This is the third of a four part series on the economy of everything. Part One talks about the disastrous creed that is ‘growth for the sake of growth’. Part Two discusses how this resulting network of manipulatory power warps our souls. Part Three below is a call to repentance and right worship. And Part Four will put forth a vision for a better way.
Repentance and Right Worship: The Economy of All Things, Part Three
In the previous posts we saw that the economy is not some impersonal force for efficiency or a lever of control. It’s communal. It’s relational. But now the work done by the vast majority of modern people is illegible. We’ve abandoned the real economy for a global economy built on a vast network of deficit economies untethered from the constraints of the real economy of scarcity.
And as participants in this system we share a degree of responsibility for it. But we’re also its victims. This economic “Machine” in which we find ourselves is more than a means for accruing material wealth. It is a type of sacred object. The Machine breaks every boundary and homogenizes everything to satisfy its voracious appetite for growth. Living within this Machine turns us into commodities. People become interchangeable. Relationships are fungible. It’s a globalizing force that dissolves centuries of culture and replaces it with a false simulacrum. The result is a world of junk food, junk entertainment, and junk sex which is almost impossible to escape. But, escape it we must.
We’re not going to escape the mess by colonizing Mars. We can only do that through repentance. God, in His infinite wisdom made the world round so that when we travel far enough in the wrong direction we arrive again at the origin, the center of all being. Recovery is possible if we would just turn back to the source of life and truth. We have much to repent of…
Broken Promises
Those of us old enough to remember the Internet in the early days can recall the excitement around the promise of global communications; unlimited information; the sharing of knowledge for human betterment. But as Paul Kingsnorth points out, “it turned out to be a trap through which we surrender every detail about ourselves to state and commercial interests in exchange for the dopamine hits which just keep coming, in turn deepening social divisions and disconnection from the natural world.”1Paul Kingsnorth, You are the Harvest, Divining the Machine Part Nine
Kingsnorth muses about how the device we carry around in our pocket, which tracks us wherever we go, allows us to access a vast network described as the ‘Web’ or the ‘Net’ — things that are designed to trap prey. Is it any wonder that we find ourselves in an age of lockdowns enforced with contract tracing and vaccine passports enabled by those devices in our pockets? At the same time our opinions are manufactured by various interest groups and our communications tracked and monitored. Is it any wonder we feel like we have less agency, less control, and less humanity than we did at the outset?
It is true, the social norms and pressures, from which many of us rebel, can be restrictive and confining. They can even be coercive. But if we break these fetters that doesn’t necessarily make us any less prone to manipulation. We’re destined to serve somebody or something. Wouldn’t it be better if that thing had our interests in mind? Wouldn’t it be better to live in a culture whose social norms encourage us to reach our full potential and set the conditions that lead to flourishing instead of being manipulated so that someone can profit from us? Wouldn’t it be better if the culture insisted that we attempt daring feats of beauty; prodding us to the summit instead of sedated into submission?
Instead, we’re enslaved by our own products. We become dependent on prosthetic devices like cars, computers, and phones. We cannot imagine life without them. Owning them is not really optional. But the power these technologies give us is illusory in many respects. The products end up setting the conditions for our thoughts, actions, and even relationships.2Just consider how dating apps cultivate psychopathy and are shifting society from monogamy to polygamy. Did anyone sign up for that? We find ourselves enslaved in this technological totalitarianism. We live in a world of abundant choices and yet we somehow lack the ability to choose what is truly best for us.
The promise of material wealth draws economic migrants to dense urban areas like moths to a flame. But the city is more accommodating to cars than to people. Modern technologically-driven cities are not built to human scale. Residential areas are segregated from commercial districts. Congestion exaggerates the distances between these spaces. Cities make us all the more dependent on the Machine. City dwellers haven’t the space, the skills, nor the time and inclination to fend for themselves. “In the city, we can live ignorant of our neighbors, of the seasons, of anything but our own direction and ambition.”3Paul Kingsnorth, The Great Wen, Divining the Machine Part Six The economic opportunities are there, but so are the safety concerns, the lack of affordable housing, and low quality schools. We’re just as likely to find ourselves working three jobs to make ends meet as we are to hit it big. And in the city the poor and marginalized are treated with a contempt unlike anything known out in the hinterlands.
Idols of Mammon
It seems we’re destined to find out what happens when insatiable greed places infinite claims on finite resources. Hebert Schlossberg observed how our idols of Mammon condition us “to place our hopes on wealth, tell us that taking is better than giving, tempt us to covet what our neighbor has, convince us that we have been wronged because we do not possess as much as we desire, and finally, pervert the sense of justice that alone can preserve peace. If we continue to worship them, the unrest and discontent that mark our society now are only a sample of the destruction that is to come.”4Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, T. Nelson, 1983
There are occasional moments of clarity when we recognize that we should not be free at the expense of someone else. This might explain why we’re appalled by the Carthaginians who, according to tradition, sacrificed their sons and daughters in fire as an offering to Moloch.5Some historians have dismissed this claim as a slur by the Romans against their Carthaginian rivals. But what cannot be denied is the great necropolis near Carthage filled with the bones of little babies. The Carthaginians served up their children to Moloch because they believed that the fertility god was economic in the most exacting sense: if you want bountiful harvests, you had better give up some of the products of your own fertility. It was an exchange; purely transactional. This is was what went on at the Wall Street of Carthage. If you were rich, you could buy the baby of a poor woman and claim the sacrifice as your own. We’re rightly appalled by this.
But yet we sacrifice our children for ambition, avarice, lust and convenience. Anthony Esolen draws parallels to today, “We kill children for the sake of a richer paycheck, a nicer house, a nifty vacation to Cancun, a college degree, admission to the bar; or to avert having to stretch the paycheck, to sell the second car, to forgo the vacation, to drop out of college, or, as a feminist writer once put it, shuddering in disgust, to buy extra-large jars of mayonnaise at Costco. If we kill children for these things, we certainly will not scruple to put them in straitjackets, or to let them languish in the infested schools, or to sit them in front of a screen that is at best Novocaine for the mind, at worst positively toxic.”6Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, Regnery Publishing, 2017 Somehow we don’t see this as a form of child sacrifice. We call it progress.
In an essay titled Christ and Nothing, David Bentley Hart roundly rejects the myth of progress. He writes, “It would be willful and culpable blindness for us to refuse to recognize how aesthetically arid, culturally worthless, and spiritually depraved our society has become.”7David Bentley Hart, essay ‘Christ and Nothing’ appearing in First Things He too draws parallels between the degeneracy in Carthage and our own. He writes, “When the Carthaginians were prevailed upon to cease sacrificing their babies, at least the place vacated by Baal8Note: Baal and Moloch are variants for the same Canaanite deity. reminded them that they should seek the divine above themselves; we offer up our babies to ‘my’ freedom of choice, to ‘me.’” Today, modern courts and human rights councils have invented the ‘right’ to abort babies. It’s one thing to view abortion as tragic but necessary. That’s not enough for our degenerate society. We must celebrate it as a triumph of morality.
This über consumerism is consistent with living in a ‘throughput society’ as Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein call it. By that they mean a society “in which civilization’s health is evaluated based on the production of goods and services, where more consumption is presumed to be better.” This framework is so deeply embedded in us that we don’t even ponder the implications — that this throughput society “depends on insecurity, gluttony, and planned obsolescence.”9Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, Portfolio, 2021 It requires us to ignore the impact this has on one’s soul. And it requires us to accept or ignore the inherent weaknesses of an economy based strictly on the consumption of imports.
We come to accept that the ‘free market’ means unlimited economic power for some. But this necessarily means powerlessness for others.10This is a point made by Wendell Berry in his essay Faustian Economics (2006) found in The World-Ending Fire Collection We get to choose which car to drive and what shows to watch. But we have no choice other than to do the work that the economy prescribes for the wage it sets. It’s debatable whether having too few choices of jobs is equivalent to economic slavery. But it is unquestionably moral slavery when we have no choice but to do what we know is wrong.11Another point made by Wendell Berry in his essay Two Minds (2002) from The World-Ending Fire Collection, Counterpoint, 2018 Schlossberg reminds us that “the prophets did not prescribe a technical fix for the economic desolation that comes from greed and idolatry. Only repentance and faith would serve.”12Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, T. Nelson, 1983
Mistake Theory
Some will argue that things are not nearly as dire or unsustainable as I assert. In fact, there are irrational optimists who argue that when we cause various problems this opens new opportunities in the marketplace for solving the problems we just created. No doubt, someone will find ways to capitalize on my ignorance and blind spots. But consider the following triumphant statement by Yuval Noah Harari: “Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products – contributing to economic growth twice over.”13Yuval Noah Harari, Sapians: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harper, 2015
Notice how Harari spins obesity and over consumption as societal goods. His thinking is purely economic and wrong. He completely ignores the toll obesity has on the lives of real people. He also ignores the fact that when we spend our money on ineffective diet products that’s less we have available to invest towards posterity. It’s not much different from the tired old narrative taught in most schools that credits World War II with ending the Great Depression. Imagine these callus pseudo-historians trying to explain the economic benefits of the war to the conscript dug in on the Siegfried Line in the Ardennes during the blustery winter of 1944. Or perhaps they might try to convince the soldier’s wife back stateside with her ration book and infant son. Let them try explaining this to the 1st Marines assaulting Bloody Nose Ridge on Peliliu, or to Mr. & Mrs. Jones down the street receiving their second telegram in a week.14Whenever someone prescribes conscription, rationing, and the systematic destruction of capital as a cure for some ailment, look out. You might as well take your chances with the disease.
This is the classic broken windows fallacy which attributes vandalism of one’s storefront as a positive economic driver because it sustains glazier while ignoring the cost to the shopkeeper who must use her hard-earned money to repair the storefront rather than expanding her inventory or hiring an extra cashier. Unseen costs are everywhere but the don’t show up on a ledger so we don’t recognize them as such.
Matthew Crawford points out the absurdity of this type of ledger logic, noting that a sterile cost-benefit analysis would tell us that stealing from someone is essentially cost neutral since the degree of loss matches the degree of gain by the thief.15Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016 And if the thief pledges a portion of his loot to charity some might even argue there is a net benefit to society. This sounds far fetched, but its the same fraud politicians use to justify their taxation schemes. They mask their deeds with numbers and appeals to dispassionate scientific analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
Perhaps the most concerning aspect of this idea of mistake theory, which sees a sub-optimal solution that creates new problems as an opportunity, is the potential magnitude of harm caused by our mistakes in this technologically enriched and globally interconnected world. The old heuristics of mistake theory don’t necessarily apply when the margin for error with some of these technologies is so thin. In a globally-interconnected nuclear-armed world we cannot afford to make mistakes like Deepwater Horizon or Aliso Canyon, or the Fukushima meltdown. We cannot afford to have recklessness bankers writing bad loans as we learned during the 2008 financial crisis. We also cannot afford to encourage doctors to over-prescribe opiates. It may even turn out that gain-of-function research unleashed COVID-19. Now we’re finding out how fragile many of our supply chains are. The scope and scale of these miscalculations is unprecedented. As if that weren’t bad enough, broad access to dirty bombs, drones, or chemical and biological agents could make the lamentable mass shootings we’ve grown accustomed to seem mild. The margin for error is razor thin. It seems like a terrible time to discard the precautionary principle as we seem to have done in our response to COVID. We cannot afford to be blinded by profit motive or resentment (the two things that seem to be governing almost every decision lately). The stakes are just too high.
Technocracy
Technocracy got us into this mess so it seems unlikely that more technology and bureaucracy will somehow get us out. And yet it’s almost impossible to see any other types of solutions. Technical fixes are the presumed solutions to practically any problem. Anything that doesn’t have an obvious techno-bureaucratic solution isn’t even acknowledged as a real problem.
Virtue is never part of the proposed solution. We act as if we can somehow achieve a just society without having people who are just. Virtue doesn’t emerge from vice. This is absurd. One cannot practice vice virtuously. It takes a certain kind of people to attain a certain level of virtue. You cannot have one without the other. You won’t find an honest society full of cheats. And you won’t find a faithful society full of adulterers. We must not laugh at honor and then be shocked to find traitors in our midst. It’s wholly unrealistic to celebrate avarice and then expect society to be generous. Society cannot get along sustainably when people consume voraciously, nor can society act shrewdly if it’s full of dunces. One cannot accept bribes expecting to end corruption.
According to Zachary Loeb, we’re all recipients of the ‘magnificent bribe’ that Lewis Mumford wrote about. “Sure that shiny new thing is keeping tabs on you (and feeding all of that information back to the larger technological system), but it also lets you do things you genuinely could not do before. For a bribe to be accepted it needs to promise something truly enticing, and Mumford, in his essay ‘Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,’ acknowledged that ‘the bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe.’ The danger, however, was that ‘once one opts for the system no further choice remains.'” 16 Zachary Loeb, ‘The Magnificent Bribe’‘, Syllabus for the Internet, Real Life
Technology ends up supplying its users with luxuries that quickly become necessities. These widely celebrated technologies are turning humanity into “a passive, purposeless, machine conditioned animal.”17Lewis Mumford, The Myth and the Machine Volume One: Technics and Human Development, Mariner Books, 1971 The Machine commandeers our attention and directs our thoughts by rewarding correct speech and penalizing dissent. As Kingsnorth points out, “Every time you search for something on Google, an algorithm is subtly shifting your attention towards something it wants you to see, and setting out the form within which you will comprehend it.”18Paul Kingsnorth, A Thousand Mozarts, Divining the Machine Part Three Before long we find ourselves “busy imitating machines” as Iain McGilchrist says.19Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, Yale University Press, 2019
There’s this half-baked idea that social dilemmas created by the Machine can be solved by inventing more and better machines. This is quackery.20paraphrasing from Zachary Loeb’s essay, ‘The Magnificent Bribe’‘, Syllabus for the Internet, Real Life Chronic illness and mounting anxiety and depression are evidence that technology is exacerbating many of our problems. And yet, we’re promised a new crop of technologies to solve all our problems for real this time, even the ones created by the previous crop of technologies.
The Parasitic Economy
Giant impersonal multinational corporations now control much of our lives. They produce the food, clothes, technology, and entertainment we consume, and even the so-called ‘news’ that forms our opinions. They employ many of us while harvesting all of us as products ourselves through the detailed personal information we freely volunteer over the web every day. These corporations are complimented by equally depersonalized collective States which exist as Kingsnorth says, “not to promote the interest of their citizens (despite what those corporate-controlled media and entertainment systems would have us believe), but to service the corporations and provide for their interest.”21Paul Kingsnorth, Blanched Sun, Blinded Man, Divining the Machine Part One In other words, they no longer serve us, but rather some abstract concept of ‘economic growth.’ “[T]here are now few places on Earth we can escape from the incessant noise of this State-corporate ‘growth’, and the incessant urge to contribute to it by clicking, scrolling, buying and competing. It has prescribed all of our values, and proscribed the alternatives, and it shows no sign of stopping. It cannot stop, in fact, for to do so would mean collapse.”22ibid. This growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell as Edward Abbey says.23Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West, Plume, 1991 Too often these companies behave parasitically; extracting wealth from other companies, from employees, and from the land. It’s an unsound economic system that consumes capital, leaving only pollution, denuded land, and crumbling infrastructure.
This creates perverse incentives. As Wendell Berry points out, “There is clearly too narrow a limit on how much money can be made from health, but the profitability of disease – especially disease of spirit or character – has so far, for profiteers, no visible limit.”24Wendell Berry, Family Work (1980), The World-Ending Fire Collection, Counterpoint, 2018 That right there is the the problem. News organizations and social media companies (i.e. marketing agencies) exploit this. Their algorithms select for time-on-site. They understand that people respond to the most attractive or most grotesque representations, not the truest. So they rely on ‘limbic hijacks’ to maximize this. The intent is not to inform, but to manipulate.
Not surprisingly these companies put their financiers’ interests ahead of the public’s. It’s hard to say whether their intent is to deliberately defraud the public or just to simply sell subscriptions by stoking controversy. Regardless, the potential for false or distorted representations is almost guaranteed as long as money is the ultimate guide. These companies subtly manipulate us to get us to read, watch, or buy something similar to the way an unscrupulous salesman endears himself to us by playing on our hopes and aspirations in order to lead us imperceptibly to buying something.
While these media companies hijack the public consciousness, the State has learned how to use the private sector to achieve its policy objectives, particularly as their objectives pertain to controlling information. Since the law restricts states in ways that don’t apply to private companies they simply enlist businesses to enforce these rights violations in order to avoid direct court challenges. We don’t need elaborate conspiracy theories to explain what’s going on. All it takes is the will-to-power coupled with a radical self-interest that aligns with other similarly self-interested entities.
It’s no wonder we find ourselves today, as Paul Kingsnorth says, “transfixed by our glowing screens, deskilled and dependent on oligarchs for permission to earn, eat and speak, with the factory system gone global and the Earth heating up from its exhaust.”25Paul Kingsnorth, A Monster that Grows in Deserts, Divining the Machine Part Two Machine society must drain the natural world in order to keep expanding, says Kingsnorth. It’s the very definition of ‘unsustainable,’ “This is the devil’s bargain of the technium, and we have been falling for it forever: embrace the new, lose the old, and find yourself more deeply entwined in a technological web from which you cannot extricate yourself even if you want to.”26Paul Kingsnorth, Blanched Sun, Blinded Man, Divining the Machine Part One Something has to give. Maybe it already has. We can feel the inelastic deformations accelerating.
Photo Credits: “Philippine-stock-market-board” by Katrina.Tuliao is licensed under CC BY 2.0