Yet, this week, the financial world both in the UK and in the US achieved a milestone: the peculiar mixture of positively valued and negatively valued assets upon the balance sheets of our quickly failing banks— an unsteady blend which might be seen as “ambivalent”—is to be split. The split, into “good” banks and “bad” banks ( here the British label is more consistent with the Kleinian sense of “bad” object whereas the US term “aggregator” calls to mind our Rambo/Terminator tradition). Presumably, this will allow the goodness inherent in our current banks, presently duking it out against the rising tide of asset toxicity, to emerge virtuous and productive, cleansed of badness.

In human development, this split of conjoint goodness/badness, held in tension within one entity, would be seen as regression to an earlier, more primitive era. That’s where we seem to be headed: barter anyone?

So, I wonder, as I have not seen the full explanation of how bad banks are slated to operate (does one deposit to LOSE money? Does one invest in the surety of writeoffs?) what the market for bad banks will be. One thing for certain, given international finance and the human desire for more—- the good banks will not remain virginal for long!

Opposing knowledge were the final days of 21st Century Weimar: thousand dollar bottles of champagne at over-priced exclusive clubs for the finance teams that had worked feverishly to bring in the deals; private plane chartered to international soccer matches; hob nobbing with C-Suite bankers in the Colorado snow; wind surfing off the most perfect secret spot in an undisclosed South American country.

The secret was that bad debt was spreading virally throughout the world, as bankers and investors gobbled up its dubiously rated super secure ratings. The speed with which merger and acquisitions had to be consummated in that final year, meant little sleep. And the terrific profit margins for lenders that had typified the growing generation of risky debt, began to diminish rapidly. Yet the players could not withdraw because their organizational roles required that they continue to play. If one bank refused a deal, then another would take it; and reputation was at stake. Standards loosened. Yet, while personal reflection of participants within the context of psychological business consultation was focused right on target, nothing of this was permitted in the workplace because the goal-determined purpose of the work required a uniformity of belief in corporate alignment. And this was affirmed in industry alignment.

Slowly, the clients I knew, began to revise their career plans. They were paid well to leave, either to pass the baton or to close up shop. Remarkably, the knowledge underlying their individual anxieties became lost to their work organizations. So that when the larger societal world caught up with the dilemma, the organization could truly claim ignorance: not only had knowledge been off-limits, but also those who knew and couldn’t say, were no longer around. Incentives to stay demanded the ignorance of the group; and incentives to leave made sure the group’s ignorance could be validated

We believe in Mr Market, as we believe in bankers and advisors who guide us and entice us, because, despite our education and the availability of information, it remains exquisitely hard to know what to do to grow our savings and so insure our financial stability. So we declare ourselves adherents of the long term or the short term, the day trade or of buy-and-hold, of value, of growth, of dividend and price-to-earnings. We advocate shareholder rights although we have no idea of the secrets that the balance sheet contains. And now, our harrowing experiences of mark-to-market have been traumatic: a condition which shuts down thinking instead of generating a tolerable loss from which to develop understanding.

So our crisis is larger than the S&P and the Dow: it is a dawning recognition that our lives are balanced on belief, warranted and unwarranted, in systems and the performances of individuals playing roles in systemic drama.

We must save and don’t know what that means, really, as the value of currency erodes and prices increase. We seek counsel to guide and to soothe. And our counselor looks to his colleague to affirm that he’s doing it correctly; and their company looks to the practices of similar organizations to affirm that they are doing it correctly. And because we are focused on our own fragility, we hardly notice that we are, ourselves, playing an input role within a system for processing wealth from broker to firm to industry.

We disconnect our wealth from our anxiety as we plan prudent action. And we disconnect our prudent acts from their uniformity with others’ similarly rational acts as we place our trust in those advisors we believe know more. And we chose not to see the pressures under which our advisors work, to affirm to ourselves that they are better than the rest — which means, that they must participate in a common culture of commerce: but of course, do it much better than others, because we are choosing them and we demand the best. Our first condition is not understanding, but thin belief, based not upon conviction, but upon our own exaggerated illusions of understanding.

Most of us take aspects of the cultures that are lived by us for granted. And under the current shock of economic reality, we are in a place of panic rather than reflection. Yet the underlying dynamics of the situation which took us here— us and not the bankers and brokers— requires consideration. We have relied on shortcuts to knowing about personal finance—as we’ve assured ourselves that the sales assurances of our vendors have been objective. Mostly, though, we have ignored how bound within our economic and commercial systems we have been as our self preservative instincts have sought false security. We have traded careful thought in managing risk in relation to our own needs for the temporary illusion of having made the same wise investment decisions as everyone else.

The continuing penalty for a move of this magnitude is that every other day during the work- week, she must move her car. It is a tradition called “alternate side of the street parking” – a daily time period when the City may choose to clean the street; but never fails to ticket aggressively. What this means for my neighbor is a reshuffling of her time. As if time were not sufficiently tight, she has now necessarily committed to “special time” with her automobile — whether as a quick trip to a distant grocery, or in quietly grading her undergraduates’ blue books or in simply catching up on unread magazines—while observing the parking rules.

We met yesterday in the elevator, as the entire neighborhood seemed to scurry from their vehicles: the period of penalty had lapsed and there was a communal sigh of relief: Free for the weekend! Free til Tuesday morning! She told me how she’d spent the hour plus and THIS is the heart of the story:

Her high school aged son, spending the week in attendance with his father, across town, had prepared her the night before for the mission: he wanted my neighbor (whose tenured university post required impeccable literary skill) to proof read a term paper on AIDS between 10AM and 1PM, when it was due. My neighbor beamed that her parenting had been successful. Her 17 year old acknowledged that she still had skills useful to him! The problem was that her Wi-Fi had not worked in the car. While her laptop had sufficient charge for use throughout the alternate side of the street period, she’d not been able to download her boy’s e-transmission!

Past her initial Baby Boom techno-panic, she had coolly reassessed the situation. Firing up the laptop, she fished out her first generation i-phone (for some reason able to apprehend transmissions from the ether) and read the AIDS paper via i-phone. Silently thanking her High School typing teacher, she transcribed the entire ten page document, correcting dubious grammar as she went, while sitting in the driver’s seat. She was dashing off to download her flash drive into her home computer to beam the paper back to her son, now cross-town at the private school paid for with fungible resources from alternate side of the street parking!

The point? We Baby Boomers are often ridiculed for inability to navigate today’s techno-environment. But my neighbor’s ingenuity in linking i-phone, e-mail, laptop, Wi-Fi, flash-drive, and alternate side of the street parking rules is simply a single example of our adaptive prowess.

What I’m getting to is that blogging friends a few years younger (pushing the limits of Gen X) have explained to me that the back-and-forth of blogs is singular in forging a community of discourse. But in the month or so that I’ve been blogging, I’ve found that an alternative route also exists: multiple new friends have e-mailed me about blog-posts, leaving the choice to “post” their comments up to me. Perhaps this is a Baby Boom thing, but it feels very genteel: the response to the Blog is personalized, through e-mail, and the communication is therefore private. Its publication is negotiable, therefore, between the two parties within the communication. While perhaps a bit unorthodox from the perspective of Blog hegemony, it attests to a creatively humanizing use of our media. Rock on!

Like making the correct small decisions in daily life (from garage to street), it’s a lovely development to note!