The Economic Priesthood

Recession As Atonement Ritual

Over on the orange rind the other day, Jerome a Paris asked a pertinent question: What’s the responsibility of the media? In that diary a study by the Columbia Journalism Review documents the failures of business/financial media to accurately cover the obvious signs of coming deep recession, warn average investors and business people that it was coming, or advise them on how to protect themselves.

I just happen to be reading – for the umpteenth time, a handful of pages a night – William Greider’s 750-page tome about the switch from Keynesian to Monetarist economic policy during the serious financial fluctuations of the 1970s and ’80s, Secrets of the Temple. The suggestion that the business/economic press owes real information to We the People Who Get Hurt by these stage-managed recessions and booms rang bells per Greider’s explanations of why, exactly, the semi-regular liquidation of the People’s assets and life savings is tolerated in our capitalist economic system – and why the People are kept ignorant of the telltale signs that ‘liquidation’ is coming.

The truth, oddly enough, boils down to religion. Not any specific religion or religious tradition, but the sort of ‘Perennial Philosophy’ that underpins humanity’s apparently in-built religious conceptualizations and experience – deep psychology. Which includes some hefty magical thinking about the issues of haves and have-nots, economic injustices and collective guilt that a modern secularist might be shocked to discover actually does rule our thinking about money and financial inequality even in the 21st century.

In Part Two, Chapter 7, Greider explains the Freudian psychology of money…

“I read one day,” Freud reported, “that the gold which the devil gave his victims regularly turned into excrement.” The next day, Freud said, one of his patients innocently recalled that an odd memory of his childhood nurse who suffered from “money deliria.” Her money, the patient said suddenly, was always excrement. Freud noted other associations. The fabled alchemist who would create gold from dross was called Dukatenscheisser, literally “one who excretes ducats.” In early Babylon, gold was “the excrement of Hell.”

The association of filth or excrement with money is, Greider surmised, the reason that the American public went along with allowing an essentially independent quasi-governmental institution to take over the money decisions for the nation in 1913, and kept tolerating it despite how often it did too much or failed to do enough to actually manage the economy so it had some semblance of stability. People choose to remain ignorant of money, so it may be true that even if there were plenty of warning in the financial press of economic collapse coming, most people would simply block it out.

But, of course, people love money. They desire it above all things, will spend it even if they don’t have it just to get the endorphin pleasure rush that comes with the ‘power’ of what money can buy. When the correction comes – and it inevitably does – it’s the “little people” who get hurt. That too is religious mythology speaking through human psychology. The Scapegoat.

In Chapter 12 Greider described Reagan’s address to the nation announcing recession (brought about by his deficit spending and tax cuts, and how he sold “sacrifice” to the nation as a Calvinist ideal:

The rhetoric of shared sacrifice and necessary pain, the price that must be paid for previous extravagance, was the moral center of what Ronald Reagan really believed about the gathering recession and the American economy. His optimistic rhetoric notwithstanding, the President could not have been surprised by the spreading economic distress that was closing businesses and putting people out of work. In a deeper sense, this was what he had always expected and, indeed, what he had long recommended. The optimism was genuine enough, but Ronald Reagan also believed in a sterner economic doctrine that politicians referred to as the “old-time religion.”

Greider described the rationale colorfully…

In the political economy, as in the church, ritual atonement required the elements of convincing theater. For the vast audience of faithful, an ancient religious drama was performed by two figures of mythic authority, the President and the Federal Reserve chairman, who presided like priest and prince on a stage of darkness and light. One was shadowy and remote, an ominous figure; the other, bright and cheerful. Paul Volker was the stern father who admonished and prophesied, uttering mysterious incantations of numbers. Ronald Reagan was the generous king who inspired hope, whose rhetoric evoked streaks of sunshine across the darkened sky. Together, they promised redemption – if only the faithful flock would first accept the penitential sacrifice.

Naturally, the real suffering was borne by a defenseless minority of Americans. The rest could accept it by not thinking much about it, since they weren’t the ones doing the suffering. If the ritual atonement for collective guilt went on long enough and spread widely enough to where it could no longer be justified, the people would turn on the priests as well as the princes.

I know I can’t be the only person who’s ever noticed that if I were to steal some bread and milk to feed my starving kids, they’d lock me up and throw away the key. But if I were a super-wealthy Wall Street Minion or corporate CEO, the taxpayers would have to pay me back for all the money I stole – from THEM – plus a hefty fee for me just ‘cuz I’m so cool. Nifty, eh? This works across the board for a long list of high crimes and misdemeanors, those on the low end of the totem pole are always punished to ‘warn’ others of their ilk away from lives of crime, while politicians, lobbyists, Big Biz and High Finance get away with every crime imaginable just because they get to make and break the ‘rules’ at will.

This is the 21st century. Aside from the ~12% of citizens who are hopeless cultists waiting for the Second Coming so they don’t have to die (as if the guy they’re waiting for didn’t have to die to get outta here), most people just aren’t that into antiquated rituals invented by Mesopotamian tribesmen before humans learned how to read and write. I know I’m not, nor am I interested in being the handy scapegoat to take the rap for crimes committed by spoiled rich people and hardened criminals in high places.

Can’t wait to get hold of Greider’s new tome about the current End Times economic scenario. But basically the bottom line is that money is merely paper or bits-bytes someone invents just because they can, and doles out in arbitrary ways to ensure society remains sufficiently feudalized to allow the rich to remain rich and poor to remain poor. No matter what form the exchange medium takes, it only works if everyone can be made to transfer their infantile psycho-quirks onto it.

If there were ever to come a time when the people stop believing in De Debbil and simply exchanged goods and services amongst themselves according to what they can produce and what they need, the feudal lords would suddenly find themselves with less than nothing. They know nothing about what it takes to build a home or farm the land or weave the cloth and make the clothes… the most helpless of humans, elevated by a terminally corrupt ‘system’ into lords over all.

Think I’ll turn down this offered role in the drama. Prefer real goats to imaginary ones anyway. They give good milk if you manage your herd right, and the herbed chevre goes great with full-bodied bread…