Description

Wall Street and the mainstream media are ignoring the true extent of the financial crisis and creating an illusion of stability. Every cornerstone of human society is in a crisis resulting from each person's egoistic attitude toward one another and the growing imbalance between people and nature. This pressure is producing a fundamental shift in human perception. People are coming to realize correction lies in fixing the system of connections among one another, and understanding the general, governing law of nature. Humanity can achieve reciprocity with this law either through awareness or through collapse. Dramatic changes in economic and social systems are underway to find future stability, but the American dream of endless consumption is gone and people are looking for more.

Transcript

TV Program with Dr. Michael Laitman
"20 Ideas"

"Wall Street Smoke Screens"

With participation of Seth Bogner

June 29, 2009
New York

Seth Bogner: Here we are, a little after a year after the financial crisis started: Lehman Brothers., everything's just going sideways. When I talk to all my friends on Wall Street (the hedge funds, different businesses, banks even, banks that are supported by the Government even), it's like nothing ever happened. Because the market went up fifty percent since March, everybody's like... It was like a bad dream.

Dr. Michael Laitman: But it's not. We can see that unemployment is rising, businesses are shutting down; they are going bankrupt. People can't pay for their houses, for their homes, and it's still going on. People are losing their jobs.

Seth Bogner: But why is it... It's just amazing to me that it's... The illusion that Wall Street is creating is so contrary to everything that's actually happening in the real world right now.

Dr. Michael Laitman: It's because money in the financial system has lost its true value. They're just playing with themselves and just inflating the number of dollars as if everything's working, everything is thriving, but actually... Because the money is not connected to life anymore.

Previously, for money you knew how many years you had to work to buy, say, a house, a car, whatever. Money was an apartment, a car, a certain amount of hours of work. Today, it's something you play with in a virtual way, in however they want. What they're doing has nothing to do with life. I looked at a very interesting, actually concerning, piece of data: the sea transfer dropped by seventy percent-the sea transfer.

Seth Bogner: It's funny you mention that. I was just in Singapore a couple of months ago. You saw-I think it goes for sixteen miles-nothing but empty container ships lined up. When you fly in, you've never seen anything so big in your life. It's probably the biggest thing that's on Earth, because it's not just one ship in a row; it's six, seven, ten ships wide, mile after mile after mile. You fly over it. And they're all high on the water, they're all empty.

Dr. Michael Laitman: Just standing there?

Seth Bogner: Now everybody's talking about China, and China is the new eight-hundred-pound gorilla. But how can China keep it up without the trade?

Dr. Michael Laitman: It can't do anything. We're just saying it. The media is working by following the Government, by the order of the Government, who agree that they just have to cover it up. The crisis is not going to go away; it hasn't gone away, it's continuing. It's like labor pains, there's a seizure and then you relax, and then another pain, another relaxation. And that's how it's going to happen. We're in a process of delivery into a new world.

Seth Bogner: The Government now has gone ahead and said, "Here, in the UK..." Well, in the UK they actually lost a lot of money, people lost a lot of money in banks. In America nobody's lost any money in banks yet. The Government has said they're going to stand behind everybody's deposit.

They're printing money like crazy. The dollar is still relatively strong because there's an inconsistency here between people viewing the dollar as the safe currency, but at the same time they're printing money like it's going out of style. I don't understand this; it just makes no sense to me from any financial standpoint.

Dr. Michael Laitman: No, but I heard about a new plan, that the Government is now going to repurchase the dollars. They want to repurchase five hundred billion dollars.

Seth Bogner: I haven't heard about this yet, no. But it's reminiscent of what Germany did when they re-priced the Deutsches Mark during the Great Depression.

Dr. Michael Laitman: Yeah. Well, look, from the perspective of Kabbalah I know only this: The crisis, in the end, is a result of our egoistic attitude toward each other. Until we change the connection between us in the global world, integral world, we have to be connected. We have to understand the system of connection between us, how nature is putting us, pressuring us towards balance.

If we don't change the connection between us to the right one, so it's really balanced and considerate, it's not going to go away. It's not a crisis on the economic level. We have a crisis in science and education, in services, in health care, in everything. Look what's happening with depression and drugs. It is a crisis within people.

Seth Bogner: Everybody is feeling it in some way, but I've heard you say before that you talked, saying that even after all this happens and the correction does start to occur, there'll still be banks, there'll still be financial institutions, there'll still be business.

Dr. Michael Laitman: But the business will have to shift to completely new methods. The banks and the system of connection between people will have to change radically. The businesses that are now closing down will not reopen.

Humanity doesn't need all those redundancies they created before. The dream of buying more and more and more, the American Dream of endless consumption is gone. People don't want it. People have had enough of these things, this surplus. They want something else. They want something that satisfies them in a different way than just money. Not just another car or another house, whatever. They've been through that satiation before in order to...

It's gone. The ego that's developing this from generation to generation isn't just growing, it's developing inside and now it wants something else. That's why you can see how the suicide rates, primarily in the developed world like Europe, where people have everything... Do you know how many people are depressed?

Seth Bogner: Did you read this thing about the telephone company in France, how they had, in one department alone, over one hundred suicides? It's mind-boggling because people just can't take the pressure anymore. There has to be a paradigm shift, obviously.

Dr. Michael Laitman: A fundamental shift.

Seth Bogner: Okay, so there's a fundamental shift that has already started occurring, people just don't realize it.

Dr. Michael Laitman: Yes.

Seth Bogner: Now, you have all these people, all these businesses, don't you think there has to be a massive crash?

Dr. Michael Laitman: No. I don't think they'll reopen their stalls again; there's no need for them. All the merchandise you saw, all the containers you saw before, for miles of miles of containers that are just lying there in ships, there's no need for them. What are they going to transfer? These are redundant merchandise; it's surplus.

What humanity needs-what it really needs-clothes, food, ordinary things: a house, a car... You need it all, but you need it on a normal level, on what's necessary for life. People don't want more than that. Today, people need a spiritual fulfillment. Our ego, our desire, has grown to wanting a little more spirit and less matter. You can see that.

Seth Bogner: When you think about that, though, as an American, America is a country that can be self-sufficient if they used less. America doesn't need other countries. We have oil, we can get more oil; they just discovered the biggest oil discovery they ever had in the Gulf of Mexico. We make enough food for ourselves; we can make clothes for ourselves.

Dr. Michael Laitman: No, no. Just like America was very happy to get rid of Iraq and Iran; and not to take care of the entire world, and not be the police officer of the world; and not wage all those wars in Afghanistan and all these places, it can't afford it to itself. Today, you can't lock yourself up in some country and say, "That's it. Those are my borders and I don't care about the rest of the world."

Seth Bogner: I agree with you, but I just see...

Dr. Michael Laitman: Why do you think it can be self-sufficient? You can't lock the country up, everyone understands that.

Seth Bogner: No, I can understand that, but I just hear people talking and I hear people saying, "Why do we need this? Why do we need all the rest of the world?" This is something that scares me, because I think it's this isolationism that could go the other way on us and take us down.

Dr. Michael Laitman: Yes, there's no choice. You're going to have to mingle with the rest of the world. You're going to have to give it a lot of efforts and put a lot of money into it, until you decline too, because the world is round, it's all interconnected. If you're not mingled in all that then you can't win.

Seth Bogner: When you say that we have to decline too, so we have to take our standard of living down to the rest of the world's standard?

Dr. Michael Laitman: No, no, no. It depends on whether or not the world connects in the right way among everyone. If they do, there'll be plenty for everyone. America shouldn't decline, lower, its standard of living; it can actually rise.

All the surplus things we've created in the world... If instead we go along with the balance of nature, if we know what an integral system is (which we are in today), what a global system is, where we're all interdependent; what's a formula of connection between us... Let's work according to nature, by the law of nature that's operating now. We need to study where we come from, where we are; and that's what our success depends on.

Seth Bogner: What do I say to my friends who are on Wall Street, the people that I've grown up with in business for twenty-five years?

Dr. Michael Laitman: They should stop being smart alecks. They thought they were above nature; they thought they could do whatever the want: to build systems out of thin air and make all kinds of plans for saving, for spending, for whatever.

They don't understand that they are within a law and that law pulls towards integralness, globality, mutual connection. If they don't maintain that law, they're going to collapse; they're going to end up in a crisis. Today we're at a point where, if we don't know the general law of nature and how to balance ourselves with it, how to achieve reciprocity with it, we're going to collapse.