Digging for Meaning

  There was a crazy old lady who mesmerised the capitalist folks back in the era of cold war, with her emotional appeal to their selfish egos. She was successful because, she managed to turn cold selfishness into a virtue. She made usurpation morally palatable. She made individuality that destroys social fabric of communities, a morally superior choice.  While I understand her perspective coming as it was from a immigrant fleeing communist excesses, I don't understand today's people still seeking inspirations in the nonsensical steam-letting of an old woman whose grip on reality was heavily coloured and biased by narrow experiences and perspectives. Her name was Ayn Rand and she legitimised her biases by giving it a name - objectivism. One of Ayn Rand's most famous character is a certain 'John Galt' - a maverick engineer who  organises a strike among the world's smartest, most creative entrepreneur and artists and thereby - "stops the motor of th...

I live these days in a coastal city where property prices are only going up. I live in an island country where, the debt it owes is several times bigger than its revenues. And my mental reaction is to look at exit doors - be ready to flee, for the oceans are going to claim the land and capitalist vultures are going to claim natural resources - don't know which one will swoop in first, but to me, it seems inevitable. And yet, I see optimism around me. Maybe others know something that I don't know. Or maybe, I know something that they do know but don't want to acknowledge? I tried to understand their source of optimism. Maybe, I was wrong. People are buying real estate at insanely inflated rates, expensive cars and so on. At first I thought that not everyone is an idiot like me who doesn't have too much into savings. Perhaps these are people who have some form of savings - either from inheritance or perhaps they can negotiate better salaries than I do. Something's...