The supremacy of the 1%: its ideology

“The more narrow an ideology is, the more it claims to be true,” I. Berlin tells us, “the more it tends to become religion, minus the spirituality ” We are at the last one: a violent ideology totally devoid of any substance.

The following text is partly taken from the chapter of “Haine Froide, à quoi pense la droite Américaine” on “Lobbies” and “Foundations” of universities and research center. I wrote it to try to explain to my European audience how a country leading in academic research may re-elect  an alleged criminal whose purpose is to destroy the state. (Google translated).

The Rockefeller Foundation

... is associated with the research centers of the largest universities: Chicago, Harvard, Columbia and Yale. Interestingly, from the 1960s onwards, these funds were paid very generously to education and the so-called social sciences. 

We then enter politics. And political it was.

In the 1970s, William Simon, then president of the Olin Foundation, urged his associates to help social scientists, as well as writers and journalists. “Give them,” he said, “funds, funds and more funds in exchange for books, books and even more books. » The sums were colossal to the point of becoming an abstraction for a public accustomed to another education system. Let us not burden the text with figures but repeat that these are private budgets which are equal to or well above the so-called public budgets. 

American professors and researchers knew where their grants and other scholarships came from, but were not always prepared to face the rather unpleasant implications of this funding, and some perhaps preferred not to think too much about why they were so much t pay them write books [1]. The first explanation, is that they received the just reward for their talent, for the sole love of art.

Arthur Koestler calls these researchers call girls, in his novel of the same title [2], published in 1972. It is not his most famous book but it is worth rereading, if only for the series of predictions at horizon 2000 that this author does, steeped in anguish. It describes a meeting where professors and researchers discuss the trend toward self-destruction exhibited by human beings. ..Answering to telephone calls inviting them to conferences for “intellectual services”, they thus practice without knowing it (wanting to) one of the oldest professions in the world. 

Let us leave fiction for the very real subsidies financing books and research in social, political and economic sciences in exchange for a “service” which never told its name and which we will call “good thinking”. The Olin Foundation, which loved books so much, spent $50 million promoting the work of professors and researchers whose names appear in the Who's Who of the academic right.

In 1988, Allan Bloom, author of the best-selling The Closing of the American Mind , was director of the $3.6 million Olin Center on Democratic Theory and Practice, which allowed him, among other things, to finance the arrival of a speaker on a choice subject: the incontestable victory of neo-liberal values at the end of the Cold War. The text of the talk was immediately published by The National Interest (endowed with $1 million by Olin), edited by Irving Kristol , who had received a $376,000 grant as an honorary professor from the Olin Foundation at New York University . Graduate School of Business). Following which Kristol published two comments: his own and that of Samuel Huntington (who had access to $1.4 million that the Olin Institute donated to the Harvard Institute for Strategic Studies). The text of the conference and its comments were then widely reviewed by the New York Times , the Washington Post and Time Magazine [3]. 

Funding is sometimes so subtle that professors don't know where the funds are coming from...until it's too late. We will find Ayn Rand and the formidable propaganda machine which supports the teaching of her thought. Gary H. Jones, professor at the College of Business at Western Carolina University, published a shocking article to this effect in the journal of the Association of American University Professors: “Recent donations, writes- he, of BB&T, one of the nation's largest banks, raised the question of influences on academic thinking [...] [AS1] At the University of North Carolina, for example, it took three years before the Faculty members only learned that the $1 million donation to endow a new course had a clause stipulating that it had to include in its curriculum Ayn Rand's long rantings on laissez-faire, which La Revolt of Atlas was to be required reading for students and that the professors who would teach the course would have to demonstrate a positive interest in the subject and be familiar with the philosophy of Objectivism [4]. »[AS2]  

Very often, too, the process is so subtle that it takes time to understand it. A witness, who wants to remain anonymous, says he received an invitation for a week of discussion on the obesity epidemic among young children. A professor on sabbatical, he was writing a book on the subject and was therefore not surprised to be recommended to replace one of his colleagues who could not make it. He knew that he would be in the company of promising young researchers from most of the major American universities, known as the Ivy League ( Ivy , "ivy" in English, refers to the ivies that grow on the walls of the buildings of these universities ): Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornnell .

The conference, by invitation, took place on the edge of a lake, in one of those luxurious but rural hotels, to which the salary of a young professor, or even an older one, does not give access é He quickly realized, everything was paid by the biggest companies in American agribusiness, represented by two silent women. That said, around the table were only experts on the social causes of obesity, including the representative of a Washington regulatory agency who launched the debate. She produced document after document that established a link between the obesity epidemic and the introduction into kindergarten cafeterias, schools and universities of " junk" . food ” and soft drinks. Everyone listened politely and took notes in silence. After the coffee break, two researchers presented their study which linked obesity to a sedentary lifestyle and lack of exercise. 

The ball was picked up with the enthusiasm of young puppies by other young researchers who mentioned numerous other studies corroborating the hypothesis. The representatives of agribusiness did not intervene, except to describe the corpus of this research as “fascinating”, “remarkable”, if not “revolutionary”, descriptions for which any young academic would sell his soul. In contrast, a heavy silence greeted an idea launched by a professor. She suggested that we should consider banning snack vending machines in nursery and school cafeterias. “Dead silence ensued,” says our witness. From that moment on, people danced around her but hardly spoke to her. » She will be slowly excluded from the group and the windfall of research funds and invitations to future conferences (Tokyo will be the next) rewarded the right-thinking when, on the last day, the subsidies were awarded.

They deserved some thought. Not that their words are false. A sedentary lifestyle accounts for a lot in the obesity epidemic and there is no prostitution of thought in wanting to demonstrate this. The control of thought is in omission, a technique used by copyist monks who wore out their eyes on translations of Aristotle's Arabic translations. Entire passages or even books that did not quite fit with the discourse of the time were “forgotten” and remained so for centuries until curious translators, called “humanists”, came to unearth the ancient texts. Humanists have always been the terror of ideologues. 

The propaganda machine 

Not all teachers prostituted themselves through thought, ignorance, action or omission.

But let's go back to the seventies when the propaganda machine that Lapham speaks of was set up. Not all teachers prostituted themselves through thought, ignorance, action or omission. Far from it. It was in the sixties, in particular, that Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring , launched the environmental movement. She and her small team of researchers succeeded in having the use of DTT banned after an epic battle which pitted them against “right-thinking” professors, ready to do anything to demonstrate the safety of the product they were indirectly paid to defend. . There were comical moments when some watched a film showing cows and birds with their feet in the air, the day after DTT was sprayed on the fields. According to them, it was the plane in charge of the operation that had scared the poor animals to death. Another researcher, particularly motivated by the largesse of the chemical industry foundations, went so far as to swallow a large glass of one of the DTT derivatives in front of the cameras in order to prove its safety. (We don't know what happens next.)

Also in the 1970s, other researchers succeeded in bringing down, and that's no small thing, the cigarette lobby, which was very powerful in the United States at that time and ready to do anything to defend the right to freedom. to consume its products. In 1971, researchers, with all supporting evidence, demonstrated that babies of smoking mothers had a much lower birth weight than children of non-smoking mothers. The CEO of the Philip Morris brand, Joseph Cullman, exclaimed indignantly during a famous interview: “But there are women who prefer to have smaller babies [5]! » because it is easier to give birth to them. No academic study has confirmed his statements. The ban on smoking in public places began to spread. But these are only a few victories on the medical and scientific front where certain evidence is irrefutable. 

The field of political and economic thought, more complex and supported by foundations, would become the showcase of Ayn Rand who thus established herself at the heart of academic thought at the University of Chicago. The brain of the octopus, whose tentacles Lewis Lapham observed, was equipped with a cortex allowing them to extend efficiently. 

The brain of the octopus

The Chicago School is an informal group of liberal economists generally associated with neoclassical price theory, free markets, and monetarism for whom the man to be killed was John Maynard Keynes. Although defending themes dear to Ayn Rand, the School nevertheless refrained from including her philosophical works on its curriculum. Milton Friedman, its founder, recognized that the novelist “had done a lot of good”, but did not hide the fact that she was “totally intolerant and dogmatic”.

The School was determined to prove the same principles not through novels or cults but through a “science”, the only one that would govern human destiny: economics. In the name of this science established as an absolute, the political field will be completely evacuated with the success that we know and understand when we go to the annual world economic forum in Davos.

Everything starts from this act of faith in a science which is not one. The rest is just ideological construction based on this postulate.

The numerous Nobel Prizes that the stars of the School received only added to the prestige of the proposal. Milton Friedman received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976 [6], followed by George Stigler in 1982, James McGill Buchanan Jr in 1986, Ronald Coase in 1991, Gary Stanley Becker in 1992 and Robert E. Lucas in 1995. Without forgetting one of the most famous, although he was not a professor at the School: the remarkable John Nash who offered the School's theories a mathematical model. Let us note in passing that his game theory was developed during an active paranoid phase of his schizophrenia which is now under control. The anecdote is important since the School, in its quasi-autistic phase, will eliminate all human referents, only the number will be cited.

Figures are essential in that they will make it possible to reduce the human political field to economics alone, erected as a science under the pretext... that it uses figures! It is a tautology which makes us forget that the economism of the Chicago School is based on a simplistic postulate (not demonstrable by science) which defines man as "selfish, rational since calculating, seeking to maximize what is in his interest [7].”

Let's continue the proposition with Mario Bunge [8]:

“ i . The individual, the consumer in particular, is sovereign.

ii . Man is insatiable in his needs.

iii . Man is essentially a hoarder.

iv . Everyone has preferences and can rank them logically, in order of priority.

v . Everyone is willing to act to meet their needs.

vi . Man tends to minimize the efforts needed to satisfy his needs: in short, man hates working.

vii . Humans are naturally competitive and even aggressive rather than cooperative.

viii . The more someone owns a good, the less they appreciate its increase in quantity (law of diminishing marginal utility).

ix . Man constantly faces choices and is thus forced to make decisions.

x . Man seeks optimization: he makes the decisions best suited to optimize his efficiency (or his well-being, or his gains). »

The postulate once accepted, the rest is only a syllogism which, like all syllogisms, surrounds us in a logic and makes us forget the precariousness of the basic postulate: 1. the essence of man is the selfishness; 2. but all those who call themselves altruists and claim to work for the common good (politicians and bureaucrats) are men; 3. They are therefore selfish and work only for themselves.

Selfishness is the iron law. Altruistic angels only exist in the imaginations of the simple and naive. Voters delude themselves when they believe that their elected officials and civil servants work for the so-called common good. Whether consciously or not, all politicians are manipulators who use voters to build their little empires. They are called "Machiavellians", which is a poor understanding of Machiavelli, who not only believed in the common good (the stability of the kingdom) but believed that it was the Prince's duty to embody this Good, sometimes at the cost of cunning and duplicity. lie when necessary. But we digress. 

Let us return to the reasoning of the so-called rational choice theory, which must be understood to eliminate the words “citizen”, “political space” or “common good”. “Politicians and civil servants behave as consumers and producers of economic theory would, in a different institutional context: the market for public decisions. As economic theory is based on the hypothesis of the rational and selfish behavior of individuals, the political sphere must also be analyzed according to the same criterion. The politician becomes a selfish economic actor like all the others. He seeks to maximize his personal utility, determined by the factors ideology (certain political ideas that he wants to promote) and power (holding a political function that allows the ideology to be realized). The politician undoubtedly has an ideology to defend, but above all he aspires to be elected or re-elected. He does not seek the general interest. His behavior therefore depends on a rational calculation taking into account his personal preferences and those of the voters, themselves only interested in their cause [9]. »

More important is the implication of the analysis which is similar to that of Ayn Rand: the government (including elected officials and civil servants) is a parasite, "an organism which spends a significant part of its life on or in the living tissue of 'a host organism, altering its health without immediately killing it (it is not a virus)'. This message, the veracity of which has been “proven” by the macroeconomic calculations carried out by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock , will infiltrate everywhere and the evidence will accumulate without difficulty. From the 1960s onwards, not a day would go by without the press denouncing a politician or bureaucrat guilty of putting his own interest before that of the community.

Certainly, in the forties and fifties, political corruption was already the subject of novels and films, except that heroes concerned about the common good (journalists, honest politicians, or representatives of a community) helped to straighten out the moral order in government.

But, in the following decades, there will be no more exceptions: everyone is painted with the same brush and, if there is a savior, it will be the lone wolf who, wanting to save himself (he is selfish), will save all humanity from the plague, the asteroid, the volcano, hairy or shiny monsters or small green beings from the galaxy. He will do so with a courage that is all the more admirable as he will have to fight the internal enemy, whether political or civil servant, who is not only a parasite but is conspiring to destroy his country. We will only mention the model of the genre which was for years an enormous television and cinematographic success: X Files . At the borders of reality.

Certainly the politicians and civil servants of the United States will not be the only ones to suffer such accusations, but the United States is the only country where a political theory will go on the attack to demand the elimination of all “parasites”. That's all the difference. We will not ask for a change of government as we do in Europe, we will ask to reduce the public sector to its simplest expression and to leave the field open to the private sector: absolute laissez-faire.

And a “social genocide”, to use the words of Naomi Klein [10], will ensue.

As we will see later, Milton Friedman's theories were applied to the letter in Iraq occupied by the army, handed over by the American government to private companies which took over the country.

The common good? What is this?  

Where has the common good gone?

Let's return for a moment to the ideology that underpins this tremendous shift of power from the public to the private sector.

English intellectuals from the libertarian movement or French intellectuals who love nothing more than rebellious individualism against the State see in it a democratic impulse of anarchic tradition, without the bombs. Certainly Bakunin also wanted to get rid of the government in the name of freedom, but in no way transfer power to businesses. He dreamed of a communitarianism devoted to a constantly negotiated common good, the antithesis of the movement that concerns us in this work, where the common good is above all not to be negotiated since it would be the automatic product of a pre-established harmony, also called “invisible hand”.

Indeed, for Adam Smith, the Enlightenment philosopher to whom we owe the metaphor, "each, by acting selfishly and for his own interest, is led to produce more beneficial effects for the community than if he really worked for the benefit of that community." -this ". He is therefore led by a sort of “invisible hand” to “fulfill an end which is in no way part of his intentions” . The sum of individual interests constitutes the general interest; consequently, that the butcher, the banker, the teacher are selfish and only seek their personal interest is a good thing because, in this way, they contribute to the common well-being more surely and more effectively than if their mission really was to work there. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the beer seller and the baker that we expect our dinner, but rather from the care they take of their interests. We are not addressing their humanity, but their selfishness; and it is never about our needs that we speak to them, but always about their advantage.

The “invisible hand” for Smith therefore means very precisely the unpredictable sequence for men themselves of the effects of their actions. They don't know what they are doing, but what they are doing has beneficial consequences for everyone. We can even say that the beneficial result is better assured by not knowing that we are doing it rather than by believing we know it. This is what the science of the legislator, in the economic field, can show. This is the general meaning of Adam Smith's great book on political economy, On the Wealth of Nations .

However, Adam Smith, just like Machiavelli, we cannot repeat it enough, is misread. Smith, like all the so-called liberal philosophers of his time, did not question the kingdom, the republic or the State. The invisible hand was waving its beneficial fingers within a pre-existing community of law that there was no question of getting rid of. He was even the architect of the construction of the modern State, which provided private industries with the material infrastructure (railways, roads, energy, etc.) and the human resources produced by schools, large or small. Smith continually emphasized the importance of the state's educational commitment. The wealth of Nations, he constantly repeated, depended on this cooperation between the private and the public, even if inevitable areas of poverty were created, which it was thought would be reduced as the nation grew. would enrich. The full title of Adam Smith's great work is a political program in itself: Research into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations . Even more revealing is the epitaph that he had engraved on his tomb where the titles of two of his works were combined: “Here lies Adam Smith, author of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations ”.

We are very far from the dollar-shaped wreath that decorated Ayn Rand's coffin. The theory of rational choice has no use for moral sentiments or even for the wealth of nations. She only remembers the word “wealth”.

The thought of the Enlightenment and its ideas of just government of the nation has no longer taken hold. The theory of rational choice has seized the ground defining the individual within a moribund nation to which he owes nothing. “Why,” it was once explained to us, “hire American labor if I can use qualified and much less expensive labor in another country?” Why would I pay taxes to help fund services I don't use: my children go to private schools, I have private health insurance. Why would I pay taxes in this country if I can live in a country that treats me better? And if I ever have to go to this country where chance gave me birth, I can do it in a few hours thanks to my private plane. »

The other part of the equation is that citizenship should not confer any economic rights to the citizen dependent on the welfare state, that state that promotes economic security and guarantees basic necessities for all citizens: food, shelter, medical care, child protection and help for the elderly . In a most interesting work, precisely titled The Price of Citizenship [11], Michael B. Katz explains this war against the weakest elements of society that it makes no economic sense to support. By getting rid of citizenship, we get rid of them.

Because it is the concept of citizenship that is called into question. There are no longer citizens by birth or adoption, there are only individuals, seven billion to be more precise, who, thanks to the opening of borders and new technologies, seek their personal interest in a completely free exchange. “I believe in free trade,” Milton Friedman declared in one of his many interviews, “because, deep down, I am certain that anyone who creates products that people want should be rewarded with money that he can then use for his own needs and desires. If Company ABC sells you terrible service or bad products at unattractive prices, then Company XYZ has the opportunity to take over by offering a better product or service. And who cares whether Company XYZ is located in Minnesota or Taiwan? The best man or woman who provides the best service at the best price should be rewarded and take charge. Final point [12]! »

Indeed the point is final. Friedman wants no tax-financed regulatory or distributive limits that would dampen the flow of supply and demand. Milton Friedman couldn't be more blunt: “If the tax rate reaches 70% and entrepreneurship is not rewarded, people like me will simply pack up and leave. I'm not kidding... Capital and brains will go where they are valued. And don't fool yourself into thinking that those who create jobs will do it for nothing [AS3] . »

Atlas revolts, as Ayn Rand wished. Not only does he no longer want regulatory limits but there is no question of feeding the parasites by overtaxing the rich to whom we offer all the tax havens that the world can offer. Milton Friedman tirelessly repeated this phrase: “I am for cutting taxes under any circumstances, for any reason, and whenever there is an opportunity.” The reason I think that is that the big problem we have is not taxation but spending. We must stop the government from spending [13]. » This last point is essential to the Friedmanite doctrine : we must eliminate programs that slow down growth and privatize everything that can be privatized in order to put all services on the market, this mythical place where justice would be exercised.

For Friedman, the legislative state should be reduced to its simplest expression: protection against violence and the protection of contracts. For the rest, all regulations and other regulations are harmful and, far from protecting us, they prevent competition law from taking effect. “ For only free competition can discipline markets,” writes Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom [14]. We don't need a moral law as long as we have free competition: market discipline is THE moral law.

This concept has serious consequences because we are led to believe that an immanent justice governs the world order, the economic order and the political order (since democracy is associated with growth). The world is turning upside down. From now on, we repeat over and over again that economic regulations are “unnatural, immoral and ineffective”. This is part of the amalgam that Georges Lakoff calls “the myth of economic freedom” and which is structured around the following principles: “free markets are natural and moral”; “competition left to its own devices optimizes efficiency”; “private industry is more efficient than government”; “regulations reduce market efficiency”; “anyone who is capable of self-discipline can succeed”; “market discipline is natural; regulations are not natural.”

Looking more closely, all this reminds us of the postulates of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Émile , where he explains to us that, if we let the child explore the world on his own, he will no longer need to external discipline. He will immediately obey the moral law in his heart. We are in pure idealism: Friedman created, when speaking of the company, “the noble savage”.

As for the common good, it will spring dynamically from the sum of particular interests which will be harmonized thanks to free competition. It is no longer a question of the national common good, but of the universal common good, defined solely in terms of a free market and growth, a sort of vortex driven by the benevolent synergy of pre-established harmonies . And so, if we let the economy do its thing, politics, the place of parasitic selfishness, disappears, and everything works out! “Making profits is the very essence of democracy!” » exclaims Friedman…

With the State disappearing, Friedman is thus the only thinker to position himself to give a strong ideology to this globalization which is happening so quickly that thought and law are outdated. He will repeat urbi et orbi , at a time when new technologies bring all humanity together, the very seductive promise that growth disciplined by markets is the march of all countries towards democracy. This is the logic described in five points by Manfred Steger : “1) globalization means deregulation and integration; 2) globalization is inevitable and irreversible; 3) no one is leading globalization; 3) globalization will benefit everyone; 5) globalization will spread democracy throughout the world [15].

This mixture of economics and politics distilled by a great communicator was Friedman's brand image. It was not the passion of Ayn Rand but a passionate rationality which hid the extremism of the proposal of a total laissez-faire, never yet tried, even by the anarchists. Paul Krugman, another Nobel Prize winner in economics, reveals to us in a long article that he devoted to Friedman [16]the little secrets of the reduction of man to homo economicus .

It is true, he tells us, that homo economicus knows what he wants, and thus it is possible to apply a mathematical model, called a utility function, to his preferences. We can also prove that their choices are dictated by a rational calculation which seeks to maximize this function: consumers who prefer cornflakes to oatmeal do so on a cost-benefit basis which includes several variables. That said, Krugman continues, no one, not even a Nobel Prize winner in economics, does this kind of calculation. “But for most economists, myself included, we find homo economicus very useful” for understanding the broad outlines of a complex reality. This allows us to bring a little simplified order to the extremely complex economic lives of human beings. But this is just a crude working tool. Nothing more [17]!

Not at all, the Chicago School will answer: it is not a tool, but it is the prism through which we will look at and judge all of human reality. A prism that will be financed by all the foundations whose enthusiasm we can easily understand. Money will rain on all studies and schools devoted to money.

Milton Friedman was a School unto himself. He pushed the concept to the point of mixing all genres, making brilliant use of the Nobel Prize he won for his (non-political) research on inflation and consumer behavior. It is not a question of classic laissez-faire but of absolute laissez-faire. An intensification which does not bode well if we are to believe Hegel who, in The Philosophy of History , attributes the fall of civilizations to the morbid intensification of their first principles.

Intensification: at this point no doubt or untruth is acceptable, this is the point where we tip into totalitarianism. The billionaire thinker George Soros , worried about this drift, expressed himself in these terms: “What allows an economic theory to transform into an ideology hostile to the open society is this certainty in perfect knowledge – a certainty of first admitted and then disguised in the form of methodology [18]. »

Milton Friedman was an ideologue. Like all ideologues, he rewrote history, telling NewsWeek [AS4] that the “industrialists of wild capitalism had only produced good”, that it was Roosevelt the Democrat, the bête noire of the American right, who had caused the economic depression. Like all ideologues, he distributed promises... in the future: he told workers that the minimum wage and unions were useless and would slow down the process by which they would benefit from growth.

Like all ideologues, he was grandiloquent, repeating that “capitalism was the greatest engine of improvement in the standard of living in the history of humanity”. We are not far from... Karl Marx, who also believed in a pre-established harmony, with this ready detail that L'Internationale would be sung differently with Friedman to become: “The Consumer International will save the human race ”… thus guided by the invisible hand.

Like all ideologues, he rejected the failures of his theory on the ground.

We keep returning to square zero, to this postulate according to which economics is a science. It is in the name of this belief that Milton Friedman liked to repeat that there were no different schools of economic thought. There was the exact economic science that he taught and those which were not sciences. Parenthetically, Karl Marx said the same thing about sociology which he believed had the same degree of accuracy as chemistry or physics. There were those who practiced scientific sociology (the Marxists) and others who only expressed reactionary opinions.

Marx and Friedman are the white hats and white hats of the history of ideologies.

They did not create science. It is never in the laboratories that ideologies are cooked up but in the kitchens: we prepare dishes of often indigestible concepts, adding a pinch of religion and a good dollop of magic. To cook up absolute laissez-faire, we could add a slight hint of metaphysics by quoting Leibniz and his “ Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds ”, but Leibniz's metaphysics is little known and quite useless when he is about persuading the masses, the goal of any strong ideology being that its word cannot be questioned.

Ideologies have their sacred texts and their accredited interpreters. The more narrow an ideology is, the more it claims to be true, the more it tends to become religion, minus spirituality. Harvey Cox, in a famous article published in 1999 [19], demonstrated how Milton Friedman created a religion modeled on the Summae of Thomas Aquinas. Because this former Harvard theology professor had a feeling of déjà vu while leafing through the business newspapers. The themes of the financial pages, he explains, are all modeled on the themes of the theological texts. They revolve around the meaning of human history, the “fall” and reconciliation. Let's replace "God" with "market" and everything becomes clearer:

The market is omnipotent. Cox defines the term as "the ability to define reality", "the power to make something out of nothing and nothing out of something" The reality created by the market leaves no other space since everything can be reduced to figures and traded on the stock exchange, whether sacred lands, parts of the human body, food traditions, Tibetan prayers. Its omnipotence is such that evidence to the contrary ( ie monetary losses in billions of dollars) are interpreted as corrections and additional proof of its existence.

The market is omniscient. Like God, he knows man and his most secret needs (the proof being the sale of a corresponding product or service). Only the market can estimate the value of goods and services based on the Dow Jones, Nikkei or Hang Seng . Financial experts have become the priests and prophets whose advice must be listened to under penalty of excommunication and damnation. Any political initiative must pass through their judgment [20].

The market is omnipresence. The market has invaded everything, including private life which until now escaped calculation (family, couple relationships, friendships, etc.).

Let's add one last point:

The voices of the market are impenetrable. Mystery explains power, Umberto Eco has already told us, not without humor [21]. And there is undoubtedly no power more mysterious than that of the new world of computing which, via a mathematical language, transforms all exchange operations into equations incomprehensible to ordinary mortals. The less he understands, the more he believes in the truth presented to him.

We must end with the element that gives its spice to ideological cuisine: a good spoonful of magic. There is no religion or power without prayers and miracles for the use of the people. It is not only a matter of convincing him that he needs neither the State nor the social group to prosper, but of creating miracles that make him dream.

The New Age and its miracle workers will fulfill this essential role and all the more important because it is centered on the individual, the totally alone individual who is made to believe that he has a direct link with the force, the universe or the stars, where it must function. The power is in the individual who is made to forget that it exists within a structure, a political society, a culture and a nature.

Sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich [22]takes us into this world of miracle workers who have proliferated since the 1960s: so-called motivational speakers, so-called “self-help” books, gurus of faith in oneself, all repeat that the individual is solely responsible of his success and that the world is his if he really wants it. We will reach the pinnacle of the miracle of individualism with The Secret , a book which sold millions of copies around the theme of positive thinking which, channeled by universal energy, returns to reward those who do not indulge in defeatism.

We are not talking here about a marginal movement, but about an empire worth billions of dollars (more than 6 billion dollars per year) and which has become central in the formation of the political psyche , or rather in the formation of his absence: “if I am sick, poor and miserable [AS5] , I have only myself to blame”; “I will only get through this if I believe in the miracle that I can become”; “everything depends on me and me alone”; and, last but not least, “I can do anything”. This kind of speech is nectar for the ideology of absolute laissez-faire which will have no difficulty in convincing believers in themselves that they do not need the State to insure them against illness through example. This goes even further, Ehrenreich tells us , since we will convince patients that they are solely responsible for their illness. The cancer patient, this leper of modern times, will be told and repeated that it is his stress and his pessimism which are the cause of his affliction, an obsessive discourse which makes him ignore discourses on social causes (pollution or limited access to healthy foods, for example). The ideology also advocates self-motivation seminars which are offered to employees whose positions are eliminated, or to retirees who lost all their savings during the stock market crash of 2008. They are continually presented with cases where losers have found the miracle formula, not only to get back afloat but to become rich. 

Individualism finds its absolute expression in the television series Survivors , which seeks to reward a super-competitor, the man or woman who demonstrates strategic superiority without the aid of an army. It is a war of the individual against the individual that we say in the state of nature, an anthropological imposture if ever there was one. But this kind of film is important. Absolute laissez-faire is safe: not only do we prove that the individual is selfish but that the common good is not an option. 

If this sounds extreme and simplistic, that’s because it is. But it is an all-encompassing Idea. And Isaiah Berlin tells us again: “It is ideas that shape History. Unfortunately ! he sighs, because most of them are crazy and dangerous [23]. »

We will have the sad opportunity to judge because this idea – and those which result from it – have been put into practice and not only among those who are tired of critical thinking and who are motivated by dizziness.

Note