You construct truth or reality be telling stories, by labelling these stories with icons and metaphors that shine through the story and are the message or the essence of the story. We live in a world fascinated by tools and technology and symbols such as numbers and if you can decorate your story with such symbols, perhaps change the numbers into money signals, your story can be powerful. Economists are not considered the most poetic people but in a post-crisis world if you are an economist who can explain what happened and predict the future by mix of numbers and icons you will get audience.
I am reading the report Iceland as Icarus by Robert Wade. Economist can tell a story by using cultural symbols such as the story of Icarus, a greek mythology man who was the son of a master craftsman and the father made for himself and his son wings from feathers and wax. Icarus ignored the instructions he got not to fly too close to the sun and the wax melted and caused him to fall to his death. When I read the report it is nether scientic or poetic and the comparison of Iceland and Icarus is very hollow. Actually the story of what happened in Iceland is told from a very narrow perspective. And I do not understand why the metaphor of Icarus is used in the beginning…… except perhaps to tell in simple terms : Iceland was arrogant, did not follow instructions and therefore it was destroyed. Another metaphor of Iceland just after the crash was to compare it to the canary in the coal mine. One of coal mining’s earliest systems for warning of the presence of methane gas was to have a canary bird with them – if the bird died, miners had to get out. If you use the canary bird metaphor you are treating Icelands case as a warning for other countries, you are saying „beware of the gas“.
There is not doubt that a certain type of society was destroyed in Iceland with the crash in October 2008. Was it only a financial crash? I very much doubt that, I think you have to look at the national state and the structure of production and division systems in societies, division of weal th, division of freedom, division of information – information that is channeled in number/money systems that are not working. Perhaps it is the collapse of a state, collapse of a nation, collapse of a community build on power and trust and shared beliefs… that are not so much shared anymore.
While I think the Iceland as Icarus describes the situation correctly in some terms, describe how publicly owned and locally oriented savings and loan type banks were privatized and turned into gambling stations using retail deposit base and central bank‘s pledge of lender of last resort to speculate and also financed their activities with short-term borrowed money and the problems was partly that in order to fight inflation the central bank had set a high interest rate it was hardly the buying spread of common people in Iceland but more the influx of carry trade money used for buying spread of extremely few investors who went on a buying spread around the world. While high interest rates, capital inflow and overvalued krona were part of the problem it was not the core.
But I wonder how different a story will be that would tell the Iceland saga by Iceland as the Great Auk that never could fly, not the Icarus with waxy wings and not the caged canari bird. Maybe the story has to be different, it has to be told of a isolated colony that was well adapted to nature and the traditional ways but had no defence mechanism for outside preditors. Except the isolation. And when the isolation was not there anymore in a flattened world the collapse of the colonies was inevitable.
The Great Auk was a large flightless bird that became extinct. It bred on rocky, icolated islands. It was a powerful swimmer but it could not fly. It was clumsy on land. The last of the Great Auks was killed in 3 July 1844 in Eldey Iceland. In the end it was hunted because museums in Europe wanted a show off piece in their exhibtion halls and perhaps the Great Hauks colonies had to move because of volcanic activiy in the islands in Iceland, move to other locations which made them more vulnerable to hunters. The razorbill is the closest relative of the great auk.
