Yves here. Haha, Capitalism! All that sublimation and deferred gratification! What a field day for a shrink!
More seriously, this essay uses as it focus Adam Smith’s invisible hand image. I’m surprised that Michael Vannoy Adams missed that Smith was a Shakespearean actor. The image of the invisible hand comes from Macbeth, as a conjurer’s device. Even Smithsonian Magazine picked up on that and other nods to Shakespeare in Smith’s opus.
By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
Economics presents itself as a rational science dealing with objective measures and quantitative approaches, but astute observers have long recognized its suffusion with magical, fantastic, irrational, and unconscious elements. That makes it fertile ground for those who study human psychology.
Contemporary discussions of economics and psychology focus mostly on behavioral economics, while psychoanalysis, the branch ostensibly dedicated to heightening awareness of the unconscious, has made far fewer appearances in the conversation. More than half a century ago, thinkers like Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse gained wide appeal with their dives into the hidden recesses and unconscious motivations of economics, but as Sigmund Freud began to fall out of favor with academics in the 1960s, psychoanalytic approaches have been pushed aside or rebranded – despite the fact that a great deal of recent scientific research supports Freud’s concept of the unconscious.
As we grapple today with economic systems that seem ever more destructive to human wellbeing, might it be time to reconsider whether psychoanalysis has something useful to say about the dismal science?
The name of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, redolent of mystical and esoteric concerns, would probably sound particularly out of place at an economic conference. But in his book For Love of the Imagination: Interdisciplinary Applications of Jungian Psychoanalysis, psychoanalyst and psychology professor Michael Vannoy Adams shows how Jung’s special attention to images — to making them conscious and understanding their meaning and influence — can help us glean what lies in the shadow of contemporary capitalism.
Adams’ starting point is Adam Smith’s image of the invisible hand, that legendary representation of the unseen force that arranges the economically self-serving actions of individuals into collective benefits. In Adams’ view, the invisible hand is not only a key idea in economics, but “the most important image of the last 250 years” — as paramount to capitalism as the hammer and sickle image is to communism. In Jungian terms, it is archetypal. “No other image so pervades, so dominates, the modern world,” asserts Adams.
He points out that as images go, the invisible hand is an odd one. You can’t really visualize it. Nevertheless, as Adams reminds us, the invisible hand image was circulating long before Smith used it in works ranging from Homer to Voltaire to indicate ghostly or divine forces that intervene in human affairs. Literary scholars note that around the time of Smith’s usage, invisible hands were popping up in gothic novels to slam doors and otherwise move the human plot along. Adams points to an especially evocative version of the hand cited in A.O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests – the reproduced illustration of a celestial, immaterial hand squeezing a human heart beneath the motto, “Affectus Comprime” or, in Hirschman’s translation, “Repress the Passions!” A psychoanalytic image if there ever was one.
As Adams indicates, when Smith first mentions the hand in a treatise on astronomy (in an essay unpublished during his lifetime but probably written before 1758), it was a mythological image — the hand of Jupiter moving celestial bodies in the heavens. Later, this hand becomes an economic hand, mentioned first in the Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 and then again in The Wealth of Nations in 1776.
Smith construes the economic invisible hand as the influence that leads individuals who pursue a private interest to promote the public good without realizing it. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, in outlining a case in which a rich landowner ends up employing laborers through his spending on luxury, Smith illustrates that the hand helps the wealthy, in spite of their “insatiable desires,” to share some of their wealth with the poor. Later, in The Wealth of Nations, he describes the hand in a section on trade, suggesting that it guides merchants and manufacturers acting in their own interest for profit to unintentionally produce positive outcomes for all.
Thus, by some audacious magic, the touch of the invisible hand transmutes selfishness into a virtue. This, as Adams puts it, constitutes a “moral inversion” – a turning upside down of a long tradition of viewing selfishness as one of the least desirable human traits. As Adams sees it, the effects of this inversion on human affairs have been profound.
Through Adams’ Jungian analytical lens, the invisible hand can be seen wiping away guilt. Under its influence, a person can feel innocent while acting greedily and indulging in what was previously known as one of the seven deadly sins. In Jungian terms, what happens when we do not recognize our guilt is that we tend to project it onto others as a shadow, the emblem of our unresolved moral conflicts. In free-market systems, the poor are made culpable, blamed for their situation and failure to act in ways that increase their wealth. The poor are assigned guilt for the self-interested actions of the rich.
Adams notes that the hand serves a religious function, too, namely in its representation of the god of the market, the god long worshipped by economists. He views this god as deus absconditus – one that, like the form of the Biblical Yahweh, is hidden and concealed. In another sense, deus absconditus is a god who is absent when people are in extreme trouble. Or a god that is unknowable or incomprehensible. Why, for example, is an invisible hand even necessary if selfish behavior naturally produces beneficial social results?
Adams notes that like Yahweh, the image of the invisible hand privileges the unseen over the seen, the abstract over the embodied, and the intellect over the senses. This function seems to pervade economics, where practitioners have often fallen in love with abstract models that have blinded them to what can be readily seen in reality, particularly the poverty and suffering of actual embodied, living beings. The hand as market god also becomes a deus ex machina like the one lowered onto the stage in ancient dramas to decide the final result of the play, or, more broadly, the mechanism that brings about a solution to a seemingly insoluble problem. In this way, the invisible hand manipulates the economy both divinely and mechanistically. Whatever the economic problem, however thorny, the invisible hand is the only solution: TINA – There Is No Alternative. To speak out against the god of the market is to have your credibility questioned, to commit heresy. For worshippers of the hand, the market has infinite wisdom to behave the way it does.
The market god, observes Adams, is a jealous god, and like Yahweh, will have no other gods before him. If the government seeks to intervene in the divine and benevolent market, then it must be a devil. This image of the market god, according to Adams, allows economists to repress the actual experience of economic crises by summoning the mantra that governmental intervention is never necessary. Market imperfections are thus consigned to the oblivion of what Adams calls the “economic unconscious.” The monopoly of the market god crowds out other images, warns Adams, images that might help orient us towards values like selflessness.
Adams points out that in obviating the necessity of government regulation, the hand dispenses with any human accountability for the economy. Eventually, in the extreme vision of neoliberalism, every inch of human society is in the grip of the hand, with the privatization of everything from medicine to education. The market renders governments unnecessary except to protect the interests of the capitalists, which leads to vast infusions of money from corporations and rich individuals to control the state and enhance their power. The invisible hand in unregulated markets seems to do the opposite of what Smith described – guiding activity that tends to benefit only a few.
Like the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8, the coronavirus pandemic has discredited the ideology of the invisible hand, illustrating how relentlessly selfish activity produces not social benefits, but social destruction. The Covid crisis revealed how the degeneration of public services renders capitalist societies more vulnerable to disruption and less resilient. The visible hand of the government has returned through fiscal stimulus, benefits to unemployed workers, and monetary policy. There is apostasy afoot, but that does not mean the market god is defeated. Witness the current flurry of arguments coming from many Republicans and, recently, Jeff Bezos, blaming high inflation on Biden’s American Rescue Plan and government stimulus checks, as if supply chain problems and monopolistic practices have nothing to do with it. As if belief in the unquestioned wisdom of the market god doesn’t result in billions of people suffering a mean and miserable existence.
There is plenty of talk in the air about the possibility of recession – perhaps we should also be concerned about ongoing repression. In 1957, Jung issued this warning about the failure to recognize the shadow and understand the operations of the unconscious:
“One can regard one’s stomach or heart as unimportant and worthy of contempt, but that does not prevent overeating or overexertion from having consequences that affect the whole man. Yet we think that psychic mistakes and their consequences can be got rid of with mere words, for “psychic” means less than air to most people. All the same, nobody can deny that without the psyche there would be no world at all and still less a human world. Virtually everything depends on the human soul and its functions. It should be worthy of all the attention we can give it, especially today, when everyone admits that the weal or woe of the future will be decided neither by the attacks of wild animals nor by natural catastrophes nor by the danger of worldwide epidemics but simply by the psychic changes in man.”
Early psychoanalyst Otto Gross, a close associate and influencer of Jung, argued that investigations of the unconscious are the necessary groundwork for any kind of revolution or moral restoration. He points us to the project of liberating the repressed values of mutual aid and cooperation that human beings are born with. Only then can we wave goodbye to the invisible hand.
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When my siblings and I were young, my Dad was fond of holding our wrists and using our own hands to slap our faces, and he’d say “Quit hitting yourself.”
I might add, my Dad was convinced that American union workers had “Priced themselves out of a job.”
I’m of the firm belief that my employers codified aversion to paying workers what they’re worth has a strong religious subtext, an absolute taboo.
OK, on to a possible answer to the question.
Since 1945, America’s ‘shadow‘ has been the shape of a mushroom cloud.
What capitalism is repressing is any real, collective self-knowledge on the part of Americans, of our country’s ‘shadow’, our un-acknowledged dark side, and the terrible violence that underpins the glittering myth of the shining city on the hill.
Capitalism must, and does work very hard to make sure that Americans accept, and believe in the contrived self-image of their country, and its people as righteous champions of freedom, and prosperity, and never, ever, reflect for even a moment on the immense level of cruelty, and violence that enforces what our rulers call the ‘rules based international order‘.
Yes. This is my take as well.
Jung’s “Collective Unconscious” is a thing at a society level; therefore, just as an individual has a Shadow, so too America as a country has a Shadow:
https://longsworde.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/the-field-concept-in-jungs-collective-unconscious/
Ack!
It’s not that complicated. Markets need money to circulate, while people see it as signal to extract and store. We are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, circular, feedback generated reality.
A medium is not a store. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The medium is not the message. It’s a tool, not a god.
We are simply in that stage of social evolution, between recognizing government works best as a public utility and realizing the same about banking.
Consequently the banks have the upper hand, but lack the decision making function of government, so the effect is this economic Ebola virus, where all value is reduced to money, in order to be siphoned off.
That’s why our political establishment has the strategic aptitude of bacteria racing across a Petri dish.
Are you saying we haven’t made a god out of the market?
I think the implication is that the market is an ok to shitty tool but an utterly disastrous God.
also, One Market Under God by Thomas Frank
A related analysis: Marx on capital as a real god
Capitalism as a ergrigore that functions as an independant will in society.
Thanks for that. It mirrors and extends some perceptions I’ve been trying to articulate to myself.
The invisible hand has been busy since Adam Smith referred to it. It’s been busy picking the pockets of the working class.
That’s like a full time job. So there must be two invisible hands. The other one doles out cash to the shameless political panhandlers. Another full time job. The creature that never sleeps.
The irony is that Smith himself would undoubtedly have been revolted by the twisted misinterpretation of his work as currently in service to, and justifying ruthless propertarian oligarchy.
He considered his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” as his great work — that it’s never mentioned by those presenting a caricature of the moral philosopher is “the tell.”
There is the invisible hand, the hand in the cookie jar, sleight of hand, the hand that could think, clean hands and hidden hands. We’ve got all sortsa hands. I don’t buy the premise that “market imperfections are consigned to the oblivion of the ‘economic unconscious’.” When I look at the mess we are in I see deliberate action all over the place. Take Bezos: He’s operating on the conscious and deliberate manipulation of the “strong dollar” so he can buy up massive quantities of goods and sell them for a tidy profit. He is a final-stage neoliberal monopolist. Government is in his pocket. “Inflation” gives him heart palpitations because he won’t be sitting at that poker table very long if all his chips are devalued. Our entire neoliberal economy operates on the deliberate (and artificial) principle of a strong dollar – but it is spinning out of control. A strong dollar demands international demand. So we impoverish ordinary citizens with high prices and interest rates and we thereby offer high interest rates on our bonds, etc. But we crush domestic demand. So, if Bezos were smart he would embrace a steady level of inflation to compensate for all of our deindustrialization. Because without it nobody is going to need his “fulfillment centers.” And the whole thing collapses by a hand he didn’t see coming, or maybe he did.
Susan, this is great… Almost George Carlin-esque. As a nod to Carlin, you left out one other hand… It’s pretty crass, but that hand is keeping us distracted while the other ones do their thing.
My favorite, ahem, visualization of the the Invisible Hand: Tom Tomorrow’s Invisible-Hand-of-the-Free-Market Man!
It’s odd that the article doesn’t cite any of the numerous references to the “Invisible hand” in Smith’s works. Here’s one:
“The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements…They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition.”
About that word “Providence.” Smith was a Deist, which is to say he believed that God had created a world that was as perfect as possible give practical limitations, and then gone off to do something else. It was therefore inherent in the design of the economy (and of the world in general) that selfish acts of individuals ultimately turned out to benefit the greater good: God had designed it that way. I suppose it’s a measure of the galloping secularisation of society over the last few generations and general ignorance of the importance of religion in history, that people like the author of this article misunderstand what Smith was saying. (Smith would never have deified “the market”: quite the opposite.)
This is just an example of the Providential view of history that was extremely common until perhaps a century ago. Puritan (and in general Protestant) literature is saturated with it: “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” says Hamlet. “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.” The idea of a God (or gods) intervening directly in human affairs is as old as civilisation itself: read Homer. In a Christian context, it means God intervening in the affairs of weak and often malignant humans to put things right. Smith’s version is just a late and very mild version of a very old idea. And of course it’s not restricted to Christianity: you find the same ideas in Islam, except probably more so.
I’ve read a little of Robert Bolton’s article on dualism. Getting into it more, I’m hoping it’ll shed light on the morphic field’s seeming to be a bit on its own. I believe in some interventions. Some perhaps that allowed given evolutionary sequences to continue on. Half of my idea on why humans is a little unusual. The other half is that we were supposed to be a bunch of Baxter Blacks. Industrial consumerism not exactly “on it.”
Great article. Reminds me of Harvey Cox’s essay “market as god”, a superb distillation of the esoteric foundation of modern free market ideology:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/306397/
Thanks for sharing. I like that it names names, ie. economists as the high priests of the religion. A pity it doesn’t take things a step further and shine light on the remainder of the priesthood which now infests almost every organisation. I’m thinking of senior levels of management, People and Culture (ie. what used to be called Personnel Department), Marketing (which should more correctly be called the Propaganda Department) etc.
this is another reason why the focus is on creating an AI to run the world as fast as we can is being indulged. we think that such a being will have the mind of god and be able to conduct all knowledge production “fairly”. people who engage in this don’t realize that there is no ultimate “fairness”. it is a matter of the perspective what is considered “fair”. they seek true objectivity but there is no thing by human hands or minds. you would need to be outside of the system and contemplating all, thus be the Eye of God. then there will be no arguing with the outcome that such an AI creates. seems like a fantasy heavily influenced by Platonic ideals.
we don’t want to make decisions we must be held responsible for. and the corporation is a machine for avoiding being held responsible, and blaming “market forces” and “necessity” for the decisions, and the losers for being on the losing end of them.
Invisible Hand–opiate of the capitalist people? But perhaps the clockwork that animates us is not the Almighty or the magic of markets but something a bit more Darwinian. We are social animals but conscious social animals and the conflict between our social and individual instincts inevitably provokes much agitated philosophizing. We are man the rationalizing animal.
Or to quote from Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game, “everybody has their reasons.”
I’ve never been able to find much of use in Jungian psychology. The anti-identitarian consensus here is pretty strong, and if you are fully appraised of just how identity-affirming Jungian psychology tends to be — you’re supposed to understand yourself with reference to “archetypes” and affirm them appropriately — then you will turn away. Jungian psychology does not involve a critique of reification, it encourages you to discover your proper reified form. This is extremely at odds with what Freudian psychoanalysis proposed, which was that reifications (qua “id”) be dissolved to enhance the freedom of the ego.
The article skirts this distinction. Notice how Marcuse seems to be in the same psychoanalytic camp, when in fact Marcuse was very critical of Jung along the lines I am sketching here. Instead we get a kind of psychocultural analysis that assumes the metaphoric invisible hand has gotten into our noggins somehow and really shapes our daily lives. That, I guess, bears some correspondence to Jungian archetype theory, but here those contents are internalized through humdrum socialization processes, pretty different from the more mysterious acquisition of archetypes.
But, jeepers, to imply that it is the invisible hand metaphor that gets in the way of the formation of mutual aid networks blows the game. If the metaphor is effective at all, it’s because it floats above brutal socialization into selling our labor power to survive and which tends to make alternatives seem absurd or imperiling. That this ongoing process is a continual source of strain that is in part managed by the kinds of defenses that Freudians emphasized is ignored in favor of an ideological mirage. To the extent that it is of any use in social transformation, psychology can be helpful by showing people the nitty-gritty of the contortions they go through to put up with capitalism, not by blithely claiming they are blinded by a metaphor.
Not everyone’s noggins, just the noggins of our capitalist overlords. They are the ones who find self-justificaion in it.
its a idiotology, and the brittle supply chains are in realty, free trade, which supply chain jargon is to hide something that has never worked, creates carnage and war when ever its applied.
Within the parameters of our TINA reality it certainly seems the “invisible hand” is like Yahweh. I do wonder if this characteristic of inevitability is endemic to capitalism, or if it was baked in through the dialectical clash capitalism had with Marxism in the latter half of the 20th century.
Prior to 1991 it was communism that was seen as historically inevitable. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union the psychological tricks that were employed in the service of capitalism solidified from propaganda to theology, and in the Western view it was capitalism that was now inevitable.
But even in 1991 only about 30% of humanity lived under communism. Despite the collapse of the Soviet vanguard, something like 25% of humanity lives in communist polities in 2022. The percentage grows if you include socialist nations. And as opposed to 1992, the largest and most dynamic economy in the world is a communist one.
So it seems to me the psychology of capitalist inevitably is a late addition borne out of capitalist advertising. And like all advertising tricks, this one is fast becoming stale and inert.
The invisible hands deals with a fundamental problem of Enlightenment thought and the foundations of liberalism: an axiomatic acceptance of man as a rational animal. Except we aren’t rational; we are capable of reason. We are capable to an extraordinary capacity like building rockets and credit default swaps and atom bombs, but we are not intrinsically rational. We get married for love, we build wealth far beyond our ability to utilize in a lifetime, we lust for power such that we demand to be a president at 80 and we nurture our petty hatreds.
Our whole system is built on the concept of us being rational. Our economics and politics demand it to such an extent that we criticize people for voting against their interests. If they were rational, how and why would they ever vote against their own interests? Enter the invisible hand that can make the irrational fit into the required framework of rationality. Didn’t one of the Austrians argue that the sum total of irrational economic behavior at the micro level transforms into rational economic behavior at the macro level? (I’m deficient at economics and its history, one of the reasons I dig this place.)
We do attribute magic to the market, especially at the lay level. Almost no one with a 401K understands what happens to the money they put in. It’s miraculously transubstantiated into even more money (mostly), but how is known only to the priestly class who live aloofly segregated by riches and decide the fate of kings. And we slump our shoulders in acceptance of fate when the market god is wrathful against us. Presidents tell us that we’ll go hungry because the market decided. We are just being punished for our infidelity to the principles of Reason on which the market god depends and requires. So now we must make our sacrifices of burnt offerings.
“The invisible hand in Jungian terms is archetypal.”
“No other image so pervades, so dominates the modern world, asserts Adams.”
But for Jung himself “archetypes are not determined in regards to their content , but only as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree.” (Collected Works Vol. 9 Part I. pp. 79-80).
Jung compares archetypes to “the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, performs the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material interest of its own.” (Collected Works, Part 9).
One more hack and then I promise I’ll quit: Inflation is the invisible hand.
Isn’t the invisible hand the hand of god that guided Diego Maradona to score the goal against England in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico City?
Only to the referee, millions of Englishmen saw it quite clearly.
The other goal, however, was sublime — Maradona was truly the Janus face of the beautiful game …
This was supposed to reply to Lex, but my phone had other ideas;
Markets are an ecosystem, in which the various participants are the organisms. Money is the medium. If those controlling it are also participants, then they effectively own the market.
Government, as executive and regulatory function, is analogous to a central nervous system, while money and banking are analogous to blood and the circulation system. By making government public, politicians are subject to election cycles, while banks have no similar limitations and over time have gained the upper hand.
Since their function is to provide economic liquidity, without regulatory strictures, the long term effect is the increasing financial liquidification of everything. Thus economic Ebola virus.
We need balance and tension between the forces driving us and those steering. The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgment.
Either we will keep sliding back to private government, aka, oligarchy, eventually institutionalized as monarchy, or we move onto public banking.
I don’t think the “archetype” of the “Invisible Hand” really gets to the bottom of things. What we need is not just that, but a motivational story (for the IH archetype has to get its grip on motivation – and the truth is that we are not always, even often – most of us, anyway – motivated by the selfishness the IH encapsulates). What motivates some of us to such dedicated selfishness – and so to the attractiveness of the IH archetype – is what I have heard called by such people a “natural ethic of ‘heroic’ entrepreneurship.” It is, so I’ve been informed, the heroic entrepreneur who pursues selfishness to the cost of all other motives that makes the IH ‘work’ in the face of those who, in their weakness, are non-selfish or – even worse! – altruistic…
My father is himself a good person. So he tends to see our elected leaders as good people. Obama, Dubya, Biden, doesn’t matter (except for Trump), he voted for them all and projects his own goodness on to them. He literally cannot see these people as malicious (except for Trump).
For the life of me I cannot get my father to accept these leaders might be “bad guys” no matter what evidence I present. Why?
What Jung did is take Freud’s “unconsious” and refine aspects of this into an image we can understand but not look at directly, a dark side of the moon called “The Shadow.” Dr. Jekyll has no idea what Mr. Hyde is doing.
The Shadow side of our own psyche explains how one can blame someone else for all things wrong in the world and scapegoat it as The Other, all the while refusing to see how these same personality traits are manifest within us and our own minds.
This sort of psychological process is how we can explain someone like Bill Gates or George Soros simultaneously gouging the world in the eye with a flaming pointed stick for profit, yet also congratulating themselves and each other for all their good work as philanthropic saviours of the world.
“Liberal communists (note: term is used ironically) are top executives reviving the spirit of contest or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who have taken over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernized version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the market and social responsibility are not opposites, but can be reunited for mutual benefit.”
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-vile
This is exactly how a human being can take their main drive of WINNING! manifested in an “There can be only one!” attitude towards the rest of the human race, and compartmentalize it safely away from their noble self image of the caring charitable man who is “eradicating polio” or “saving democracy” as the case may be, depending on their personal brand.
In other words, yes, these billionaires believe their own bullshit. Compartmentalization through The Shadow thus staves off the cognitive dissonance beleiving in their ridiculous philosophy “sefishness = selflessness” necessarily creates.
Worshipping “The Market” as God leads to social responsiblity. Because God is charitable. It’s bonkers!
In Michael Hudson’s book J Is For Junk Economics, Hudson acknowledges that Adam Smith uses the term invisible hand, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, to describe an increase in overall prosperity by seeking their own self-interest. However in The Wealth of Nations, he describes hereditary land ownership, monopolies, and rent seeking as being incompatible with such balance. Here he describes businessmen conspiring against the public good by seeking monopoly power. So the powers that be have conveniently selected the term, the invisible hand, to justify their own selflessness while disregarding the overall message of Smith. Hudson, who considers himself a classical economist, sees that the early classical economists all saw capitalism naturally moving toward socialism. It seems that the book by the Adams discussed in this post has also disregarded the full message of Adam Smith in his analysis. I suppose it was necessary to sell his book.
NC is full-service indeed, with Jungian critiques! May I also offer two tightly-held American archetypes – bootstraps and exceptionalism.
A Matter of Heart, a 80s documentary about Jung, is well worth watching.
Missing from this whole conversation is how much of the invisible hand is just plain old misogyny, cleansed by academia and dressed up with an economic label, prevalent even among critics of capitalism!
I don’t buy for a second that women are virtuous. There are plenty of greedy and abusive women and they get to be more so the more power they have.
All true! But since they decided that god was a man, there apparently have not been enough greedy women to make a difference for 52% of the world’s population; economics helps by backing that up with the numbers.
Economics as moral philosophy or religion — either description would be more accurate than sullying science with any association thereto.
This MICIMATT thing about weapons to Ukraine and the sanctions are both about magical as you can get, at the minimum at least as irrational as any Nietzschean idealism that’s come down the pike so far. The current blend is always what gets folks, and this one’s one of inverted totalitarianism + old homey Gates seeming to have the answers to everything. Remember, default “science” at the time had a beef with Jung. According to old homey these days (at least TPTB that love him), there should be no struggle with facts’ sources. But if individuals don’t struggle with opposed sources, they miss out on hard knocks. And if they miss out on hard knocks they miss out on a lot. Aporia (noun form) is a condition humans have lived with from nigh on nigh on.
The paragraphs below are parts of something I recently put up on a social media “group” page (before I put up something else there that started getting all prior comments under certain shares removed…I mean everyone’s)…
Half the learning process in education and the creativity students express/develop in the thing…is taking sides in regard to some “academic debate.” So, if you’re gonna stifle creativity across the board, where does the creativity get stuffed?