The paradox of blackmail

Wolfgang Schaeuble, the German Finance Minister, yesterday declared that he would not be blackmailed by anyone (presumably, in this case, Cypriots) only to say in the same sentence that he must do everything to preserve the euro (and its rules). You do not let yourself be blackmailed by actual people but are quite happy to be straight jacketed by a made up financial mechanism.

This is, of course, a very common pattern in our human experience where 'abstracts' become more real than actualities. Plato called it 'sophism' - the tendency of the human mind to prefer its conceptual frameworks rather than the hard task of continually creating 'notional' responses to the world as it continually presents itself to our embodied minds, to people in action.

Ideally, we should be fashioning and re-fashioning the rules to meet the demands of actual needs as people. Currency was made for man not man for the currency (where have I heard that before)!

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The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

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