street fed by politicians wanting their constituents to own homes whether or not they can afford them. (Happy homeowners make good voters.) Maybe the guy in the White House has good people on the case. Maybe a rush to regulate the bad guys will succumb to the law of unintended consequences beyond our shores.

In the words of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Only when we remember that we live in a complex, intertwined world in which we all have played a part can we cooperate to save ourselves from the storm.