The Cult of Capitalism

Neoliberalism neatly cleaves the world in two: myth and reason. Myth, in this case, means roughly “a story made up to explain things that is not backed by data.” Liberalism is the basis of a modern society, based in science and reason. It is informed by “natural law” like evolution and capitalist economics. Meanwhile, myth provides the framework for “primitive” societies, like those colonizers carried out a systematic genocide against in order to create the US.

There’s a strange justification embedded in that assertion. It evokes a reference to a Social Darwinism still embedded deep in the American psyche, an evolutionary model that obscures a vulnerable complexity, an ideology that justifies genocide. Those primitive others, whose lives were still informed by mythology, could only have ever faced one fate: they must have been destroyed, as reason must conquer ignorance, when they faced an advanced and rational people. How else could things have gone?

Surely within modern “Western” academia, one would only expect to find myth studied as such, and only within the humanities. Surely the Enlightenment tradition, the reason of Europe, cannot itself be woven from myth. Surely we are a rational people, systematically purging myth with the light of science. Yet behold the mythology embedded in the bedrock of capitalism: the myth of currency. Still taught to children in schools and adults in introductory economics classes, even while being widely debunked for generations.

I’m not going to spend much time on the barter myth, because others have already pointed out how laughably absurd it is. Anthropologists have found no evidence for it. Archaeologists have found no evidence for it. Adam Smith literally said he just made it up. Yet, it’s still the dominant story told, widely accepted as historical fact, despite there being well studied and supported alternative explanations. Why have we all been taught a story that is clearly not true?

Capitalist economics is largely made of this type of obvious bullshit. The supply demand curve, the central model of economics, assumes rational actors. The simple existence of advertisement is sufficient to prove that this assumption is unreliable at best. Though some value has come out of economics, it can be compared to phrenology: a pseudo-science built around defending racism, that occasionally stumbles on useful ideas (see Phineas Gage for phrenology, or game theory and Ostrom’s work on the commons for economics) which will probably, at some point in the future, be integrated into an actual science.

Capitalist economics is the apologetics of the Neoliberal faith. Epicycle after epicycle is added to explain the repeated failures of markets, to excuse the growing incompetence of “the wealth creators,” to hide the inconvenient truth that infinite growth is incompatible with a finite world. The wealthy should be in control because they are wise, they are wise because they became wealthy, they are wise therefore they deserve to be in control. Why is having wealth the biggest predictor of building wealth? The logic of capitalism chases it’s tail until we are exhausted. Those who have survived cults may be noticing a familiar feeling.

And this is not for nothing. It’s easy to believe that the concept of ownership we have now is somehow universal to all humanity. Yet, not all human languages even have ways to express ownership in the same way. As Etymologynerd pointed out, some languages will grammatically separate mutable and immutable “ownership.” Body parts, parents, inalienable connections are not haphazardly grouped with alienable possessions. Other languages are incapable of producing a grammatically correct sentence to express “ownership” without a workaround. Ownership then, far from being universal, is a cultural creation that happened at some point in time.

As Graeber has pointed out, when we try to understand the origin of the concepts of ownership and control of private property, it becomes very strange indeed. But to dig in to that we need to unpack a few things.

In Dawn of Everything, David Graeber ( et al.), outlines 3 basic forms of domination:

1. control over violence (sovereignty)
2. control over information (bureaucracy)
3. and charismatic competition (politics)

The modern “state,” the book argues, is an illusion. Rather than being a thing itself, it’s instead a combination of these three forms of domination. Additionally, these forms of domination, historically, did not necessarily develop together.

The sovereign seems to evolve from cults of personality, wherein said sovereign becomes the ultimate expression of a child in the form of an adult. The sovereign requires constant attention, must be fed and clothed, must be served at all times. Meanwhile, the sovereign is simultaneously a person who is unbounded by all law. The sovereign may be expected to murder or steal, but does so with the permission of the people. But the early sovereign, without a bureaucracy to enforce their will, was only individually unbound by social constraints. Emissaries of the sovereign may well simply be ignored.

By being the sovereign, this individual was released from the law. The properties of sovereignty were transmitted by birth, non-transferable and connected directly to the individual. But other systems of privilege could be disconnected from the individual. Magical items could imbue the one who controlled the item with a set of transferable sovereign-like properties. Ritual masks or musical instruments, for example, may allow an individual to order others around while they are being held or used by the owner. Were such objects to escape the ritual realm, they could give the “owner” permanent ritual powers.

Territorial sovereignty seems to have evolved from personal sovereignty, where the powers of sovereignty are restricted to a space and the person may change. Divine Right of Kings maintained the birth-rite connection between the individual and sovereignty, but this was not universal. Some systems included the possibility for regional sovereignty to be transferred based on competition. A republic is an instance of transfer of sovereignty via competition where the winner of the competition may be decided by votes. But there are also other ways to restrict and transfer sovereignty.

There are magical objects in our society that permit the owner limited sovereign violence within an explicitly constrained space. The deed to a house, in many US states, may permit the owner to murder people who enter the house under certain circumstances. The connection between ancient myth could not be made more explicit than by it’s name: The Castle Doctrine. Property allows exceptions to rules that are supposedly otherwise universally applied.

Property also has other magical elements, such as transition of ownership. To own property (such as land or tools), the logic goes, is to then also own all products produced with that property (food grown on land, items manufactured in an owned factory). Marx refuted this, claiming that it was labor, not ownership of the means of production, that actually was the true root of ownership. Unfortunately, he missed the fact that the concepts of “workers” and “ownership” are just completely made up. Ownership is a metaphysical concept with no connection to any natural law. It is a religious assertion. “Das Kaptial” is a grimoire that claims to reveal the true magic of property. Thus the entirety of “Das Kapital” could simply be replaced with the “rationalist” reply of “nah dude, that’s all just some made up bullshit” and, by doing so, would become more consistent with anthropological evidence.

[S]acred items are, in many cases, the only important and exclusive forms of property that exist in societies where personal autonomy is taken to be a paramount value, or what we may simply call ‘free societies’. It’s not just relations of command that are strictly confined to sacred contexts, or even occasions when humans impersonate spirits; so too is absolute – or what we would today refer to as ‘private’ – property. In such societies, there turns out to be a profound formal similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion.

Much of this is implicit – if never clearly stated or developed – in Émile Durkheim’s classic definition of ‘the sacred’ as that which is ‘set apart’: removed from the world, and placed on a pedestal, at some times literally and at other times figuratively, because of its imperceptible connection with a higher force or being. Durkheim argued that the clearest expression of the sacred was the Polynesian term tabu, meaning ‘not to be touched’. But when we speak of absolute, private property, are we not talking about something very similar – almost identical in fact, in its underlying logic and social effects?

As British legal theorists like to put it, individual property rights are held, notionally at least, ‘against the whole world’. If you own a car, you have the right to prevent anyone in the entire world from entering or using it. (If you think about it, this is the only right you have in your car that’s really absolute. Almost anything else you can do with a car is strictly regulated: where and how you can drive it, park it, and so forth. But you can keep absolutely anyone else in the world from getting inside it.) In this case the object is set apart, fenced about by invisible or visible barriers – not because it is tied to some supernatural being, but because it’s sacred to a specific, living human individual. In other respects, the logic is much the same.

To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that – quite unlike free societies – we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms.

-Graeber et. al., Dawn of Everything

The cult of the United States makes many such wild metaphysical assertions, all pinned together by the claim that, because some people under its control are allowed to choose the winner of elite competitions for sovereignty by voting, the system is consensual (ignoring, of course, the massive apparatus of violence needed to maintain this cult). But even this assertion, that the population actually controls the cult via the “democratic process,” is itself easily disproved.

In 2014 Princeton University published a study used data to show that US is an oligarchy, not a democracy. We all know that the desires of the elite are more predictive of what policy will be implemented than are the desires of the population. So we are told that “We The People” are the root of “legitimate authority,” but we all really know, at least on some level, that none of us are actually part of that “We.” Therefore, if we acknowledge what we all know is true, all authority exercised by the government of the United States in our name is, necessarily, illegitimate. One of the most interesting and relevant (to this topic) observations in Dawn of Everything is, in fact, hiding in a footnote and is, actually, a reference to another book:

[…] whenever one group has overwhelming power over another […] both sides tend to end up acting as if they were conspiring to falsify the historical record. That is: there will be an ‘official version’ of reality – say that plantation owners are benevolent paternal figures who only ever have the best interests of their slaves at heart – which no one, neither masters or slaves, actually believes, and which they are likely to treat as self-evidently ridiculous when ‘offstage’ and speaking only to each other, but which the dominant group insist subordinates play along with, particularly at anything that might be considered a public event.

Layer on layer of blatant lies, easily disproved with even the most cursory analysis, somehow are still repeated even by those who oppose the current and most authoritarian incarnation of it. Even the most simple and self-apparent facts about, say, how currency operates are poorly understood because even pointing out obvious things is considered “political” and thus becomes taboo. How could such obvious falsehoods wield so much power?