These are secondary. Absolutely secondary. It’s not a financial system that is collapsing today, but a historical system. A structure is being razed, not a handful of forms, facts and details. A crisis of concepts of value in economics and finance is not an isolated fact, as it partakes of a general crisis on all levels of modern life. We live with too many abstractions, too many illusions. We’ve lost the ground beneath our feet. It’s not only the gold standard that has been lost, but any fixed relationship between our symbols and ourselves. There’s a gulf between man and his context. These expressions that you see have become dehumanized. Or, perhaps more accurately, they have become inhuman.

Take any of our institutions, ideas, attitudes, skills or shortcomings, take them one at a time and sound them out. You will notice that they ring hollow. Life has fled from them, the spirit has left them. Why? I don’t know why. The result, perhaps, of the abuse of intelligence. I’m not joking. We have made for ourselves a civilization based on intelligence as the basic value, and this is an expensive luxury and a terrible presumption. Between ourselves and life, we have posed ourselves as arbiters. That is a tragic conceit. We are nothing and it was Descartes who believed otherwise. See now how we pay the price, three hundred years later.

I fear the hour of the fools is upon us. Rather, I don’t fear it at all. I’m glad. Because I have seen what intelligence has done and where it has taken us. Now we turn back, penitent, embittered and with three centuries of weariness, heading back into the forests of foolishness and real life.

You can call that obscurantism. All the better.

*

He’s neither student nor assistant. He’s a professor of political economy. This year he’s teaching a course on ‘the concept of value in the history of economic doctrines’. His name is Ghiţă Blidaru. The boys just call him Ghiţă. He’s come from Munich or Berlin, I’m not sure which. He looks much younger than his thirty-five years. He has a long, drawn, asymmetrical face, with something shy in his smile and commanding, joined eyebrows. He speaks in an offhand drawl, interrupting himself at times with a ‘no?’ like a fiery full stop.

From today’s lecture, a passage that was just a parenthesis:

To be logical? To be logical is not, as is stated in our books, to think according to formulae and equations, but to think according to the essential nature of things.