Charles Darwin's great principle doesn't just affect lions and zebras on the plains of the Serengeti ...
In 1937 the Russian composer Shostakovitch was intimidated by Stalin into inscribing the score of his Fifth Symphony A Soviet artist's practical, creative response to just criticism.
In a public humiliation worthy of Stalinist Russia, four leading (ex-)bankers appeared recently before a Treasury Select Committee in a demeaning charade of contrition over their failure to foresee and prevent the credit crunch.
This unseemly, populist spectacle serves only to deflect attention from the abject moral, regulatory and legislative failures of the establishment - the government, the opposition, the administration and their cronies in commerce.
The purpose of government used to be to protect its citizens from foreign thrall - to create an environment in which they could go about their lawful business; the purpose of banks used to be the protection of depositors' money and the supply of credit to the creditworthy.
In the UK the dictum became 'the purpose of government is to be re-elected', rather as the bankers' purpose became to increase their bonuses. Both of these objectives are understandable but have consequences that are ... undesirable.
And it is difficult to see how this culture might be changed. By analogy, most dangerous drivers can't be persuaded to change their ways until they have an «accident». The more serious the crash, the more amenable they are to re-education. Those that survive, that is.
When the present government bailed out the major banks, it showed that its instincts lie in the fix as opposed to the cure. The government opted to apply pain-killers to a broken arm to mollify the patient whilst hoping that the fracture would repair itself. This is unsurprising given that the deputy supremo regulator of financial institutions was a man who, as a banking executive, was closely involved in the unfair dismissal in 2005 of a manager who dared to point out the excessive risks his bank was taking. In banking it seems that it's not just the debts that are toxic.
The environment that selected for those individuals who neglected diligent behaviour in the pursuit of personal gain has led inexorably to this crash. This toxic environment is mainly due to government complacency, an interpretation it seems unwilling to acknowledge, preferring instead to pass the buck to the bankers.
If the government's spin succeeds in persuading us to repeat the feckless spend-spend-spend behaviour that led to the crash, it can expect only an even larger pop as the next bubble bursts.
The establishment may yet rue the day it decided to rescue such powerful and monolithic organisations and in doing so re-endow them with the capability to bring us all down.
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