March 4, 2009 / Read The Latest Article By The Brotherhood Press How Do You Spot a Hao lian Temasek Scholar?
Tell me could Temasek and GIC have done a better job in outperforming the markets? Was it such a good strategy to put so many of our chips on banks? Was the melt down foreseeable? Is it true to say, paper losses are just paper losses? What about profits then; could they just be paper profits as well?
You know what? I dunno. As these days, the MSM seems to be very evasive about the whole idea of delivering news – content is definitely king even if it resembles the idea of bottling Himalayan air – but if you want to know more, then perhaps you can check out these excellent links to gain a deeper understanding of the salient. Go on blow your mind out.
GIC’s Conversion from Preferred to Common Marks the Beginning of the End / “2008 Was a Year to Forget” – 2009 Probably will be One to Forget, Too / How did our SWFs manage to invest in the 3 worst performing CDO issuing banks??? / UBS Tax Fraud Makes Lee Kuan Yew Look Like a Dufus Dumbo
But that is not the point of my essay – that’s really just the garnish. My main dish is a boney fish – question: why is it so hard for elites to admit they screwed up?
Why is it so hard to come to terms with the most basic human quality: fallibility? Some people say it has something to do with the whole idea of run-away train ego – I don’t buy into that crappy logic as no one in his right mind is going to go the full nine yards just for ego sake alone – I mean no one, not even the Shah of Iran had the stamina to bear out the naked truth – at some point most people will just make peace with their mistakes and move on as best they can.
There has to be something more to the whole business of denial. From my personal experience the vast majority of ordinary folk don’t suffer from denial syndrome – if they screwed up, they just come clean, most of the time, at least. Like when I once went out with this girl who was really into organic food produce – she thought I wasn’t getting enough beta carotene into my system; so she started lacing all my food with carrot everything behind my back – one day when a colleague remarked I reminded him a bit of a jaundiced yellow AA tow truck. I just said to her, “look what you’ve done to me? I trusted you with my gut and look what I’ve turned into?” And she just came clean and that was the end of that.
My point is there is absolutely no mileage in going straight up against the unsavoury truth especially when it’s coupled with irrefutable evidence – taken to its extremes – digging in and taking a not-one-step-back defensive position only exacerbates the situation; as all too often it comes across as a form of intransigence and that’s bound to create a impasse in the psyche of those who seek to understand – result: it squeezes out all prospects of forgiveness, healing and hope for reconciliation.
Again why do elites find it so difficult to come clean when they screw up?
Most of us know there’s no profit in dealing with a mistake by sweeping the facts underneath the carpet or dumbing down the facts. Neither does it pay to ignore the evidence and hope with time no one will remember and all the evidence will just disappear.
Again why is it so difficult for elites to come clean when they screw up?
I guess one reason why elites feel the need to sell the charge of light brigade as a sound enterprise is they have invested so much their raison in the myth of infallibility – never mind that most people don’t see either the exceptionality or value in the whole proposition of how if good wins over bad its simply because of the whole idea of a few good men; that’s what happens when the idea assumes the end rather than a means to an end – the show simply has to go on for better or worse, right or wrong.
One clue why most of us perceive a dissonance (real or imagined) is because we don’t have much trouble making out those gaping fault lines – where myth gives way to inconvenient truth. But once you’re in gyre – its not so simple – the line of sight gets cloudy; periphery vision narrows. Result – you only see the world the way, you want to see it.
That in a nutshell is what elitism excels in embellishment – it matters little whether it’s the idea scholars are the most reliable people or perpetuating the departmental claptrap there is an acute scarcity of talent – observation even suggest elites aren’t really elites in the true sense of the word – otherwise why aren’t they regularly making the red carpet walk to collect the Nobel prize every year? I mean if you want anecdotal gold standard proof then it doesn’t get higher than that, unless you can convince the rubber dodo bird award happens to be a higher standard for individual and organizational excellence.
Like I said, it matters little whether it’s the Samurais who once banned gunpowder just so they could perpetuate their class politics by nurturing the cult of the sword; or the Manchu’s who developed the art of loosing arrows from horseback to monopolize a valuable skill-at-arms to allow them to assert their hegemony – my point is at some stage; the whole idea elitism gets so ritualized and stylized that form eventually supplants function so completely that it ceases to be a reliable way to deliver excellence; that’s when it becomes so sclerotic and sedentary that it can only be worthless – if you are wondering why ST cannot seem to find the entrepreneurial imagination to prosper in the digital age – wonder no more, there you have it the reason in the palm of your hands – if you’re wondering why the Lehman bros, Madoff’s and Satyam’s of this world took an ignominious swan dive – there it is again.
In every single case without even a single exception; the myth i.e ONLY a select chosen few can be entrusted to be sole purveyors of goodness played out to deadly effect – and the post mortem all revealed, none of them even so much as considered looking twice at the error of ways to even consider changing course to avoid disaster – its a sad, sad tale.
Its suggestive; something akin to slow acting poison must have played out to make it all but impossible for elites to even come to terms with their own failings, limitations and need to reinvent themselves – tragic realism it seems, requires them to insist on their version of rightness even when everything goes down the chute – but what’s even sadder is not because it serves the imperative of the truth and greater good; but rather by that late stage in the game; the die is truly cast and it conceivable; they may not even control the system any longer; as much as the system owns them lock, stock and barrel to even demand of them to insist on their version of the truth, at every oppurtunity and turn – and with that, the last stanza can really only read like the last flight of Icarus; all that remains now is the epic fall from grace.
It’s game over.
Darkness 2009
