If you like the way I usually juxtapose funny pictures with funny rants, today will be a disappointment. Gotta be serious for a minute. Woke up this morning with a special kind of headache - a hangover from Wall Street protests and a lifetime of binging on symbolism.
Most of what follows is pretty obvious. Actually all of it is. But after all the words, you get a picture at the end.
"Economy" and "people" are obviously not the same. "The Economy" only stands for how much wealth (not just money, but wealth) is changing hands at any given time, regardless of whose or how many hands are involved.
"People" is just people.
The purpose of the Economy is to serve the material needs of people, like the purpose of the Law is to protect people. The Economy can't do this if it is receding, or shrinking. Sometimes it can't do it when it is growing either, if that growth is channeled into the service of a few at the expense of many.
The Economy's health or recovery is irrelevant if people's lives are not improved. If the Economy is improving the lives of a few at the expense of many, it has become an instrument of oppression. And if the Economy is costing people their lives, it has outlived its use and needs to be destroyed.
The purpose of the Economy is to serve the material needs of people, like the purpose of the Law is to protect people. The Economy can't do this if it is receding, or shrinking. Sometimes it can't do it when it is growing either, if that growth is channeled into the service of a few at the expense of many.
The Economy's health or recovery is irrelevant if people's lives are not improved. If the Economy is improving the lives of a few at the expense of many, it has become an instrument of oppression. And if the Economy is costing people their lives, it has outlived its use and needs to be destroyed.
Let's not make the classic mistake of thinking the symbol is the reality. This whole economic structure is an abstraction, a symbol for the exchange of goods and work for money. We call the exchange "Capitalism," another abstraction people commonly take for granted as a concrete reality. And the money is yet another abstraction - a symbol of wealth, i.e. goods and work.
Sure you can see and touch money in many cases, but you can see and touch a crucifix too. And what's a crucifix, if not a symbol?
When the symbol or the abstraction is mistaken for the reality, really important things are forgotten, with disastrous consequences. When "Freedom" takes the place of people's freedom, people are imprisoned or killed for the sake of protecting their Freedom. When "Spirituality" takes the place of spirituality, it becomes a set of turgid laws that kills the spirit. When "Law" takes the place of the law, the people it was meant to protect become its human sacrifices.*
Just think of the reasoning behind the American Major's decision in Ben Tre, Vietnam, to "bomb the town in order to save it." What is a town if not the people and physical structures in it? Same sort of thing happened there. Confused a symbol with reality.
I like to say that Capitalism is a Religion. It has all the hallmarks: rigid doctrine, revered doctors (i.e. writers of doctrine like Keynes), fanatical devotees, and people willing to kill for its ideals. Let's not forget the firm belief that it's the economic system of choice of God Himself... which could just as well be a thin cover for personal preference.
By Religion, I don't mean a community of people bound together by love or a common approach to spirituality. That's religion. I'm talking about Religion as the empty dedication to forms and structures that - without love as its source and destination - leads ultimately to its own nullification. But not before it damages people's lives.
(If you wanna have some fun with religious idiocy, click here).
Back to the Economy.
At the time of writing (10/01/2011), a CNN/ORC poll (which I hate to quote, but it's a good symbol) has just been published that announces "90% of Americans Say the Economy Stinks." I'm guessing most of them haven't even considered the philosophical implications of the statement.
Apart from the fact that it's physically impossible for a an abstraction to stink, I'm inclined to agree. The Economy stinks like food gone bad - to the point when it would kill the eater, or sicken with a whiff. Like a reanimated corpse that continues to walk around, ignorant of its condition.
Recession? Try collapse. Try whitewashed tomb. Maybe try looking something in the face instead of reading its name over and over and over, thinking that will expose its face. All this talk of invigorating the Economy will help no one. This Economy has outlived its use. What we're hearing now is the death-rattle.
Don't get it twisted though. Symbols are good. I wouldn't be writing things out if they weren't. But these written words are symbolic of spoken words. Spoken words are symbolic of the ideas behind them, which are, in turn, interpretive symbols of the reality that shaped them.
Symbols only become harmful if mistaken for reality. Unfortunately you can only say "Reality." You can't say reality.
*And
don't get me started on "Theology," literally "God-Word." How
sufficient can human words be to reduce the
foundation of the universe to a judgmental old man in the sky? We need a new word for it. But
that's a whole other thing... One of my biggest pet peeves.
**Thanks to "montominco" for the zombie pic.
An example of Religious abstraction and its damaging effect on people:
ReplyDeletehttp://alufaq.com/pakistan-newly-converted-ahmadi-muslim-martyred-al-ufaq-the-horizon
While I decide whether or not to write a full response as a partial devil's advocate (I like a lot of this entry, but I am also a relatively recent convert to restrained capitalism from my old doctrine of socialism)
ReplyDeleteI have to say, it's entertaining to see Keynes mentioned as a revered writer of Capitalist doctrine. How times have changed.
From the 70s until very recently (as in, TARP and President Obama's various bailout plans), Keynesian thought was the one neoliberal (the then-predominant Uber free-market) economists tried to distance themselves from. When it was first coming to prominence in the aftermath of WW2 it was denigrated as being nearly outright socialist because of it's emphasis on mixed economies and encouraged a larger role for the state in mitigating the effects of economic turmoil.
I'll also just put a quick one out there:
ReplyDelete"The Economy" is by it's very nature a permanent work in progress. Marxists like to believe that capitalism will continue to go through crisis after crisis until everyone dons coveralls and wipe out the aristocracy.
They're partially right: It's a given assumption in mainstream economic thought that capitalist crisis are periodic and inevitable...the questions for decades have been how best to weather these slowdowns and manage the inequalities that spring up, because despite the ups and downs the quality of life invariable rises anyway.
But they're also partially limited in their belief by the inability to account for changes in our relationship with the market....the idea that we can find what Germans call the 'Third Way', where we enjoy the freedoms and huge quality of life benefits of a free-market system while maintaining safe guards to ensure that our quality of life doesn't suffer when the system hits a slump. The mixed-economics of Keynesian thought.
The advent of social security, unemployment, welfare, long-and-short term disability, government funded medical insurance, government sponsored post-secondary education, and laws to protect minimum wages, maternity and paternity leaves and working conditions (not to mention international organizations to stabilize and limit serious shortfalls) are all mixed-economic solutions, and they work: We're in, by many measures, the biggest slump since The Great Depression, but it is even today virtually unthinkable that people will be reliving the same hardships of the 1930s.
My point is that if things aren't already headed towards improving, they will be soon, and if we're smart we'll end up with better global banking regulations, a better perspective on the effect of reckless spending and debt, and a host of other institutions that will prevent this exact scenario from repeating itself.
Yep. If we're smart.
ReplyDeleteAppreciate the clarification on Keynes.
The funny thing about neo-liberal economics - as I understand it - is its use for determining where hardship will be, geographically. Not an expert by any stretch, but I gather it's one of those "We'll help you out now if you shoot one of your legs off first" approaches to 3rd World development. Is that in anyway accurate?