Nov

6

TroyVictor's Homeric reference invites reflection upon markets and social order.

Why, when combined, do Iliad and Odyssey present the evolution of human mores as found in our markets of today?

With a study of world masterpieces, we see how Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey represent an eclipse of the “old order” by that anew: having been governed by contract, so guised, therein leading to servitude, we oppose with preeminence of the individual – represented by the ode’s central character, Odysseus.

Agamemnon raises his fleet to Troy by contract… All would honor and enforce Helen’s choice. Intent was then extended beyond marital rights at time of her suitors’ resolution. Thus we see how the four corners of a contract may be rounded by the scissoring malfeasance of human pride (or the Greek notion of hubris).

So too here with a president and congress, commissioning a secretary of corporate errands (Rubin) en route to private offices (Citi).

As the Iliad depicts the unfurling of flagged notions of men bound in strife, so claimed to be that strength of contract as law; though as likely leading to social and economic decay. The Odyssey celebrates that struggle of man as an individual, there chronicling Odysseus’s escape from both the madness found in the armies of men and their leaders’ desires for power; all to be purged with loss of his crew during the ensuing return trip to the sanctity of home and kin.

So too since have we with the “Crisis” this year past.

Perhaps the markets of today are not of Troy as found in the glories of exchange but in the ruins of what has been lost during the past ten years. The ten year war since fought, as if by contract among monetary and global centrists, who in 1999 achieved their commercial and depository banking union at the behest of investment banking tribes, with what we see today from the repeal of Glass-Steagall?


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