When reading about the dynamics of „The Economic Crisis“, its impact and causes, I have the impression that most contributors to the debate miss a crucial point. There seems to be a great need for the identification of someone to blame, someone who is responsible for the collaps of the markets. Now, responsibility implies intention, and intention implies free will. From my experience as an advertising professional I know that free will is amazingly hard to find in big corporations. This doesn’t mean that executive managers don’t know what they’re doing. They know what they are doing, but they don’t know why. They don’t know because it doesn’t matter as long as they abide by the laws of their corporation – with corporations being subsystems in the bigger system that we call „the free market“ or even „capitalism“.
Humans acting within systems unfortunately tend to forget that these systems are man-made structures that serve no other purpose than their happiness. Instead of shaping these structures for their own best, people accept them as unalterable. Thus the system becomes autonomous. Suddenly it has its own rules and logic, its own symbols, meanings and mechanisms, it forgets about ist goals and becomes an end in itself. This makes it possible that people can be very successful within the system, i.e. the corporation, while at the same time their actions are extremely harmful to others. As soon as we forget that systems like the economy, the nation or religion are a mere framework for human relationships and not absolute, we lose ourselves again in the depths of self-incurred immaturity. Even fighting "the system" means believing in it and contributing to its continuing existence. But if we manage to see the current economic crisis as a chance to challenge our own beliefs of what is real and what is not, we can actually emerge stronger than ever. If we stop considering ourselves victims to the systems we constitute, these systems lose their power over us. If we realize that we have everything we need and that we actually own the world, we can finally stop trying to win it. Greed is for people who feel poor. Do executive managers have Buddha-nature or not? Mu!
