WHY POLITICAL ECONOMY MATTERS
The economic model and the making of modern man
I go on about political economy a lot and I think it is time that I explained what this is and why it matters.
What does political economy do to our lives?
You might be rather surprised to find out.
I will ask you to think a bit and then will explain how our political economy:
Produces social breakdown
Makes people helpless and dependent
…and why we have a chance to change it (for a change)
It should take you about 10 minutes to read.
Thought Experiment
Imagine that we do not live in a system which “evolved” out of the enlightened tolerance of all points of view.
What if liberal democracy isn’t the product of the best ideas winning the debate?
What if it is a system produced by an economic vision for the whole world?
CONTENTS
What is explanatory power?
Creating a Globally Standard World
Where our politics and values come from
PAYWALL
How Political Economy shapes you
Learned Helplessness - A Parable from My Garden
How our political economy makes lifelong dependents of us all
What is The Economy for?
Explanatory Power
Nothing makes sense these days and so ideas which help us to make sense of everything would be very useful indeed.
One way to test the value of ideas is to see how much they explain.
How complete are those explanations? Can we make more sense of things with an idea than without it?
Try this idea out to see if it satisfies this method.
Standardising the world
Imagine that some people came up with the idea of turning the whole world into one thing, everywhere.
You would have to equalise the population, their history, culture, traditions, moral beliefs and religion for starters, but if you succeeded you would have a Standard Global System.
I think this is the basis of the political economy of liberal democracy.
I think if we imagine the goal of this system was to produce a single world economy then all the attempts to install a worldwide monoculture to replace the ones we had make sense.
It also makes sense of the political system produced by this economic vision.
Making Belief in the Global Machine
To recap:
First, the economic model
Second, the politics
Third, the values
The economic basis furnishes a politics to serve itself, and the politics creates values to serve itself. As a whole, the liberal system is animated by technique - which is the refinement, over time, of the process of producing a standard result.
So, economics creates the politics which generates values. Taken together, this machine produces belief - in itself. The belief takes place in you1.
The beliefs are placed in you by the mass culture, which mass produces belief in the system which produces the culture. This is how they make belief, and this is how they make you into a component in a machine.
Some of the effects of this at scale are harder to spot than others. Here I will explain how this creates helpless consumers with no self control.
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