Carl Gustav Jung stated that “[t]he pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” It’s important to note, however, that while these concepts are coterminal, they are hardly equivalent. On the other hand, in Immanuel Kant’s world in which reason is the fundamental authority for morality, perhaps the sense/nonsense and right/wrong continua should at least intersect at some point. The pendulum metaphor finds application throughout human endeavor, whether physical or metaphysical. A normal heartbeat is represented by a sine wave, or sinus rhythm, a familiar representation of a cycle. We view our economy’s cycle with alarm, noting our place in the trough, while hoping for an amplitude shift that will evidence improvement. Human nature is such that we believe that things will improve eventually and the cycle will continue. In fact, in humanity’s relatively brief history, it always has. The worst of times have always been followed by something better. The $64,000 question, of course, is “how bad can it get before it gets better?”
I can remember when I was a young adult, signing a mortgage to buy my first home. The New Orleans Housing Authority, or some similarly named agency, had issued bonds to fund an offering of low-interest home loans at 7.5%. At the time, home mortgage rates were averaging 10%, and I assumed that the 6% 30-year mortgage rates of my parents’ generation were a thing of the past, never to reappear. Mortgage rates eventually rose above 16%. The intervening 30 years have given me a new perspective, as not only have rates risen and fallen with alacrity, but creditworthiness itself has assumed a widely varying significance in the lending process. (I submit that no one saw that taking a cyclical route, but there’s that sense/nonsense masquerading as right/wrong.)
There’s an old adage that holds that bad news comes in threes. This is an approximation, of course, although things do seem to go bad all at once, and conversely seem to get better all at once. This is a cycle, although one wonders if trouble creates an aura that attracts other trouble, a la Joe Btfsplk, Al Capp’s apocryphal character with the dark cloud hovering overhead. The value of the adage, though, is that, after three, we begin to expect things to get better, or at least to stop getting worse.
I grew up in New Orleans, and watched the city’s decline with the firm belief that once things got bad enough, they would have to start improving. The pendulum kept swinging, and then began defying gravity, as if influenced by a mysterious electromagnetic field. How could it keep swinging so slowly and inexorably in the wrong direction? Katrina hit, and the only silver lining to that dark cloud would be its upset of the status quo. The pendulum would have to swing back, from nonsense to sense, from bad to good, wouldn’t it? Little did we know that the mayor had entered the Twilight Zone. The swing of the pendulum would be delayed further. Meanwhile, the wheels of justice began gaining traction and crooked politicians were convicted, despite promises of “honorable explanations.”
Does this portend that the pendulum has begun swinging in the opposite direction? Has the amplitude shifted? Has the cycle turned? Who knows? All we know is that if it hasn’t, it will, and this is what keeps us going. We hope, and we believe that things will improve. We find ourselves waiting for the signal that the economy is improving, and cheer the news that things are getting worse at a decelerating pace. Why, if this continues, things may stop getting worse altogether, a necessary precondition for things to actually start improving. I’m reminded of Winston Churchill’s remarks after the Allies first decisive victory of World War II, at El Alamein, to-wit: “[n]ow this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Here was a man who saw the pendulum’s swing as inexorable, but kept it in perspective. Churchill also said “[n]ever, never, never, never give up.”