Faith in financial system may never be restored.(News)

BYLINE: Andrew Nash

Much of the discussion around the current global economic crisis begins by asking: How long will the crisis last? When will the economy (or the stock market) hit bottom? When will the turnaround come? Above all, when will things get back to normal?

These questions are misleading in that they suggest that the normality that led to the crisis was stable and benefited everyone. The answers given to them are often less than honest. The turnaround has been announced many times, but not yet come. We can expect it to be announced or predicted at regular intervals, and there will surely be periods of greater stability. But these predictions are made to encourage us not to ask about what caused the crisis, whether it can be fixed, or is worth fixing. Instead we should hold on until things are back to normal.

But is there a way of getting "back to normal" again? The normality that was ended by the subprime mortgage crisis in the US depended on confidence and trust in the financial sector that may never be restored. Too many supposedly deep truths about the place of the markets in human life have been exposed as shallow lies, and too many people are being made to suffer the consequences for them simply to believe them again.

Recent discussions of the economic crisis have often reminded me of South Africa just after the uprising that began in Soweto on June 16, 1976.

At that time, I was an Honours student in the now-defunct Department of Political Philosophy at Stellenbosch. I also worked in the building shared by the two philosophy …