A State of Psychic Despair in the Masses

One of Albert Einstein's (1879-1955) biographers, Walter Isaacson, once managing editor of Time magazine, America's continuing novel, recounts that the theoretical physicist, with the mad scientist look, possessed a strong instinct for individual freedom, a belief that democratic institutions must guarantee personal autonomy, and put himself on the line attempting to protect the liberties of all men and women. The 1921 Nobel Prize winner for Physics had to leave Germany for the United States in 1933 to defend himself, a so-so Jew, from the atrocities that were to befall millions of his fellowshe received a clear message to get out of Germany after Nazi thugs had ransacked his home there. His formula, E = mc, saved him from a fate that would not redeem many others. He favored two philosophers: David Hume was especially influential in making AE a consummate doubter and a stubborn analyzer; and, Baruch Spinoza, unfortunatelyif only AE had read more DH and less BS!induced AE to trust that it was without a doubt necessary to admit of the existence of an absolutely infinite substance. It is certain that AE would have easily fit into the company of JeanPaul Sartre and Bertrand Russel (his friend)two of the twentieth century's most illustrious philosophersand join them in their courageous efforts to eliminate war and suffering throughout the world. In fact, AE was a strident pacifist and promoter of a world government at least up until the Nazi regime began to perpetrate its vicious crimes against humanity. AE was not lenient with the German people, and he blamed the whole German grouping and not alone the madman Hitler and his staff. (Henry Miller, the German-American, said that a German makes the best American because he or she enjoys a physical independence in the United States that they cannot in Germanysurrounded on all sides by other sovereign states.) AE thought that the collective German consciousness was the prime mover for what had led to World War I and World War II, and we can be sure he would have agreed with the thesis Erich Fromm laid out in his classic work, The Anatomy of

Human Destructiveness. AE definitely was not an enthusiast of the irrational rationality of Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz (On War) and Niccol Machiavelli (The Prince). He did a lot more to effect world peace than many other physicists who escaped Germany to work on the Manhattan Project, and thanks to the paranoia of the FBI's Herbert Hoover, AE was not granted a security clearance which would have cleared him to participate in the construction of The Bomb of All Bombseven if he had desired to.

Shortly before Albert Einstein sailed for the United States for good, he commented, interestingly, on the European scene: There is a state of psychic despair in the masses. This foreboding, this there's something in the air, might have forewarned political leaders throughout the world about some impending catastrophe soon, then, to befall our planet Earth. And, if AE's dream of a world government had come true, all these united nations might have nipped the Nazi regime in its bud. Ante bellum! We are not prone to be so diligent. In modern times we are already reduplicating some of the errors then made and which brought forth both world wars. For the sake of clarity, I wish now to discuss two of these pre-war states of psychic despair that I have witnessed for myself on two different continents. During the intoxicatingly, capitalistically-maverick democratic years (1975-1985) when some Venezuelans binged on the lucre culled from the exorbitantly high prices of their liquid gold, I curried favor in an affinity with those profiting off my journalist experience, my rewriting of speeches and news reports for the Venezuelan government, and English classes for the families of mostly well-off Venezuelan business and government leaders. Venezuela was in the pink of graft and corruption and Caracas was their capital. A time when allexcept Venezuela's poorwere drunk on spending and buying. All you needed was a telephone, a telex, and a rented roomyour mini office. People were importing and exporting unrestrainedly. Whisky, cars, electronic equipment, clotheseven two snowploughs! If you named it, you could buy it. Venezuelans were so rich, they qualified to take out billion dollar loans in the United States and Europe which they still have not been able to pay back. The feverishness was so

overstated, my friend Fernando, a government official, came running into my office one morning at the Ministerio de Informacin y Turismo brandishing a copy of El Nacional with the new, higher posting of a barrel of Venezuelan petroleum, and blurted outhis eyes flooded with tearsfor all, including me, within ten kilometres, this Spanish squawk: We're going to fuck you gringos for good! Fernando could not forgive and forgetas millions of his compatriotsthe decades of exploitation suffered under the thumb of foreign oil companies. His hate was such that when I asked him, to calm him down, how he was going to go about fucking the gringos, he retorted: We don't know yet, but you can be sure we'll do it, gringo! Little did we know, at that time, a Hollywoodish actor was waiting in the wings of the White House soon to play his most important part, soon to bring down the curtain on the Venezuelan bacchanalia of the 1970s and 1980s. Pressure had to be applied to the Venezuelan economy gone berserk. After years of spending licentiousness by the Accin Democrtica political party, the new polity headed by the Comit de Organizacin Politica Electoral Independiente arrangement laid down the gauntlet with a bare-boned austerity contrivance that became the order of the day. The frenetic nervousness of living beyond one's means turned into a toned-down psychic despair which unnerved Venezuelans so much that it caused them to switch to a behavior, collective consciousness, characterized by incivility, short-temperedness, higher crime rates and unheard of violence. In the coming years, riots would cause thousands of deaths, but there never existed the threat of a world war in South America caused by the hostile nature of the once placid and somewhat pseudo-flush Venezuelan society. Venezuelans had been left to massacre and maim themselves: Tribuo quod victum. Sound familiar? It took me two or three yearsafter I had arrived in Montecatini Terme, Italy on 1 May 1983, anticipating the Venezuelan mini revolution by a good three or four yearsto realize that I had been plopped into another country gone hog-wild on a spending spree squandering money borrowed from international banking cartels. I was dumbfounded to see how Italians did so little to solidify the state of their schools, transportation systems, hospitals, and telecommunications networksjust to name a fewyet energetically occupied themselves struggling not to spend to possess but being possessed to spend. For almost forty years, Italians tallied up a debt of 2,000,000,000,000, and no one believes today that they will ever

find a miracle to pay off this enormous quantity, nor will the Italians even ever bring their economy into something resembling a safe haven. There now exists a rush to austerity which might have been rough-and-ready had it been implemented twenty years ago. It is too late. Italians, queasy and impetuous, know that very well. The party is over, and Italians have little to show for their decades of fiscal intemperance. They have been zombizied into a state of self-indulgence and self-satisfaction, and they have no idea how they might recoup their lossesor begin to do so. Their binge is evolving into a pending nightmare. A state of psychic despair in the masses exists in The Boot. Italians will not start World War III. They would shoot themselves in their feet before doing so. They have no one who would want to go on the attack with them. What they might do is fight amongst themselves. Already, Italy is divided in two: a racist belligerent north; a racist belligerent south. Social protest is now in the red danger zone. Another scenario is the possibility that Italy will forge an alliance with the other Mediterranean countries, Greece, Portugal and Spain all Roman-Orthodox Catholic adherents, all social groupings with not the minimum intention of refunding the billions and billions they have continually borrowed to live devil-may-carely for decades. World History has frequently recorded that the source of war is so often sparked by the friction kindling among opposing religious factions. Here we go again?

Authored by Anthony St. John 1 August MMXII Calenzano, Italy www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior