"Immanuel Kant countered the conservative motto “Don’t think, obey!” not with “Don’t obey, think!”, but with “Obey, BUT THINK!” When we are blackmailed by things like the bail-out plan, we should bear in mind that we are effectively blackmailed, so we should resist the populist temptation to act out our anger and thus hit ourselves. Instead of such impotent acting out, we should control our anger and transform it into a cold determination to think, to think in a really radical way, to ask what kind of a society are we leaving in which such blackmail is possible .
Will the financial meltdown be a sobering moment, the awakening from a dream? It all depends on how it will be symbolized, on what ideological interpretation or story will impose itself and determine the general perception of the crisis. When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field is open for a “discursive” ideological competition – for example, in Germany in the late 1920s, Hitler won in the competition for the narrative which will explain to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar republic and the way out of it (his plot was the Jewish plot); in France in 1940 it was Marechal Petain’s narrative which won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat .
Consequently, to put it in old-fashioned Marxist terms, the main task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose as narrative which will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system AS SUCH, but on its secondary accidental deviation (too lax legal regulations, the corruption of big financial institutions, etc.) .
Against this tendency, one should insist on the key question: which “flaw” of the system AS SUCH opens up the possibility for such crises and collapses? The first thing to bear in mind here is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one: after the digital bubble exploded in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across the party lines was to facilitate real estate investments in order to keep economy going and prevent repression – today’s meltdown is the price paid for the fact that the US avoided a recession five years ago. The danger is thus that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one which, instead of awakening us from a dream, will enabled us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry – not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and the US interventionism in order to keep the economy running. Or, at least, to use the meltdown to impose further tough measures of “structural readjustment."