Because of all my pride, the tears I got to hide.

Apparently, the powers that be, have decided to replace the head of Edward Elgar with that of Adam Smith on the back of the £20 note.

I think I mind this very much.

The economist Adam Smith 1723-1790 is famous for many things. Not least, The wealth of nations. A huge tome of Political and financial Economy. These days, of course, he has a very right-wing think tank named after him.

One of the principle economic driving forces of the Thatcher years was the embodiment of Smith’s theories of Political Economy, brought up-to-date by the mathematics of Frederic Hayek. A hands-off approach to public issues that have enabled multi-nationals to gain their now (very) secure footing in Britain, eclipsing the state and deposing the established economic theories of John Maynard Keynes that grew out of huge world conflict.

Hayek’s theroies of political economy argue in favor of a society organized around a market order, in which the apparatus of state is employed solely to secure the peace necessary for a market of free individuals to function. These ideas were informed by a moral philosophy derived from epistemological concerns regarding the inherent limits of human knowledge. Goodness !

In 1763, Smith used the example of making of pins. One worker could probably make only one pin per day. But if ten people divided up the eighteen steps required to make a pin, they could make a combined amount of 48,000 pins in one day. Taken further in the 1920’s by Henry Ford in America, this form of utilitarianism and mechanistic production has come to dominate the western world and is best exemplified by the reduction of human behaviour and actions into small and explainable portions. Super-Capitalism is the result.

The private troubles ensuing from such public issues in the more micro world of human psychology suggest abberant behaviour in individuals, rooted in declining self-efficacy and subsequent mental pain, alienation and anomie are now treated as calculated and personal disorders by the modern psychologist and labelled by acronyms such as PTSD, ADHD and the like.

We are in a bad state because of this.

Conversely, Edward Elgar 1857-1934 wrote some of the finest choral pieces of music ever heard in the Western World. The music sours with emotion and majesty. His elegiac cello concerto for example, written after the death of his wife, exemplifies perfectly the emotional confusion of the human condition far more succinctly than any rational calculus of human behaviour based on self-interest characterised by the works of Smith and Hayek.

So then to private troubles….…..

My relationship with Thumper, characterised (as it is) by the routine and the mechanical, the everyday and the rational is a sad thing.

In my newer life, Pip represents everything that is passionate, loving and powerful. Her music and creative imagination is part of herself. She lets it be known these are important thing and in this……

She brings joy and laughter, tears and pain to the state of being that is myself. Long may that state continue.

JVIP