Debt, Division, and Distraction
How a forgotten economist foresaw the crises we’re repeating today
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
— T. S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock
In 2025, global debt hovers at levels unseen since the Great Depression. Inequality has widened, civic trust has thinned, and leaders continue to speak of prosperity as if it were permanent—echoing the optimism of the American economist Irving Fisher, who, just days before the 1929 crash, famously declared that “stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Fisher was one of the brightest minds of his generation, yet even he mistook the peak of euphoria for the dawn of stability.
Amid this same cycle of overconfidence and denial, one long-forgotten economist and banker—Felix Somary—offered a vision that proved prophetic. His writings, dismissed in their time as gloomy, now read like dispatches from the future.
A Mind Formed in the Crucible of Empire
Felix Somary (1881–1956) was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and came of age in Vienna—a city that, like our own age, shimmered with progress while trembling beneath it. It was a place of dazzling innovation and deep division: Freud was charting the unconscious, Mahler was rewriting music, and economists like Menger were redefining value, even as nationalism, propaganda, and inequality corroded the empire’s core. The old imperial order resembled today’s global one—technologically advanced yet socially brittle, cosmopolitan yet tribal, confident in its future even as it sowed the seeds of its collapse.
Unlike today, intellectualism in Somary’s Vienna carried social prestige. Argument was not noise but nourishment. Propaganda existed, but reasoned discourse was still possible. In that environment, a seventeen-year-old Somary published a paper on Austrian corporations that drew the attention of two intellectual giants—Luigi Einaudi, the future president of Italy, and Karl Menger, one of the founders of modern economics.
Somary later recalled the encounter in his memoirs, The Raven of Zurich:
“Right after leaving the Gymnasium I had written a paper on corporations in Austria and in it outlined the transition from pure speculation to investment. The little booklet aroused a certain interest: in Italy a young professor, Luigi Einaudi, later to become the country’s President, gave the work a searching critique. At the University Karl Menger, the leading economist summoned me and talked to me about its contents and a number of questions arising from it. I described to him the evolution of my thesis: the disproportion between a great empire and its limited financial capabilities in Spain under Charle V, and the then dependence of the state on individual private fortunes - to the modern trend in which private fortunes are totally dependent on the state.”
That observation—the shifting balance of power between governments and individuals—would guide him throughout his life. Somary understood that who depends on whom for money, whether individuals depend on the state or the state on private capital, reveals much more than an economic arrangement; it reflects the deeper condition of a civilization—its values, its balance of freedom and control, its capacity for independence and innovation.
The Raven in an Age of Euphoria
Somary’s career spanned the convulsions of modern Europe. He managed Austria’s wartime finances during World War I and later became one of the clearest voices warning that the postwar credit boom and punitive peace treaties would end in catastrophe. During World War II, while representing Swiss financial interests in Washington, he earned the nickname the Raven of Zurich—a dark bird of warning amid the false dawns of prosperity.
Like the mythical Cassandra, who foresaw the fall of Troy but was doomed to be ignored, Somary was both respected and dismissed. His contemporaries wanted optimism; he offered realism. His memoirs, written after witnessing two world wars and three economic collapses, read today as both history and prophecy. From them, six lessons emerge for understanding our age of debt, division, and distraction.
1. “You are ignoring the lessons of history.”
Somary repeatedly lamented society’s forgetfulness:
“We, who in the beginning warned, were derided as money-monomaniacs… condemned as pessimists.”
A century later, the pattern is unchanged. Global debt has swollen to unsustainable levels; asset prices rise faster than wages; governments promise permanent growth through borrowed money. Post-COVID inflation, speculative bubbles, and political denial would have struck Somary as eerily familiar. History, he would insist, is not a museum—it is a mirror. When societies stop learning, they start reliving their mistakes.
2. “Monetary policy is a Faustian bargain.”
For Somary, interest rates were not technical levers but moral signals. To manipulate them was to tamper with society’s natural rhythm of prudence and reward.
“The danger comes when the authorities interfere with interest rates… The crash will come from the gap between appearances and reality.”
The illusion of control is the oldest temptation in economics. From the 2010s through the early 2020s, central banks institutionalized near-zero rates and quantitative easing. The result was predictable: inflated asset prices, widening inequality, and a generation convinced that debt no longer carried consequence. When inflation returned and rates rose, the illusion collapsed. Somary would have called this what it was—a reckoning with borrowed time.
3. “War follows economic breakdown.”
Somary understood that war is rarely born of ideology alone; it gestates in the soil of despair and debt.
“War is the child of bankruptcy.”
Banking collapses such as Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 were not isolated failures but early warnings of deeper fragility. History shows the same rhythm: when internal cohesion frays, nations often seek unity through external conflict. From the Great Depression to the Cold War, economic strain and military buildup have walked hand in hand. Today, with record defense spending alongside record deficits, the pattern returns. Ignoring economic reality is often the first step toward confrontation.
4. “You are mistaking complexity for stability.”
Somary had an instinct for fragility disguised as sophistication.
“The government is the fence that separates the zoo of wild animals from the outside world…”
The modern economy resembles that zoo—vast, intricate, and interdependent. Supply chains stretch across continents; markets move at the speed of algorithms; artificial intelligence now trades, recommends, and governs faster than we can think. A single disruption—whether a geopolitical shock, a platform outage, or a viral rumor—can cascade through the system in hours. Recent years have shown that what we call “resilient” is often just “unbroken so far.” Somary’s message: complexity without resilience is fragility in disguise.
True stability, he argued, rests not on scale or code but on institutions capable of absorbing shocks—on humility, not hubris. In our TACO age—the “There’s A Clip Online” mentality, where every problem seems solvable by a viral, tech-mediated fix—Somary would have reminded us that civilization’s strength lies not in what it builds fastest, but in what it can endure.
5. “Wealth without culture is a trap.”
Somary believed that economics was downstream from ethics.
“If the curse of ‘Party above family’ should hit our country too, how should we try to bring up our children?”
He saw clearly that prosperity without moral cohesion leads to decay. In 2025, as social media amplifies outrage and anti-intellectualism erodes trust, the same warning applies. Civilizations collapse not only through invasion but through the slow rot of cynicism and division.
Somary would remind us that wealth unmoored from culture—or from labor itself—is a gilded trap. Outsourcing production and thinking money grows on trees, indulging in endless consumption of energy through crypto or speculative markets, all create the illusion of prosperity while ignoring effort, responsibility, and consequence. Growth detached from purpose, work, or ethical grounding is a gilded shell destined to crack.
6. “You are mixing up technology with salvation.”
Somary admired human ingenuity but distrusted technological messianism.
“The danger is not the machine, but the illusion that the machine will save us.”
Today, we echo that illusion through faith in AI, cryptocurrencies, and frictionless digital finance. These innovations dazzle but often distract. They promise progress without discipline, efficiency without ethics. As in the Roaring Twenties, mechanical brilliance masks moral drift. True transformation, Somary would argue, begins with virtue and vision—not with code.
And here enters the most modern of Somary’s prophecies: distraction as decay.
In our era, distraction itself has become an economic force. The attention economy fragments civic focus and monetizes outrage, leaving societies too overstimulated to think long-term. Somary would likely see this as another form of debt—an intellectual one—where we borrow attention from the future to indulge in the noise of the present.
The Raven’s Prescription for 2025
Above all, Somary would remind us: crises are not unique—they repeat.
So where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Wisdom, he would argue, is the discipline to see patterns before they become crises—the courage to act against convenient illusions, and the moral clarity to prize long-term stability over short-term comfort.
Knowledge, by contrast, is what we accumulate when we study history, understand institutions, and learn from our own mistakes.
Our entertainment-driven culture is rich in data but poor in discernment. We have charts, forecasts, and endless metrics—but without reflection, without critical self-examination, both wisdom and knowledge vanish.
Somary’s life reminds us that neither is automatic—not even in an age of artificial intelligence. They must be cultivated, practiced, and defended. If we fail to do so, we will pay the price—not only in markets and politics, but in the slow, quiet erosion of civilization itself.
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Compelling how those 6 laws seem to be at their extreme position of late. Indeed, quite foreboding but at least I won't be blind sided. Thanks Wendy for another new lesson.
I think that the worst possible destiny would be to be reincarnated, over & over, as an Economist. A broken wheel with a lop-sided roll. Because apparently we just never learn 🤷 How Humanity stores "value", our Wetware, has been suborned, twisted, devolved as it distilled, become toxic.