Perception

"Perception keeps our lives in chaos. Our perceptions are legion. We have numerous perceptions about any given subject, and for the most part they are all terribly inaccurate!"

I saw this quote today in a book I am reading, entitled "The Lotus Still Blooms." First, I saw the word legion, and I thought of course of the legions of readers who are always waiting with bated breath to see my work here. LOL. After I got over that shock, I did get down to some serious contemplation, and I was struck by the truth. The truth in the quote and how it relates to the world. Now, before you haul off and go, here is another northeastern douchebag from a liberal arts college struck by some vague notion of "truth" in a book about Buddhism, recognize that I actually did partake in a Pilgrimage in Japan, and that I harbor no axe to grind against Catholicism, the religion that I was born into. The truth that I see is absolute only in how it applies to life that we currently face. Warren Buffett once wrote that, in the short run, the stock market is a weighing machine. In the long run, it is a voting machine. This year, in his annual letter, he referred to the derivatives markets as venereal disease. Print it out and look at page 17 of the printed PDF if you don't believe me. It's true...in that you don't only have to worry about who you partner is but also with whom they have been "in bed."

I could say here that, in the financial world, our perception is diverging farther and farther afield from reality. If someone else wrote that though, I would scream CLICHE. I mean, we're wrong. We're all wrong. No one knows anything. The system is set up as follows. There might be private investors in the world who would be able to see a "solution" to the current crisis. So, it would logically follow that there would be so much money that they could make that they would be motivated by their own self-interest to do what they could to execute on that idea. Capitalism at its finest. But, on the other side, there is the government with its complete ineptitude. True, in some cases, it had to act. But, how did it "save" AIG if the company is still losing 61.7 billion dollars in a quarter. No, there is some element there of "they don't know what they're doing." And, there is another element of "we don't know what they will do next." Combine those two, and then ask, why would any private investor do anything at all? I can't see any reason. If they did, there would be no certainty that the rules wouldn't change tomorrow.

And so, our perceptions function to keep our lives in chaos. Government seems to perceive a need for more and more and more. The private sector perceives a need to wait for certainty. Both are interlocked in somewhat of a death spiral that isn't going to solve anything.