5fish
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Capitalism or Neoliberalism is our new religion. The Ferengi God is Our God... Its a good read...
In this story, people take on secular attitudes and values. They turn from community to competition. The sin of greed becomes the desirable trait of “self-interest” and the habit of devotion gives way to the quest for domination. Veneration morphs into venality. We ditch the old totems and taboos and work like crazy, trying our best to be thrifty and restrained so that we can accumulate wealth, now our chief focus. By the time we arrive at the 21st century, the neoliberal regime and its chosen institution, the global corporation, are bringing us dazzling products that promise to meet our wants and needs. The system may be rapacious and exploitative, true. We may often feel twinges of unfulfillment and uncertainty, yes. But that’s the price we pay for the goodies and convenience. The dispirited must suck it up, for, as Maggie Thatcher famously insisted, there is no alternative.
In distinction to some like-minded thinkers, McCarraher holds that capitalism is not a disenchantment, or even a reinchantment, but rather a misenchantment, a “parody or perversion of our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world.” He sees the condition peaking at the beginning of the 21st century, followed by calamitous years of economic crises, political and social unrest, and now, as Ruskin scholar Jeffrey Spear and I have described, a pandemic in which the neoliberal priests demand a human sacrifice to the cult of Mammon.
We come along to the think tanks and college seminars of the mid-20th century, where a rising order of magician-priests, the University of Chicago-trained economists and wonks, seek to remake everything, including the state, in the image of the market. They use their best sleight-of-hand to protect Mammon from any interference from democracy while making it all look quite spontaneous. Thus, the American Century morphs into the “neoliberal Market Everlasting,” and Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand becomes the Not-So-Invisible Fist, described by Thomas Friedman, an exceptionally loyal neoliberal clergyman, in a 1999 New York Times magazine piece quoted by McCarraher:
“For globalization to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will not work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technology is called the United States, Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps…”
This gobble-gobble gospel is enthusiastically embraced by business writers, managers and libertarians like Ayn Rand, a priestess of Mammon bent on “bringing to a graceless apogee the American divinization of power that began with Emerson.” McCarraher offers an intriguing look at how American business journalism partly arises as a religious enterprise, with magazine publisher Freeman Hunt plugging a gospel of entrepreneurial divinity and the worship of technology, herding the flock towards a particular strain of misenchantment later called the “technological sublime.” The promoters of scientific management, for their part, offer a beatific vision for control freaks — a devotion to timekeeping and standardized behavior that may have partly originated in medieval monasteries.
The Gospel of Capitalism is the Biggest Turkey of All
The perverted dreams of western modernity and capitalism may be exhausting themselves, says author Eugene McCarraher. And that’s something to be thankful for.
www.ineteconomics.org
In this story, people take on secular attitudes and values. They turn from community to competition. The sin of greed becomes the desirable trait of “self-interest” and the habit of devotion gives way to the quest for domination. Veneration morphs into venality. We ditch the old totems and taboos and work like crazy, trying our best to be thrifty and restrained so that we can accumulate wealth, now our chief focus. By the time we arrive at the 21st century, the neoliberal regime and its chosen institution, the global corporation, are bringing us dazzling products that promise to meet our wants and needs. The system may be rapacious and exploitative, true. We may often feel twinges of unfulfillment and uncertainty, yes. But that’s the price we pay for the goodies and convenience. The dispirited must suck it up, for, as Maggie Thatcher famously insisted, there is no alternative.
In distinction to some like-minded thinkers, McCarraher holds that capitalism is not a disenchantment, or even a reinchantment, but rather a misenchantment, a “parody or perversion of our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world.” He sees the condition peaking at the beginning of the 21st century, followed by calamitous years of economic crises, political and social unrest, and now, as Ruskin scholar Jeffrey Spear and I have described, a pandemic in which the neoliberal priests demand a human sacrifice to the cult of Mammon.
We come along to the think tanks and college seminars of the mid-20th century, where a rising order of magician-priests, the University of Chicago-trained economists and wonks, seek to remake everything, including the state, in the image of the market. They use their best sleight-of-hand to protect Mammon from any interference from democracy while making it all look quite spontaneous. Thus, the American Century morphs into the “neoliberal Market Everlasting,” and Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand becomes the Not-So-Invisible Fist, described by Thomas Friedman, an exceptionally loyal neoliberal clergyman, in a 1999 New York Times magazine piece quoted by McCarraher:
“For globalization to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will not work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technology is called the United States, Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps…”
This gobble-gobble gospel is enthusiastically embraced by business writers, managers and libertarians like Ayn Rand, a priestess of Mammon bent on “bringing to a graceless apogee the American divinization of power that began with Emerson.” McCarraher offers an intriguing look at how American business journalism partly arises as a religious enterprise, with magazine publisher Freeman Hunt plugging a gospel of entrepreneurial divinity and the worship of technology, herding the flock towards a particular strain of misenchantment later called the “technological sublime.” The promoters of scientific management, for their part, offer a beatific vision for control freaks — a devotion to timekeeping and standardized behavior that may have partly originated in medieval monasteries.
