I don’t glance at the stocks in the morning paper, as I don’t read horoscopes. There is a saying in Dutch, and there is probably a similar one in English. Niets is veranderlijker dan de liefde’, meaning there is nothing more fickle than love. Anyone who has ever tried to give advice to a person who has problems in the realm of love, or anyone who has ever had heartache and has had to listen to other people giving them their well-meant advice, will understand the simple truth of this saying. Tomorrow everything can be different. Tomorrow, or in ten minutes, or after one sms, for that matter. Love is not rational, and love doesn’t depend on you alone[i]. Because of this you cannot invest love, you cannot trade love, and you cannot store it, because you simple cannot trust on love to be consistent. This makes love as inexplicable and worthless as it makes it essential, and I don’t mean to generalize, but everyone, none excluded, desires it. This desire for the inexplicable is an intrinsic part of the human condition, and, I and many, would argue, one of mankind’s primary motivations. Religion is also an example of this. It is utterly human to want to believe in something beyond understanding, to explain something the unexplainable, giving human reason to something ‘higher than human. The existence or non-existence of a Creator really isn’t the question, but rather the point around which essential spiritual wonderings of mankind rotate. Too bad that money has replaced god from the 19th century on, and too bad that the accumulation of wealth has replaced God’s love in the 20th .[ii]In the 21th century, prognosis is probably more important than reality. It seems obvious to me that money is the new God, that money’s flux in the international financial market is as fickle as love is, and that both are as beyond reasonable explanation as they are essential for mankind’s modern condition.
I am just kidding of course. There is no such saying in Dutch; I was just talking about the weather.
\S.D.
[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Pavese, see his book: This business of living, diaries 1935-1950.
[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism.
