Over the course of this book, while I have been going on and on about the economy, my greatest fear is that all along you’ve been wondering, How can Dad have confused me with someone who gives a damn?
Setting aside my bruised ego, my fear stems from a larger worry: that most people have no time to scrutinize society. We just want to get on with our lives, chat with our mates and enjoy the pleasures that market society provides. Maybe books like this seem at best a distraction or an irrelevance, at worst an obstacle to enjoying life.
I suppose I could respond by arguing that market societies are bad at producing genuine pleasure, that market society is in truth a joyless place. But I won’t do so here. Instead, I shall beg for your attention for just a little longer and ask you to participate in a thought experiment.
Imagine that our friend Kostas, a mad scientist, has designed and built a magnificent computer called HALPEVAM: Heuristic ALgorithmic Pleasure & Experiential VAlue Maximizer. HALPEVAM is the opposite of the horrible, misanthropic machines in The Matrix, which designed a virtual reality in order to help enslave and exploit humanity. In contrast, HALPEVAM is designed to be our faithful servant – the ultimate pleasure machine.
HALPEVAM reads your brainwaves to work out with 100 per cent accuracy what you like and what annoys or saddens you. It then creates for you a virtual life that is by your own standards the best of all possible lives, and while in it, you have no clue that it is virtual. Above all, its primary directive is never to change our desires or motives to suit its virtual world but to create a virtual reality in perfect harmony with your own desires, sensitivities, aspirations and principles, just as they are.
Now, suppose that Kostas’ birthday present to you next May is a cool-looking marker pen. He tells you that you can use it to draw a large square or circle on any wall, and then, just as Harry Potter and his friends catch the train from Platform 9¾, you can jump through the wall to the other side. What’s on the other side?
The other side is the virtual world created by HALPEVAM especially for you. A landscape of unlimited pleasure awaits, with none of the chores, pains and sorrows of normal life, none of the boring tales your dad tells you. While you are immersed in maximum experiential bliss, your body will be cared for in an advanced facility by a team of medical androids who receive their instructions from HALPEVAM, ensuring its tip-top physical condition.
Would you go for it? ‘Sure,’ I hear you say.
‘Not so quick,’ Kostas warns. The catch is that if you go through the wall you cannot come back. You will have to live all the rest of your days in the perfect dream world of HALPEVAM.
So here is the question: would you go through the wall for ever?
If you decide that you will not, then you have rejected the notion that the satisfaction of your preferences is all that matters. At the same time, you may find it hard to explain precisely why you feel this way. Perhaps the thought of having to saying goodbye to your current reality, even to your dad, is too much to bear? The prospect of a life of pure bliss is not enough to take away the apprehension that fills your soul at the thought of leaving all this behind.
But what if Kostas were to program HALPEVAM to tele-transport you to your virtual bliss without you realizing it? What if the corporation that owns HALPEVAM were to organize this for every human on the planet? None of us would be aware of any difference except a remarkable improvement in our levels of happiness, satisfaction, fulfilment, joy – even while our bodies, along with billions of others, were being looked after by scores of androids designed and directed by HALPEVAM.
Would you describe this as heaven? Or as a hell not substantially different from the one that Neo and his comrades were struggling to escape from in The Matrix? If, like me, this image makes you shiver with disgust, then we have just agreed: preference satisfaction is hugely important but it is not everything.
So let’s pause for a moment to ask what is really wrong with the world HALPEVAM is trying to create for us? What, in other words, is the difference between satisfying our desires and authentic happiness?
Sure, when our desires are fulfilled we feel happy. For a while at least. And that is a good thing. But as John Stuart Mill, a British philosopher and political economist, warned us in 1863, ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, that is because they know only their side of the story.’ In other words, ignorance may be bliss – and the bliss that HALPEVAM offers is impossible without it – but authentic happiness requires something more like its opposite.
You see, looking for happiness is not like digging for gold. Gold is defined independently of who we are or, more importantly, who we are becoming by digging for it. There is a chemical test that allows us, or a computer, to establish whether what glitters is truly gold or not. But in the case of authentic happiness there is no such thing. As a result, all that HALPEVAM can do is reflect back at us the preferences we had when we joined it. And yet living a successful life, a life in which authentic happiness is a possibility, is a process of becoming – for which the Greeks had a word, eudaimonia, meaning ‘flourishing’ – in which our character and our thoughts, and thus our preferences and desires, constantly evolve.
Looking at photographs of myself when I was in my late teens or early twenties, I remember the things that I obsessed about then, my preferences and preoccupations, and I cringe. Would I want to live in a universe that constantly served those preferences and preoccupations? You bet I wouldn’t.
But to what do we owe the evolution of our character and our desires? Conflict is the short answer. Yes, we owe our character to our confrontation with the world and its refusal to grant us all our wishes at once, as well as to the conflict within us made possible by our capacity to think to ourselves, I want X, but should I want X? We loathe constraints but at the same time understand that they liberate us, if only by helping us question our own motives. Authentic happiness is impossible, in other words, without dissatisfaction as well as satisfaction. Rather than being enslaved by satisfaction, we need the liberty to be dissatisfied.
These two conflicts, the internal and the external, which depend on liberty and autonomy, are the key to our development. While it may be well intentioned and valiant in its efforts to serve us, HALPEVAM can only encase us in a dystopia, in a tyranny of our own frozen preferences and of a self that cannot grow, develop or transcend itself.
What is the point of any of this in the context of a book on the economy? It is that HALPEVAM is designed to do that which market society strives to accomplish: to satisfy your preferences. Judging by the wholesale unhappiness around us, market society does so terribly incompetently, but the point is that you live in a type of economy that is not only terrible at achieving the goals it sets itself but, far worse, an economy whose goals should never be met.
The key to happiness, the American writer Henry David Thoreau once wrote, is not to look for it. It is like a colourful butterfly: ‘The more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.’ So, if happiness is not the goal we should be aiming at, even if we crave it no end, what should be our aims? You must find your own answer, but while you are thinking about it, here are some personal thoughts.
Something that angers and terrifies me more than almost anything else is the thought of being the plaything of forces and people of which I am oblivious. I think most people feel this way. That’s why movies like The Matrix and V for Vendetta have proved so popular: they appeal to our need to be self-directing, autonomous, free thinkers. The worst slavery is that of heavily indoctrinated happy morons who adore their chains and cannot wait to thank their masters for the joy of their subservience.
Our market societies manufacture fantastic machines and incredible wealth, astounding poverty and mountainous debts, but at the same time they manufacture the desires and behaviours required in us for its perpetuation. The perfect example of this is the shopping mall. The architecture, the interior design, the music: everything is designed to numb the mind and marshal us at optimal speed through the aisles and shops, to stifle spontaneity and creativity and instead to manufacture the desire in us to leave its shops burdened with stuff that we probably neither needed nor wanted when we went in. Knowing this, I cannot help but loathe them. Instead, give me HALPEVAM any time, or even the Matrix!
There are other means of indoctrination as well. One is the mass media, whose purpose is also to fabricate mass consent to the oligarchy’s political decisions against our own interests and those of the planet. Another is the most potent form of ideological indoctrination of them all: economics.
‘So, how did these rulers manage to maintain their power, distributing surplus as they pleased, undisturbed by the majority?’ This was a question I posed near the beginning of this book, in Chapter 1. My answer was ‘By cultivating an ideology which caused the majority to believe deep in their hearts that only their rulers had the right to rule.’
This was so in Mesopotamia and it is so today. Every dominion needs a dominant ideology to legitimize it, a narrative that invokes fundamental ethical values in order to justify itself while threatening punishment for those who doubt in it. Organized religion has provided such narratives for centuries, developing sophisticated superstitions to shore up the power of rulers, justifying their autocratic power – and the violence and theft it allows – as the divinely mandated natural order of things.
As market societies emerged, religion took a back seat. The birth of science that in time made the Industrial Revolution possible also gradually revealed belief in a divine order to be just that: a belief, nothing more. The ruling class needed a new narrative with which to legitimize themselves, and they drew on the same mathematical methods of physicists and engineers to prove, with theorems and equations, that market societies were the ultimate natural order, created as if by an invisible hand, to use the words of their most famous founding father – the economist Adam Smith. This ideology, this new secular religion, was of course economics.
Since the nineteenth century, economists writing books and newspaper articles, now appearing on TV, radio and online, have been the apostles of market society. When normal people hear or read them, they tend to draw this conclusion: The economy is too technical and boring to bother. I should leave it to the experts. Except the truth is that there are no real experts, and the economy is too important to leave to the economists. As we have seen in this book, economic decisions decide everything from the mundane to the profound. Leaving the economy to the experts is the equivalent of those who lived in the Middle Ages entrusting their welfare to the theologians, the cardinals and the Spanish inquisitors. It is a terrible idea.
Have I ever told you why I became an economist? Because I refused to leave it to the experts. The more I understood the economists’ theories and mathematics the more I realized that the so-called experts in our great universities, on our TV screens, in the banks and finance ministries did not have a clue. The smartest among them created brilliant models that could only be solved mathematically if the reality of labour, money and debt described in this book was first removed from those models, rendering them irrelevant to market societies. The rest, the second-raters among economic commentators, not only did not understand the models of the great economists, whom they worshipped, but remarkably did not seem to care that they did not understand them.
The more I heard these economic experts talk about the economy, the more they sounded like sages or oracles from a pre-modern era. And that was not by chance. In the 1930s the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard spent time studying the society of the Azande, an African tribe. While living with them he observed that the Azande placed great store in their oracles, from whom they obtained prophecies just as the ancient Greeks did from the Oracle of Delphi. But since these prophecies often turned out to be completely inaccurate, he wondered how the oracles managed to maintain their unwavering power over the tribe. Evans-Pritchard’s explanation for the Azande people’s steadfast faith in the infallibility of their oracles went as follows: ‘Azande see as well as we that the failure of their oracle to prophesy truly calls for explanation, but so entangled are they in mystical notions that they must make use of them to account for failure. The contradiction between experience and one mystical notion is explained by reference to other mystical notions.’
Today’s economic experts are not much different. Whenever they fail to predict properly some economic phenomenon, which is almost always, they account for their failure by appealing to the same mystical economic notions that failed them in the first place. Occasionally new notions are created in order to account for the failure of the earlier ones.
For instance, the notion of ‘natural unemployment’ was created to explain the failure of market societies to produce full employment and of the experts to explain that failure. More generally, unemployment and low economic activity have been held up as proofs of insufficient competition, to be fought by the magic of ‘deregulation’ – the releasing of bankers and oligarchs from government restraints. If deregulation does not work, more privatization is thought to be able to do the trick instead. When this fails, it must have been the fault of the labour market, which must be liberated from the interference of trade unions and the impediment of social security benefits. And so it goes on.
How exactly are today’s experts any different from the Azande priests?
Many people will tell you that your father doesn’t know what he’s talking about; that economics is a science. That just as physics uses mathematical models to describe nature, so economics uses mathematical models to reveal the workings of the economy. This is nonsense.
Economists do make use of lovely mathematical models and an army of statistical tools and data. But this does not really make them scientists, at least not in the same way that physicists are scientists. Unlike physics, in which nature is the impartial judge of all predictions, economics can never be subjected to impartial tests. It would be not just hard but impossible to create a laboratory in which economic circumstances can be sufficiently controlled and replicated for any scientific experiment to have validity – to test for example how world history would have evolved if in 1929 the state had printed money to give to the poor instead of opting for austerity, or how Greece would have fared if in 2010 the bankrupt Greek state had refused to take out the largest loan in history on conditions of the most savage austerity ever practised. When economists insist that they too are scientists because they use mathematics, they are no different from astrologists protesting that they are just as scientific as astronomers because they also use computers and complicated charts.
Fellow economists, as you can imagine, get very cross with me when I tell them that we face a choice: we can keep pretending we are scientists, like astrologists do, or admit that we are more like philosophers, who will never know the meaning of life for sure, no matter how wisely and rationally they argue. But were we to confess that we are at best worldly philosophers, it is unlikely we would continue to be so handsomely rewarded by the ruling class of a market society whose legitimacy we provide by pretending to be scientists.
Having rejected the escape offered by Kostas’ HALPEVAM, what next for you? The third-rate simulation of HALPEVAM offered by the shopping mall? An insurrection against the status quo? Or a decision to carve out your own niche in our highly imperfect world? You will need to work it out for yourself.
Whatever course you choose, there is something I recommend you take with you: the idea of the ancient scientist Archimedes that, given enough distance, nothing is impossible. ‘Give me somewhere to stand, and a lever long enough, and I shall lift the Earth,’ he said. All systems of domination work by enveloping us in their narrative and superstitions in such a way that we cannot see beyond them. Taking a step or two back, finding a way to inspect them from the outside, allows us a glimpse of how imperfect, how ludicrous, they are. Securing this glimpse keeps you in touch with reality. This is why (I think) you rejected HALPEVAM’s world – because once within it, an Archimedean perspective would be impossible.
Market society also instils illusory beliefs in us, though never as efficiently or happily as HALPEVAM. They thus lead us to behaviours that reinforce it at the expense of our creativity, our relationships, our humanity and of course our planet. Whether you adapt your behaviour to suit market society’s needs, or become obstinate enough to want to adapt society to your own ideas about what society should be like instead, performing the Archimedean leap – a periodic mental withdrawal from our society’s norms and certainties – is vital.
When you were born, your name, Xenia, appealed to me greatly because its etymology comes from the Greek word xenos, meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner’ and translates as ‘kindness to strangers’. The appeal of this name came in part from my belief that the best way to see your country, your society, is to see it through the eyes of an outsider, a refugee. Try mentally to travel to a faraway place, if not necessarily in order to move your world – though how splendid that would be! – but to see it clearly for what it is. Doing so will grant you the opportunity to retain your freedom. And to remain a free spirit as you grow up and make your way in this world, it is essential that you cultivate a rare but crucial freedom: the liberty that comes from knowing how the economy works and from the capacity to answer the trillion-dollar question: ‘Who does what to whom around your neck of the woods and further afield?’
So, enough! You have suffered me sufficiently. Since we have come full circle, returning to the question of why some have so much while others have so little, you may say I have wasted your time. In reply, I offer only this favourite verse:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.