"There is a lack of critical assessment of the past.
But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old
ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the
past."
Ryszard Kapuscinski
But they maintain a firm grasp on information and power, for their own sake,
and sidetrack and stifle any meaningful reform.
In October 2000 Thomas Frank published a prescient critical social analysis
titled, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the
End of Economic Democracy.
In the video below from 2015, Thomas Frank looks back over the past 15 years
to when he wrote this insightful book, and ends with this observation.
"I want to end with the idea that the market is
capable of resolving all of our social conflict, fairly and justly.
That is the great idea of the 1990's. And we all know now what a crock
that is. I think what we need in order to restore some kind of sense of
fairness is not the final triumph of markets over the body and soul of humanity,
but something that confronts markets, and that refuses to think
of itself as a brand."
The book was not received
well at the time in the waning days of the Clinton revolution and the birth
of the era of the neo-cons in foreign policy and neo-liberals in economics.
This religion of the markets had yet to suffer the serial failures and
decimation of the real economy which it would see over the next sixteen
years.
This is an ideology, a mindset, and as Frank calls it a religion, of taking
market capitalism to such an extreme that it dispenses with the notion of
restraints by human or policy consideration, so as to consider the market and
its oracle of economics to be like gods
This extreme form of market capitalism, also called neo-liberalism in economics
and neo-conservatism in foreign policy, has worked its way into the
policy and mindset of many of the developed nations, and taken a place
in the public consciousness and the orthodoxy of the new elites
It is the taking of an idea, of a way of looking at things, that may be
substantially practical when used as a tool to help to achieve certain
outcomes, and placing it in such an extreme and inappropriate place as an end
in itself, as the very definition and arbiter of what is good and what is
not, that it becomes a kind of anti-human force that is itself considered
beyond all good and evil, like a natural law.
It is born of and brings with it an extreme tendency that kills thought, and
stifles the ability to make distinctions between things. If not unfettered
capitalism then what, communism? The adherents become blind by their
devotion to their gods.
This is not something new. It is a madness that has appeared again and
again throughout history in the form of Mammon, the golden idol of the
markets. It is a way of looking at people and the world that is as old
as Babylon, and as evil as sin.
