Accounting is beautiful. And so, I start my blog.
I was an accountant before, a counter of beans, and have weathered the unseeing condescension the modern public showed the late profession. It was an attitude of forgetting, if not ignorance.
Though safely neutered, professional Accountants were instituted as public protectors, the High Priests of Mammon’s Leash … if it were ever sincere.
Maybe the cultural disrespect for the profession allowed it to sell out. Nobody bothers too much about pencil-necked accountants and other geeks now lost in the shadows of the bestial psychopaths so much more adored.
The profession is very different these days.
Fraud gave us Writing
Accounting predates writing–the troublesome skill was invented, after all, to keep control of inventory and trades. The sonnets came later. This dual purpose–theft-prevention and financial control–has survived throughout the ages because these needs have never changed. Of all their guises, humans have been most durably criminal.
No Need to Be Nice
One of the things that makes Accounting beautiful is that it doesn’t depend upon the truthfulness of others. In this world, that’s a very lovely thing. You don’t need an admission to detect fraud.
If you follow the rules and do the diligence for variances, you can, tentatively, sort of verify whether the books are sound or not. Cooperation isn’t needed; accounting has tremendous power to channel commerce. You can keep things tied down … in theory.
Accounting and the modern world
Accounting’s big contribution to the modern world was the ‘double-entry’ concept, which was invented and refined in the 13 & 14th centuries (in both the East and West).
This system produces two entries for each financial transaction, which can be totaled separately and checked through a summary record called a Balance Sheet. Detailed records can be established through various instruments such as journals and ledgers. It’s gorgeous!
Sound Accounting is, or seemed to be, a gift to govern our economy and lives. It gave us a way to keep the fire contained.
Except for the Control Fraud
I just wanted to give Accounting its due as a modern tool, not for finance, not for business or government: to to keep us from drowing in world-devouring fraud.
Now, I’m not saying accounting does this, or that it isn’t a shockingly corrupt enterprise bundling us all toward destruction–it totally is–only, it doesn’t have to be. It sold out, that’s all.
So the chaos could have been avoided. There’s room on the ledger for hope.
It’s probably premature to say this: most people aren’t looking for hope so seriously yet. They act like they don’t even know we’re in an Accounting crisis.
It’s just bean counting, after all.