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We spend our lives amid furious collisions of outer and inner imperatives, energies, agendas. Finding our personal thread amid this plethora of cables, knots, and networks is our task, and is especially the mission that psychoanalysis undertakes. While the corporeal eye is seduced by the world of appearances, mere facticities, invisible energies govern that visible world, which is why it is so difficult for any of us to become wholly, or even partly, conscious on a sustained basis. Every life is an enactment of stories, the sum of which is our biography, our résumé, our epitaph. But the story we tell ourselves, or others, is only the story of which we are conscious. Our more enduring, more pervasive stories rise from deep, very deep archetypal matrices, genetic predispositions, cultural forms, intergenerational messages, sundry reflexive, reactive readings, and acquired defenses amid a world essentially unknowable, sometimes hostile, from which we do not escape alive. Nonetheless, we are called to achieve personhood—to contribute most to others by becoming who we are, and standing for values that matter in this world, whatever the obstacles history provides us.
What Matters Most
James Hollis
Anywhere else, the trust that underpins the financial system—the trust between the public and banks, and among the banks themselves—would have eroded long ago. But in China, financial stability is based not on the relative health and good management of the banks but on the widely held belief that the government will always intervene whenever necessary to ensure the stability of the system, a belief based on Beijing repeatedly doing just that. In most economies, government intervention is typically limited to changing interest rates and printing money. Beijing, however, is far more expansive in its use of state power. When the stock market collapsed in 2015, Beijing stepped in, deploying all the various powers at its disposal to stop the rout. It mobilized a group of large state-owned firms—what became known as “the national team”—to buy up huge volumes of shares, and they set themselves up as buyers of last resort. Ultimately, they spent about 1.5 trillion yuan to stop share prices from falling any further. Fund managers were pressured to only buy stock and not sell. Television and radio stations were instructed to soft-pedal their coverage and to avoid using harsh words like “slump” or “collapse.” People were arrested for “spreading rumors” relating to the stock market. When Caijing, one of China’s premier financial magazines, reported that the national team was planning on winding up its intervention, the journalist who wrote the story was arrested and, while still in custody, made a televised apology. “I shouldn’t have released a report with a major negative impact on the market at such a sensitive time,” he said. “I shouldn’t do that just to catch attention which has caused the country and its investors such a big loss.” Therein lies China’s strength. No one questions Beijing’s commitment to maintaining stability. Beijing’s willingness to use all the tools at its disposal—whether telling state firms to buy shares, or molding public opinion—has traditionally made the prospect of China’s experiencing a financial crisis seem fanciful. But this is also China’s Achilles’ heel. With financial institutions safe in the knowledge that Beijing is providing a safety net, the system has grown bigger, more complex, and riskier. Moreover, and more disturbing, sometimes Beijing does lose control.
China's Great Wall of Debt
Dinny McMahon
“Long-term thinking levers our existing abilities and lets us do new things we couldn’t otherwise contemplate,” Jeff wrote. “Long-term orientation interacts well with customer obsession. If we can identify a customer need and if we can further develop conviction that that need is meaningful and durable, our approach permits us to work patiently for multiple years to deliver a solution.”2 Key word: patiently. Many companies will give up on an initiative if it does not produce the kind of returns they are looking for within a handful of years. Amazon will stick with it for five, six, seven years—all the while keeping the investment manageable, constantly learning and improving—until it gains momentum and acceptance. The other key is frugality. You can’t afford to pursue inventions for very long if you spend your money on things that don’t lead to a better customer experience, like trade show booths, big teams, and splashy marketing campaigns. Amazon Music and Prime Video are examples of how we kept our investment manageable for many years by being frugal: keeping the team small, staying focused on improving the customer experience, limiting our marketing spend, and managing the P&L carefully. Once we had a clear product plan and vision for how these products could become billion-dollar businesses that would delight tens, even hundreds of millions of consumers, we invested big. Patience and carefully managed investment over many years can pay off greatly.
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
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