A brief genealogy of profit as a totalitarian idea
Human society has not always embraced profit and greed as a positive force. Classical philosophers such as Aristotle viewed the pursuit of profit as contemptible and without virtue.
In the Jewish tradition, charging interest was deemed usury and considered morally wrong and even made illegal, although permissible when dealing with non-Jews.
Early Christianity was similarly skeptical of the pursuit of profit and material opulence, with Jesus cleansing the temple of money lenders and merchants. This line from Matthew shows just what Christianity, in it’s original conception, thought of wealth: “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24).
Yet with the advent of industrialization and the growth in flow of money and the need for financing, our society has seen a tremendous cultural shift from one valuing asceticism to the shameless glorification of self-interest and greed as the virtue that drives progress. This confusion endangers human existence.
The transition begins from a backdrop of general glorification of the wealthy and powerful — this is the establishment orientation to courting wealth. Artists, intellectuals and cultural creators broadly tend to get funded by the wealthy who have accumulated enough to be patrons. So the default stance in our culture sympathizes with those of means, indeed, often the very works that over time create culture were funded by these very wealthy patrons. Unsurprisingly, our political and legal legacies often justify private property and the right of the powerful — including classics authored by Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Adam Smith and so on. Such justifying works have benefited from compounding biases in our history, for they have more often been directly sponsored by wealthy patrons, and once created, their reception has been more positive and received praise. Conversely, controversial anti-establishment positions have been the product of self-sacrifice by their creators, and have been either merely ignored or actively rooted out by those with the most to lose.
Yet our cultural obsession with wealth turns macabre in the extreme right-wing ideology perfected in the twentieth century, where pure self-interest becomes synonymous with virtue. This runs against most inherited human tradition from the Judeo-Christian tradition to tribal societies, which cultivate pro-social behaviors of generosity and contribution to community. In this way, it is the extreme right wingers which far from conservative, cultivate the most dangerous death cult to have held broad political power.
In the next section, I show through the lens of popular culture and mainstream politics, how different the values and practices of the early to mid twentieth century were with respect to the expected responsibilities of the wealthy and powerful from the present day.
Conservative discourse in comic books and its fulfillment in FDR’s New Deal
The twentieth century starts firmly entrenched in the establishment orientation, and ends the century in the radical veneration of greed. In the genre of superheroes, for instance, popular characters like Batman exemplify the archetype of the billionaire hero who battles a teeming mass of chaotic criminals — typically impoverished upstarts. Yet even here, wealth is usually an enabler or signal of means yet never the obsession for heroic characters. This is the establishment position of wealth as a signifier and consequence of virtue but not the content of it. Rather, heroes use their wealth and power in the service of others and society broadly, as expressed in the often-mentioned phrase “with great power comes great responsibility, ” — attributed to both Voltaire, and Spiderman’s uncle Ben.
So while the comic book genre tends to take wealth as a signifier of merit or achievement, it falls way short of equating heroism with pure sociopathic self-interest. Such a drive becomes cruel when not curbed by human empathy and caring of others. It is in the villain, not the superhero, that disregard for others reaches its extreme. The comic book genre thus connects to inherited human traditions in an organic way, and we can see the continuity of values between these ideas and those of traditional culture.
Such values impose obligations on the wealthy and powerful to not just bask in their glory and power, but to actually wield such power responsibly in the service of others. FDR stands out as a great case in point. Extremely wealthy and aristocratic, FDR also both betrayed his class interests and consummated the heroic ideal of altruistic sacrifice by pushing through the New Deal, revolutionizing American society and producing a genuine middle-class society (which has either been lost or is deeply imperiled in 2020). To do this, FDR had to go to war against entrenched interests of the wealthy who fought him tooth and nail. Perhaps it was his leadership through WWII which made his presidency one of collective admiration and set the stage for the success of his policies. Yet he prevailed in a fashion congruent with conservative ideas of public service and heroic work.
Those that opposed FDR’s project resented the very notion that society should encumber powerful people with responsibilities. They attacked this notion in vectors spanning philosophy, art and fiction, economics and so on. Prominent in these attacks are novelists Ayn Rand and economists Milton Friedman. They succeeded in the twentieth century in fusing virtue with self-interest and greed. Their project was to eventually give birth to the now common-place notion of “fiduciary responsibility”, namely that all individuals and businesses have the duty of sociopathic profit maximization. They thus promoted the idea that extractive management is a moral right and duty. Collectively, this movement in culture, business and politics persuaded a large fraction of American society that government, that purported arbiter between the weak and the strong and a crucial innovation for humans in the world, was the problem rather than a part of the solution (paraphrasing Ronald Reagan).
The virulent radicalism of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman
Ayn Rand crafted novels about the virtue of egotism and the plight of the willful hero against the collectivist tyranny of the masses. She had her initial success with the still popular The Fountainhead, published in 1943, in which the protagonist architect dynamites the building he had designed at the end because the project sponsor had slightly adjusted his designs. Rand’s general worldview parallels that of superheroes like that of Batman at times, as tycoons figure prominently and superheroes must also cultivate their individual will. And yet, where superheroes care about the weak and downtrodden, Ayn Rand’s characters view them with disinterest at best and contempt at worst. They do what they want not out of any desire to contribute, but rather out of pure solipsistic self-interest. Indeed, Ayn Rand claimed not only that altruism and generosity were wrong, but that they were evil.
Rand was an immigrant from Soviet dictatorship, and behind every norm of charity and solidarity she saw the shadow of the soviet politburo ready to enslave the individual in the interest of a demonic collective mass. To this day, many American Republican congressmen and senators look fondly to her novels of individualistic glory. And her contributions get bipartisan support, with luminaries like Alan Greenspan (who was a member of Ayn Rand’s inner circle) and Steve Jobs citing her novels as a powerful influence in their lives.
Economist Milton Friedman further built up the case for sociopathy in a manner very close to Ayn Rand’s conception of self-interest as virtue. Friedman perfected a rigorous and systematic assault on the role of government and strongly invigorated a movement in economics towards extreme free-market fundamentalism. He published Capitalism and Freedom in 1962, arguing against social security, against public education and for a system of vouchers, against government interventions in the economy of all sorts, and against progressive taxation and for a flat tax. These ideas read like a blueprint for the Republican agenda in 2020 — they have been that influential. Friedman used economics, with its privileged role in modern governance, to launder these radical ideas into technocratic common sense which by the 1980s had become the prevailing dogma in Ronald Reagan’s White House and with Margaret Thatcher in the UK.
Yet Milton Friedman started out on the fringe, in his Mont Pelerin Society, alongside others like Hayek and von Mises, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society) they cultivated ideas most ordinary and powerful people rejected as sociopathic and implausible. At the time, John Maynard Keynes held sway in halls of power and the academy. His prescription of targeted government intervention had proven useful to FDR as a practical tool to recover from the Great Depression. Free market extremists merely advocated that the markets be allowed to crash and unfurl for the good of all — a cruel treatment that elites had frequently turned to without any evidence of success.
Indeed, such ideas aren’t even novel. They undergirded the lack of government response to the Irish potato famine of 1845–1849, with the British continuing potato exports out of Ireland even while a significant percentage of the Irish population starved or left the country. British administrators turned to God, reassuring themselves that the starvation must have been mandated by God even as the Irish plead for government interventions that could save lives.
Yet Milton Friedman sustained his attacks against the idea that government should help provide prosperity, hoping that some day the right people in power would paradoxically use it to amputate government’s formidable capacities. He stated that:
“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” (Milton Friedman)
He was right that eventually, people in powerful positions and eventually the entire Republican party took strongly to these radical notions (and the Clinton Democrats and Blair Labor party in the UK weren’t far behind), redefining common sense so that it championed a radical uprooting of society through market extremism. Yet I believe the intellectual revolution was enabled by changes in the economy. What changed was the advantage of the powerful. Whereas in the industrial era, much of the wealth came from manufacturing that required government support and orchestration, innovations in market capitalism led to a boom in financial capital and the profits made in speculation. Yanis Varoufakis has made this point elsewhere.
Now there was more wealth and power to be had from embracing deregulation in all its forms, cultivating an extreme philosophy that essentially equated the pursuit of personal greed and government minimalism. It was roughly in this period in the eighties where consensus shifted, and free-market extremism became official government policy in the US and UK, with the world soon to follow.
Yet at heart, capitalism itself had transformed through this period from a system focused on the production of commodities and real goods, to one focused on financial machinations. Such change in the opportunity for profit undermined the cultural partnership between the productive tycoon and the society which gave the tycoon workers and had need for the industrial products. Instead, financial speculators have few employees and no interest in scaling a human-dependent operation.
The new character exemplified by Wall Street’s Gordon Gecko, has a limousine driver and a cell-phone, and so armed, raided and plundered existing businesses selling them for parts. As such, they promoted the new mantra, “greed is good”. I don’t mean to say that the new economy does not produce real goods — indeed, it does. The difference is that the growth of speculators as constituents, and financial machinations as profit-centers even in otherwise ordinary businesses, creates powerful stakeholders for the ideas that Rand and Friedman popularized. They overwhelm those that create and depend on the economy of material goods, such as real manufacturers and workers. Over time, the wishful thinking and convenient ideas of the speculators has determined the political platform of the establishment and radical right and the establishment left, and strongly influenced that of the political spectrum.
The present deadlock: the rise of the undead
In the twenty-first century, we still are surrounded by the ideas that failed time and time again. The era of deregulation led to the financial collapse of 2008. Whereas Alan Greenspan had once been considered a wizard, it is now common-place to hear his impact as being one of incompetence and negligence. Nonetheless, the establishment wing of the Democratic party, far from being able to draw on different cultural resources to muster a different kind of value-system with relation to market capitalism in the United States, instead rescued the financiers who had failed so publicly in 2008.
It is partly the dissatisfaction and the perception of establishment corruption that led to the election of Donald Trump in 2008. Trump’s achievement has been to at once embody contempt for the establishment, with his willingness to attack the systems and programs that provide a safety net for so many Americans by associating these programs with political correctness, and identity politics. And the return to market extremism played its usual rationalizing role. Under Trump, regulations were slashed, the corporate tax rate was reduced, and progress on climate change was halted with the US pulling out of the Paris agreement. But the United States also largely ceased new interventions abroad.
Only the progressive wing of the Democratic party, chiefly led by Bernie Sanders, has had a different message that can fill the void left by the demise of extremist market economics. See Bernie rock his mittens during the inauguration of Joe Biden in 2021.
It is a populist message, yet unlike Trump’s, it is not a misanthropic message for it doesn’t smear large populations with racist slurs. The Sanders message blames concentrated economic power in corporations and the wealthiest people in the world, for rigging the economic and political system to their advantage. Simply put, the message is correct. While this message is well positioned to be popular nationally in the United States, it has had the constant stumbling block that the establishment (and dominant) wing of the Democratic party finds it extremely inconvenient. It exposes the corruption which they themselves are a part of. And in so doing, it calls to action to reduce the privileges that they themselves enjoy.
Unfortunately then, it seems that establishment democrats have preferred a tired old rinse and repeat with the election of Joe Biden. Yet the writing is on the wall that this is a deeply unsatisfying presidency, not able to directly address any of the core concerns of the public except for the deep disgust with Trump of most democratic voters. It seems likely then, that in 2024 either Trump or his hand-picked successor will re-take the presidency.
This will once again bring us closer to a dangerous neo-fascistic totalitarianism that couples market fundamentalism with reactionary ethnic politics. This is certainly a dangerous situation, for without any fundamental correction in the troubling state of affairs, dissatisfaction is only likely to get worse and hence people are likely to become more reactionary.
The appropriate political response to the present crisis must restore life and well-being as central system objectives over and beyond profiteering. And yet this is precisely what threatens the establishment sources of power. Therefore, the establishment cannot be supported any longer.
