The Unexpected Effect of Monnet on Money

Monnet's Brandy and Europe's Fate

For most citizens of the Western Hemisphere, this is a fascinating essay on the legacy of Jean Monnet.

It is certainly curious that the convictions of a person whose personality was set before WWI, would come to dominate European events 2 world wars and 100 years later.

This is all so foreign to US citizens - and various of the many details are both unsettling and enlightening.

Compare Monnet to Marriner Eccles. You have to wonder whether they ever met.

Monnet & Europe saddled with so much baggage?

While Eccles, FDR & the USA were so innocently free to get on with pragmatic responses to changing context?

The bigger issue seems to be how both zones are adapting, at what Adaptive Rate, and why the Adaptive Rates of both zones are fluctuating differently.

For comparison, one can't help but ask how many Australian citizens know much of, or care about, the cultural dynamics on the European mainland?

And, this brings up a question about Aggregate Tempo.

How much do any of us need to know about the spurious history of one another ... versus just learning - and then KEEPING - the habit of QUICKLY seeing how to coordinate new success, in any new, unpredictably varying context?

"Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore SELDOM ADOPTED FROM PREVIOUS WISDOM, but forced by the occasion."  Benjamin Franklin

Maybe FutureShock shows that we tend, in practice, to non-selectively over-weight ALL input from elders, in our currently accelerated cultural settings. Don't we need to be just as selective about which bits of elder-advice to keep, as we are about selecting which inventions to keep?

Since methods drive results, which methods might allow us to enter every new context with a fresh, unbiased approach to sampling both our emerging options plus the optional feedback/analysis/test methods we may use to achieve our next desired outcome?

Although it might seem harsh, perhaps Europe, and the whole world, would have been far better off if Monnet had retired earlier, or had been more quickly forgotten? :) Or are efforts such as Monnet's the historical norm, rather than the exception?

Or is Monnet simply unfairly remembered?  For example, was his regret of the unfair reparations against Germany following WWI mistakenly repressed? If Monnet were still here, would he be insisting that the MiddleClass be treated more fairly, across all of Europe, and especially in southern Europe?

There is no way to tell for sure? Yet it doesn't hurt to ask those questions.

It seems that Monnet's "Action Committee for the United States of Europe" and the later European Parliament reconstituted everything about USA democracy except Ben Franklin's famous "Table talks" - i.e., the crucial method which actually delivered the beneficial function, not just the constraining form.

"When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint. In like manner here, BOTH sides must part with some of their demands."

So far, most people in southern Europe feel that only one side, the Middle Class, is parting with anything. There will be no progress without fairness, regardless of which methods are employed?

Have we merely distracted ourselves with the topic of "money," while failing to adopt adequate responses to the demands of an occasion that is still ongoing, largely unchanged, since Monnet's youth?