Obama’s inauguration was transformative. Bolivarian Marxists climbing the telephone poles, weeping in the streets for the forthcoming “Si se Puede” handouts. This was Peak America, or rather the peak of the corporate United States as a global force for good. American has always been an aristocracy, an enshrinement of excellence and power, into a republican architecture highly conscientious of individual character and nobility. The United States began as an overthrow of monarchy and its metastasis in imperial central banking as the truer and higher form of aristocratic character, that each man would rise to embody that character with love, sovereignty, creativity and sentience. Now all that remained were broken principles as splints for a broken banking cabal, bandaged in reams of second-hander democrats.
It was a Lord Acton moment, in his letter to General Lee, Nov 1866:
“…Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”
All of us Americans know the feeling of our candidate losing. It surely wasn’t this. I hadn’t any affection for McCain, voted for Dr. Paul who we knew wouldn’t win. My candidate has always been Columbia herself. But we saw in this debacle an entire 60 years of failure, failure of our prior generation as caring stewards, failure of our institutions from journalism to the academy to capital allocators and king dollar itself complicit in the fraud. The glut of welfare and warfare and extreme housing consumption, of rebuilding Zhuhai and skirting Detroit. The deconstruction of the country’s capital. Did no one care enough about the future to plan for it? Was American culture just a pinata of global credit? Who do a people have to be to engineer this outcome?
When fundamentals are broken, rebuilding the fundamentals is the only option. To bring forward a contradistinction of something centrally positive and ennobling which the heartland had not been able to guard. A way for us to more deeply understand, support and capitalize the virtuous world around us, and link an ancient understanding of the transcendent individual within our own economic work.
As the post-modernist monetary ideology closed down our horizon, in my humblest of ways I desired to open it again. To bring back an appreciation of the transformatively beautiful in human endeavor and purpose, even if in a perhaps in a very difficult way.
A zen monk told me once, as I remarked about the beauty of the cliffside above the center, “that is your own beauty you are seeing.” What a remark that was that the moment rang painfully true. A moment of resolution like the quiet after MacBeth’s last stand, like the dignity and aware elegance of a Bach cello suite etched out from an organic instrument. It was not in least something like basking in my own precious specialness — completely the opposite. More like the body’s release of a harbored grandiosity. That we can be innocent bystanders witnessing the unowned beauty of our surroundings as though they were figments of our own selves, like an amazing, disembodied happenstance of nature. This resolution is only apparent when the “I” which claim ownership of it recedes. It’s not a cliché. Venturing to possess a thing so it will make you a more desirable object to your own self is something that, if we pay attention hard enough, evokes a physical pain in us. This pain is our instincts contesting it knows we are telling a lie. And we infer that those things and places around us which are ennobling are in a sense a kind of truthful homecoming. One a dark horizon of possessing, one an open horizon of creating and witnessing.
Personally, I love architecture for this reason. If you live in a beautiful building, that building becomes a means for you to understand yourself. Symmetry and proportion and light become ways of you proportioning yourself.
And markets, commerce and economics most of all, are no different. Architecture is more of a subsidiary to the study of economic purpose, rightly informed and with a clear-eyed view of the greatest possible future we individuals can imagine, bounded within a sense of elegance and a sense of beautiful meaning.
If we possess the awesome depth of the Humanities — of the cherished collected works of all who came before grappling with what it means to be a human being, then in our over-abundant age how did we dehumanize the market so profoundly? How did we deconstruct our capitalist instincts into an ideology of the dispossessed? Theirs the province of materialist coercion and violence. Ours the province of the beautiful and the true. How could we have been so mute and so craven? What were the objects to acquire through which we could regain our nobility and self-respect once again?
For what do we do in our work but act with a kind of resonance and proportion to what we have innately within us of the greatest beauty and meaning. When we ignore this resonance and proportion it can even physically degrade us. My dear mentor, a philosopher turned hedge fund manager, who nonetheless I was convinced would listen at night to the orchestral interweaving of market and company, lost his life to a heart attack.
It is my view that entrepreneurship is the best expression of a sense of meaning. And not to be flippant, but that at some stage a healthy PnL is just a hall pass to an expanding horizon of homecoming toward a deeper sense of transcendent potential. Perhaps this mentor had told me, as he observed my parents as artists who lived in the more noble profession than we did, that a strong PnL by itself was no pass to anywhere without an upstream sense of beauty. Those of you doing what you are supposed to be doing will not object to this.
Obama marked a popular turn to Machiavellian cynicism in which the world had been too peopled by r-selective, finite-game players. The American Order had been too successful, where collectivist short-termism had overtaken humanist roundaboutness. The result was more losses in the banking system than profits ever made in the history of banking, followed by the engineering that the next generation pay the bill.
Now we see millennials as rootless and even less able to mount the defense. And it’s no wonder: the American Order’s leftover global institutions have all conspired to disinherit them. But there is a moment when meaning dawns on you, when like a Promethean flame your calling is revealed from behind the occlusion of a darkening collectivist horizon. This moment when the transcendent and archetypal in you takes over and the coercive recedes like a lie you can no longer dishonor yourself to tell. Go ahead, it says, you have the right to enact what you see as meaningful and beautiful. Listen earnestly to what it tells you. You might just remember yourself again along the way.
And there is reason not to despair. There is a whole treasure house of value which is far more deeply real than the petty, second-rate bolshevism masquerading as culture these days. We possess spotlights from the past to help us in uncovering a sense of beauty which transcends. With architecture, with literature, with music, with the bastions of wisdom which ride high above cynical fads; which illuminate the path out of the cave, beyond the puppet show which pathologically holds violent takings as its prime directive. Tools which help reconnect us with our own instinctual genius. For when we see beauty in the world, it is in fact our experience of our own beauty within rising to our awareness.
Submission to an ideology of violent takings is submission to a new slave morality — that we are not worthy of our own instincts of human purpose. If we are ideologically compelled to relinquish our humanity for the sake of the state or a faddish collective, our humiliation will be complete and our only consolation is to more deeply enslave our neighbors.
The choice is simple. Do we seek to be able to live up to the love we are called to? Or do we want to denigrate love in order that we not be found unworthy of it?
-RC