The three-headed beast of Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Karl Rodney Hegel Marx King...the Third

At one point in the history of philosophy, someone said, "We're all Hegelians, we're all Marxists." Well, that was bloody silly, of course. All is never anything except all. However, there are times when looking at an event from the perspective of a relevant system isn't necessarily a bad approach. Especially with the financial debacle that we're watching unfold, because the Hegelian dialectic really explains a lot. Not quite to the extent of explaining Ben Bernanke's beard, but close. For that, we need Occam's razor.

OK, to refresh the memories of those who've forgotten or those who never bothered to learn anything about the two greatest influences on philosophy in the 19th Century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was an idealist concerned with the way that the "Spirit" was making itself manifest in history; Marx was a Hegelian who decided that the spirit was bunk, and it was really all about the Benjamins. Probably, as a Tiffanyist both were correct. The basic premise of both thinkers revolves around the concept of the dialectic...according to -Wikii, a way of arguing and thinking that goes back to Socrates. Poor old bastard, all he wanted to do was get out of the house, guzzle wine and bullshit with his friends, and he gets the blame for everything. Hegel and Marx owe the common understanding of their approach to Fichte, another dreary German that nobody but Germans, and mainly as a punishment, bothers to read...

Hegelian dialectic, usually presented a threefold manner, was stated by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis, giving rise to its reaction, an antithesis which contradicts or negates the thesis, and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis.

Now, good old Jewish, middle class Karl took this one step further, applying the dialectic to everything that is and not worrying so much about the not-is. Marxists view dialectics as a framework for development in which contradiction plays the central role as the source of development. This is perhaps best exemplified in Marx's Capital, which outlines two of his central theories: that of the theory of surplus value and the materialist conception of history. In Capital, Marx had the following to say about his dialectical methodology:
"In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary. Engels, Marx's CFO and smarter watercarrier, had this to say about Marx's approach...A very simple process which is taking place everywhere and every day, which any child can understand as soon as it is stripped of the veil of mystery in which it was enveloped by the old idealist philosophy..."Probably the same gentlemen who up to now have decried the transformation of quantity into quality as mysticism and incomprehensible transcendentalism will now declare that it is indeed something quite self-evident, trivial, and commonplace, which they have long employed, and so they have been taught nothing new. But to have formulated for the first time in its universally valid form a general law of development of nature, society, and thought, will always remain an act of historic importance."

What has this to do with the fact that we are all soon going to be living in caves, eating leftovers from bears and having sex with woodland creatures? Well, the not terribly surprising news that the dying regieme of Twitshit de la Dweeb is modifying the "rescue plan" is a great example. To use a semi-Marxist approach, free market capitalism depends upon the desire for more along with a decent respect for the common good. Well, obviously there's a contradiction there. Watch most Westerns, where the desire for more trumps the common good; hell, in the most simple of the morality plays that are the great westerns/Samurai movies/detective stories etc. etc., the desire for more takes the concept of the common good, turns it on its head and butt fucks it with the barrel of a Winchester 76, after which the common good whimpers and scurries off into the corner.

Not terribly unlike what we're seeing here, of course. The big investment bankers are seeking more, as are the people who had this great idea of flipping houses in the continually expanding, always upward housing market, or the people who tied executive compensation to stock price as opposed to profit. Greed versus respect for the common good -- the idealism of a Hamilton versus the common sense of Jefferson. So, the regulation of Greed leads to increased profit for the greedy, who then want more than they can get with the regulations, so they work to undermine the regulations which results in the weakening and ultimate irrelevance of the regulations, resulting in an explosion of greed which causes the system to collapse. Followed by chaos, ending with more regulation than in the first case and the greedy licking their wounds...until the next time, when the cycle repeats. Quite frankly, there is a question that sums up human existence more succinctly than Hegel or Marx...Rodney King's "Can't we all get along?" No. We can't.

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