I received a host of feedback and a couple of summons from last week’s column. They range from folks who understood the essence of the argument — that demand has to be sustainably created locally (generally those across the financial industry past and present got it intuitively) to sceptics who believe the fault lies elsewhere, including academics who only saw their corner in absolute terms and missed the context.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, talked about the dangers of fighting monsters lest one becomes a monster. “And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee,” he wrote wrote in Aphorism 146.
The subject of endless schools of philosophical debate, a solution to Aphorism 146 was to jump into the abyss instead of looking into it — not to find firm ground but to make the void your home. “Jumping into the abyss and accepting that there will be no firm ground removes the fear of falling into your philosophical death — a blissful weightlessness,” was Rene Descartes’ conclusion.
