Charging bull. Flickr/Sam Valadi. Some rights reserved.It was recently reported that a number of top world banks pleaded guilty to rigging the price of foreign currencies and interest rates. These included Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland. Here are some familiar faces carrying on the same old cycles of corruption and lawbreaking, with no recourse. Not much has really changed since the 2008 financial meltdown. Back then no one went to jail and banks were bailed out. At the onset of the Occupy movement, while protesters gathered in lower Manhattan, police put barricades around the iconic sculpture of the Charging Bull. The image of the guarded bull at the world’s financial centre captured the essence of the deepening global crisis; rapidly growing greed and ruthless aspects of humanity that are protected by those in power.
Some call it capitalism or neoliberalism, while others call it statism or corporatism. Whatever names are used across ideological lines, more and more people are beginning to recognize this oppressive force that tends to drag all into an abyss. The question of our time which engages us with the problem of this growing beast is the following: what is the dark force symbolized by the bull and how can it be tamed?
Perhaps this wild creature represents primitive animalistic parts of man that have become the shadow of current civilization. In Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, John Ralston Saul (1992) described how the west strove to conquer the savage within and that its conception of civility was defined by the triumph of reason in a “struggle against superstition and arbitrary power.”
