The global capitalist=consumerist economy has an entire
faith system, which has its own hierarchy, its own institutions, its own marble
palaces. It has its own mythology, doctrine of the creation, doctrine of the Fall,
doctrine of redemption, even a kind of eschatology, where history is going
where it ought to be going – all interpreted and presented in terms of a
consumer capitalist economy. It has its own heretics, its own schisms. It
encourages us to trust in the god of the system: to trust, even though the god
of the economic system doesn’t seem to know what he is doing at times, when
things go very wrong. But we are still supposed to trust that in the long run
the wisdom of this market god will make things right. There is an old American
religious song called “Farther along we will understand why.” There may be a
mystery now that the trickle-down theory of economics is not reaching everyone,
as Pope Francis reminds us, but if we only wait, if we are only patient, in the
long run the market knows best. In other words, to use a term taken directly
from theology, the market is omniscient.
It may not appear omniscient, but it certainly claims to be.
So we must have confidence that it is omniscient. So I am talking about an entire
symbol system here, of myths and stories and narratives, that are parallel to
but very different from those of traditional religions such as Christianity or
Judaism or Islam – very different and in some ways contradictory.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
In a nutshell
The global capitalist=consumerist economy has an entire faith system, which has its own hierarchy, its own institutions, its own marble palaces. It has its own mythology, doctrine of the creation, doctrine of the Fall, doctrine of redemption, even a kind of eschatology, where history is going where it ought to be going – all interpreted and presented in terms of a consumer capitalist economy. It has its own heretics, its own schisms. It encourages us to trust in the god of the system: to trust, even though the god of the economic system doesn’t seem to know what he is doing at times, when things go very wrong. But we are still supposed to trust that in the long run the wisdom of this market god will make things right. There is an old American religious song called “Farther along we will understand why.” There may be a mystery now that the trickle-down theory of economics is not reaching everyone, as Pope Francis reminds us, but if we only wait, if we are only patient, in the long run the market knows best. In other words, to use a term taken directly from theology, the market is omniscient.
It may not appear omniscient, but it certainly claims to be. So we must have confidence that it is omniscient. So I am talking about an entire symbol system here, of myths and stories and narratives, that are parallel to but very different from those of traditional religions such as Christianity or Judaism or Islam – very different and in some ways contradictory.