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“The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest,” Goldman’s Griffiths said Oct. 20, his voice echoing around the gold-mosaic walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose 365-feet-high dome towers over the City, London’s financial district. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all.”
via Profit `Not Satanic,’ Barclays Says, After Goldman Invokes Jesus – Bloomberg.com.
I didn’t believe this story was true at first — thought it had to be a spoof. But it turns out to be true. The great banks of the world have gone on a p.r. counteroffensive in Europe, and are sending spokescrooks in shiny suits into churches to persuade the masses that Christ would have approved of the latest round of obscene bonuses.
Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths explains it this way: that Christ’s famous injunction to love others as one would love oneself actually means that one should love oneself as one would love oneself. This seemingly baffling outburst by a Goldman executive in what appears to have been a prepared speech — someone actually wrote this, and thought about it, before saying it out loud — gets even weirder when one tries to figure out what could possibly have motivated this person, and by extension his employer Goldman Sachs, to make such statements in such a place as St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Because there are only a couple of possibilities, and both of them are equally unnerving. One is that they know how preposterous this is and are just saying this shit because they think enough people will fall for it that it will end up being a net plus, optics-wise.
I seriously doubt this and think the converse is much more likely: that they actually believe this to be true, or are trying to believe it is true, and by making the case publicly hope to persuade the world to see the light (and just maybe reaffirm to themselves in the process) and embrace the Orwellian propositions that greed is love and taking is sharing.
It’s not hard to imagine how they could actually believe this stuff. Absolutely the dumbest people in the world, always and without fail, are intellectuals. Anyone who has ever sat in with a bunch of Yalie grad students while they discuss Kafka– they’ve read every book in the world about him, right down to the nineteen different Marxist critical interpretations of The Castle, but it’s somehow eluded them that Kafka’s stories are funny — knows what I mean.
It’s a particular kind of mental disability. This is dumbness that doesn’t know how to connect the information coming in from their other sensory organs, i.e. from the outside world, to whatever flowery kaleidoscope of overwrought horseshit their professors sent hurtling on a permanent lifelong spin-cycle in their empty skulls back when they were eighteen.
We all go through the same phase at the same age and most all of us fall for more than a few dumb ideas in the same way. The difference is that most of us normal people end up having soon after to go out into the world, where we get rudely introduced to the fact that life is mean and unforgiving and confusing as hell and that if you try to go through it leaning on some neat, gift-wrapped package of intellectual theories given to you by some preening old clown in a cardigan, you will very quickly become ridiculous and incompetent to manage your own life.
You’ll notice it, your friends will notice it, the opposite sex will notice it, and certainly the meritocracy known as the capitalist job market will know it.
This is true in every case, with one big exception. If you happen to be a rich dweeb who went to the right schools and hung around with the same group of people your whole life, and those people actually run the world, well, then, you’re in the very happy position of having your own bullshit adolescent belief system become self-reinforcing.
You think that reality coincides with your beliefs because your beliefs are true, whereas in truth it’s because you spend all your time with people who believe the same nonsense you do, and generations of your cultural ancestors just happen to have built very high walls all around you fools to keep reality from getting in and spoiling things.
Nothing else explains people like Alan Greenspan and Megan McArdle and all those other idiotic Ayn Rand devotees, big and small, who continually go out there in public and flog pseudo-religious beliefs about the self-correcting free-market as a cure-all for anything and everything, even as evidence to the contrary rains down from the sky like volcanic ash. These people actually believe this shit and they believe it with the imbecilic ferocity of teenagers, even the ones who are 190 years old like Greenspan (who incidentally finally conceded a “flaw” in his thinking, but only after the entire world exploded and even all the reality-proof friendly data sources he had relied upon for his whole life told him his ideas were fucked), and it’s nearly impossible to get them to let so much as a sliver of their belief systems go.
There are lots of different varieties of evil in the world. On the extreme end of the spectrum you’ve probably got your Ted Bundy-at-Lake-Sammamish brand of evil, torturers and such, people who actually take pleasure in the suffering of others. You look at people like that and they defy rational explanation; you have to just chalk that up to the universe basically being a horrifying place where there’s either no God at at all or a God who’s just incompetent and/or explaining himself really, really badly.
On the other end of the spectrum, not nearly as evil comparably but still pretty bad, are people like this clown from Goldman. They lie to themselves and think up elaborate reasons to do the bad acts they were already hoping to do anyway. Some day, when historians finish peeling back all the different onion-layers of this financial disaster we’re living out right now, they’re going to find at the heart of it all this social Darwinist mantra wherein a very small group of overeducated twerps agreed to believe that stealing every last dime they could get their hands on was something other than what it looks and sounds like to the rest of us. That protective delusion was the first of the many luxuries they bought with all the money they stole, and see if it isn’t the last they agree to give up. What a bunch of assholes!
- Portions of Album Content Provided by All Music Guide © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC.
I think you have your scale of relative evils bass ackwards. How many people were killed and how much misery was loosed upon the land by Bundy?
Matt, another interesting piece, on a subject that I have been grapling with a lot lately. I grew up in an Irish Catholic house and in what others call the the school of hard knocks, but we Irish, call life. Darwinism was on full display in my rough and tumble neighborhood and I never doubted it, until now. Mind you, I am not ready to jump on the “save the whales” bandwagon but perhaps it’s time to revisit old assumptions. After nearly 30 years of working for giant conglomerates, I cannot say your assessment is wrong.
When I was six months old, President Kennedy was shot. Years later, I remember my Father telling me his still vivid memory of 1963. He said he was at work when someone came into his office and told him that someone had shot the President. My Father described how he just went numb and lifeless and how he couldn’t believe it was true because who would be crazy enough to shoot the President. He finished by telling me that, in fact, the day Kennedy was shot had never made any sense to him, how he could never fully come to grips with it.
So I am reminded of my Father’s story because I keep waking up in the middle of the night, anxious over the state of country, the political and financial crisis and how our children are going to survive it all. And, I too, cannot come to grips with it. I know people are upset. I know they’re worried but where’s the outrage? Where’s the unmitigated fury? For cry-out-loud America, you get more worked up when someone cuts you off on the freeway.
Let’s try to marshall up a little emotion here. Fake it if you have too. Tea parties? Are you kidding me? Tea bags, silly signs and pig noses – come on a ten-year old could do better than that? People should be protesting in the streets, pulling their money out of banks, picketing their local corrupt politician. Can we at least burn old copies of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street?” Maybe toilet paper a banker or lobbyist or two?
Seriously, where is the boiling point anger? Where are the search warrants? Where at the pajamaed clad executives being awoken by ten white guys in FBI jackets and perp-walked to jail? Where’s the telephone book thumping confessions? And, the latte sipping Wall Street types crying how everything was “Skip’s” fault? Come on DOJ, these guys will roll over faster than a spinning churro — our only problem should be finding the right “Skip.”
But nothing is happening. It’s as if we have all been drugged into benign semi-coma’s. Everyone’s afraid to make a move, to tell his boss to shove it, to tell his CEO to go fuck off and to tell Washington, that we cannot be bought by silly car for clunker programs, we cannot be tricked by health insurers writing legislation or rich country club types telling you how their 80 room mansion could be yours if you just worked a little harder.
I hear ya! I for one am madder n hornet! The way I see the State of Affairs, is that people aren’t hurtin enough yet. When they get truly and literally, hungry, then the caca will hit the fan. BTW people are just scared. When they have nothing left to lose they will fight. Oh and yes Big Pharma does a fab job of druggin up people so they won’t feel any anger. But they will once they can’t afford their medications. Thanks for saying what I feel.
Thanks for the ever-insightful reportage and analysis, Matt. The System (what used to be called The Establishment) is wholly corrupt and results in the following for consumers (we who used to be called citizens):
-Big Media = we are hypnotized & manipulated
-Big Education = we are either overspecialized/intellectualized or illiterate, same difference: unprepared for life
-Big Health = we have no health care
-Big Pharma = we are drugged up zombies
-Big Government = we have taxation without representation
-Big Business = we are constantly broke
If we go along with the System, everyone (except that good ol’ top 2%) becomes working poor
How to break free:
1. Wake up to what’s going on
2. Turn off TV and infotain “news”
3. Get riled up
4. Transform anger into energy for change
5. Stop being cogs in the consumer machine — reduce consumption to a minimum. Live better with far less need for cash. Stop buying the “convenience” of pre-packaged, pre-fabbed, processed. Cook your own food — then advance to re-learning how to grow and preserve it like our elders did. Exchange goods and services with friends and neighbors. Take the bus, ride a bike, or carpool. Whenever possible, do-it-yourself. Whenever you get a little extra cash, save it in a local credit union savings account or use it to pay off debt, never the stock market. Buy local. Keep doing everything you can to become independent of the System. As more of us figure it out, and become free, it becomes a relentless revolution. Lots of information and resources out there: search online for simplicity — self-sufficiency — self-reliance — local living economies. Laugh at the Evil System, they can’t fool us anymore!
VERY funny that Griffths felt ‘Jesus’ and the Bible could be evoked in the name of greed. I could quote in kind some of Tom Greco’s comment’s about banker’s. From his book “The End of Money and the Future of Civilization.” (2009)
“…The Book of Revelation is demonstrating the import on a spiritual plane of the elitist takeover: And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. (Revelation 13: 16-17)”
I guess that is how Griffths and banksters feel about the average person, and their degree of control over wealth…
I think we should take some of Greco’s suggestions on an alternative monetary/trade system, and opt out of banksters system.
…What was that about hell freezing over, Griffth?
Greetings,
The final comments remind me of a fundamental truth I have become aware of, the value of which is continually reaffirmed by simple observation:
” Nothing is more difficult to believe than the extent of the ability of humans to morally justify any, and all, of their actions, no matter how preposterous “
While I couldn’t agree more with your sentiments, these twerps did manage to successfully sell their beliefs to the public, the elected and most of the media.
When I take a royal dump on this guy’s grave I hope he tolerates the inequality of bowel movements as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.
The right term is ’snakes in suits’.
I think it’s a little unfair to pick on Megan since she is so D list and means nothing. A modern budget Marie Antoinette playing intellectual like the real Marie played shepherd. A more worthy opponent would be Geithner. OK I’m not on any list at all and will probably be living under a viaduct maybe near you before it’s over, but don’t hold that against me. Hell, I’m proud to never have had a profession. If you really must get involved in politics spit on a company man now and then. Key a Ferrari. If you don’t get that you don’t get it. I mean that in the nicest possible way.
“…when one tries to figure out what could possibly have motivated this person, and by extension his employer Goldman Sachs, to make such statements in such a place as St. Paul’s Cathedral.”
At St Paul’s Cathedral, Griffiths would literally be speaking to his “Peers”…normal folks (aka victims of the kleptocracy) don’t sit in those pews. This is where Chuck and Di were married. So don’t be amazed at his gall – he was probably in the safest place he could be to make those statements.
With money being the new god, it seems so appropriate to have the Man from Goldman Sachs addressing the worshippers at St Paul’s.
[...] Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone blog “The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest,” [...]
I was just wondering how Matt feels about his amazing giant- squid-sucking comment about Goldman Sachs making it into a Maureen Dowd column in The New York Times. As for Blankfein’s comment, it buggers the mind. Revolution, anyone? Although this from one older enough to have been a fan of MIKE Taibbi, so I’ll just stay behind the barricades, giving advice.
What’s with the bullshit anti-intellectual comments? So much more troubling is how you shout this stuff out like a Fox News guy, or a Tucker Max type frat boy, full of the belief that you and you alone know the brutal truth about the “mean and unforgiving” world! Some wisdom coming from a privileged prep school guy – I shouldn’t even mention the failed year at a Russian polytechnic!
So? Matt’s in a position to know exactly where these guys come from- He probably could have been one of them, but instead he’s exposing them. What exactly is your beef?
Great work Matt