(This is Part 2 of a 2-part article. Go back to Part 1.)
Sometimes societies fall under the sway of totalitarian regimes. And occasionally such totalitarian regimes can last for centuries, as with the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire and so on. But even there it's all inherently self-correcting. Even the most powerful and repressive empires do go extinct, to be replaced by new life, new freedom.
Indeed, it's the very power and repression that bring about the rise of an empire that eventually also bring about its downfall. The empire falls into greed, corruption, excesses of all kinds. The very mechanisms which allow the empire to hold onto power become the very instruments for its downfall. This is all part of nature, and nature is always inherently self-correcting.
In finance, credit bubbles build up and then must inevitably burst, like a balloon that has been blown up too far. The slightest thing can cause it to burst. In a credit bubble, almost every asset is simply someone else's liability. Your money in the bank, for instance, is simply a liability of the bank. The money isn't there; only 3% or so is kept; the rest is loaned out.
This time the credit bubble, or we could call it the debt bubble, has been building since the 1930's, and in some respects since the 1780s, and in other respects since the Renaissance. It is gigantic, the largest in history both in absolute and percentage terms. Thus the resulting depression will be the largest in history, lasting far beyond the rest of our lives.
Yet these cycles of boom and depression are also self-correcting. The resulting contraction of the debt bubble (what we call a "depression") removes the excesses and corruptions and over-extensions and brings everything down to its base, a stable foundation from which another great expansion can begin.
Thus all depressions are self-correcting too, because they actually create the conditions which allow the new expansion to have a solid foundation from which to arise and flourish.
Look at the body. It is constantly correcting excesses in hormones, sugar levels, emotional neuro-transmitters and thousands of other things; indeed, that is how it keeps you alive. Yet even if the excesses are too great and the body dies, other bodies take up the cause of Life and carry on. Life is spread out over billions and trillions of separate units, so that as one unit does another is born, but Life itself is unextinguishable.
This is our universe, always self-correcting in all respects and at all levels. It is infinitely brilliant, infinitely compassionate, infinitely remarkable.
Look at our computers now. It is so difficult to build some small degree of self-correction into them, and yet the universe has this quality everywhere. And even computers will have it to a remarkable degree someday, for that is the nature of this mysterious and sublime existence that we inhabit.
—jim sloman, for 7/10/02
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