In the long run, as Europhiles are constantly telling us, the
Eurozone will work perfectly when they've found the right acronymic
scheme. "In the long run," as Keynes once said, "we are all dead."
Beyond any dispute, we now know the precise scientific reason why the
Eurozone can't last. Because the Eurozone is in a particularly bad
crisis this week it's possible it won't last beyond next week. The
consequences of the Greek election on Sunday might be the last straw
that breaks the camel's back. Many of the large European investment
funds -- pensions, investment, hedge, etc -- are already fleeing
Eurobonds and parking their money in US Treasuries, even though the
latter are, in actuality (when taking inflation into account), paying
negative interest rates.
The Eurozone can't last because the dour, disciplined northern
Europeans -- the Germans, Dutch, Danes, Finns, Latvians -- are
psychologically as different as chalk and cheese from the laid-back
southern Europeans -- the Italians, Greeks and Spanish. How so? They
all have the same standard stock of genes, all laid out in strict
order along their chromosomes (otherwise they couldn't inter-breed).
They differ somewhat in the selection and balance of minor variations
within the otherwise identical genes (we can tell the difference in
appearance between the typical Finn and Sicilian immediately). They
will happily trade together (because both sides benefit) but they
don't like living too much cheek-by-jowl nor, more than anything
else, being governed by those who have a very different culture.
If they have the same genes, northern and southern Europe differ
greatly in the way their genes are selected when expressing
themselves in the living cells of our bodies -- in our body health
and our behaviour. Which genes are selected for this or that
environment? Which genes associate together on this or that
occasion? How long is a particular gene allowed to express itself
before re-coiling into its secure DNA helix? All these are the
result of small molecules that are of a higher order than genes.
These are called epigenes and have only been indisputably identified
in the last decade. If genes are the 'hardware' of our DNA, epigenes
are the 'software' which always controls the otherwise inert DNA. The
existence and sheer complexity of epigenes have already
revolutionized the pharmaceutical industry of the West and is rapidly
overturning almost everything that we knew hitherto about many
diseases, particularly those which attack in mid-life such as
diabetes, heart conditions and many cancers.
Besides predisposing us to this or that disease (and/or helping our
immune system to resist others), new epigenes are constantly rising
in our body cells according to the precise environment around us.
There's no internal decision-maker which supervises the epigenes. Our
epigenetic make-up is strictly according to the diets we eat, our
daily temperatures, how hard we have to work (and what type of work),
our social world, our rank order (via hormone levels) within our
group or neighbourhood (and deference to authority), the pollution
around us, the appropriate playfulness or seriousness of our culture,
and so on in the thousand-and-one ways whereby personalities and
cultures different from one another. In short, our psychological
propensities, broadly set by our culture, and more particularly set
by our parents, are as subtle and complex as our physiological
propensities to this or that disease.
Moreover our epigenetic settings are passed from parent to child, 50%
from one parent and 50% from the other. In our lifetime we can
augment some or not use some, and then pass the same condition to our
children. A particular epigenetic setting may take several
generations to reach maximum intensity; it may take generations for a
particular setting to die away.
If we could transplant a thousand Greeks into a housing estate and a
factory in Germany, they would be psychologically and culturally
German with a few generations. (And they would tend to have the same
mix of mid-life diseases as indigenous Germans.) Conversely, if we
were to able to transplant a thousand Germans into country cottages
and olive farms in Greece, then they would be psychologically and
culturally Greek within a few generations.
The bureaucrats and retired politicians who devised the European
Union and Eurozone by continuing to do what they're best at --
manipulating the punters in small stages -- should have read their
history books first. The only way a large land mass and a large
population with many different climes and cultures within it can
possibly become unified under a centralized budgetary authority is
either via a dictatorship or a full-scale civil war. That's where
they should have started in order to succeed. But neither another
Hitler (or Napoleon or Stalin), or Civil War is possible (we hope!)
because no-one would lend the money for armaments. Unfortunately, a
deluge of unrepayable debt is poised to fall on us sooner or later.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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