[FRIAM] ideas are lies

[Eric Charles]

This article is absolutely fascinating! I think that if we just took each
sentence individually, I would disagree with around 60% of them. That is
being generous and assuming the author is accurately reporting what other
authors are saying. If you allow for my disagreeing with those cited (while
not disputing the citation itself), that could easily bring me as high as
disagreeing with 80% of the individual sentences. That is making it very
hard for me to assess what I think of the overall argument. It seems quite
plausible that "free-market thinking promotes power relations" in a
particular historic context, which seems to be one of the main theses of
the argument... but the author is covering at least a dozen deep topics
that are in no way necessary to make that argument, and is not
demonstrating a deep understanding of any of them.

Here are some example sentences from throughout the paper that seem
confused. Some might merely be massive overgeneralizations, but even that
seems pretty problematic in the context of the argument being made:

   - Free-market ideology claims that to help society, we must help
   ourselves. If we all act selfishly, the thinking goes, the invisible hand
   will make everyone better off. So here we have an ideology that promotes
   selfishness in the name of group benefit. It’s a Machiavellian lie that
   should be caustic to social cohesion.
   - According to the theory of multilevel selection, there is *always* a
   disconnect between the interests of a group, and the interests of
   individuals within the group.
   - So for groups to be successful, they must suppress the selfish
   behavior of individuals. There are many ways of doing this, but the most
   common is probably *punishment*. To encourage altruistic behavior,
   groups punish self-serving individuals.
   - But while punishing deviance is universal to all social organisms,
   humans have developed a method for suppressing selfishness that is unique.
   To promote prosocial behavior, we harness the power of ideas. We *lie* to
   ourselves.
   - According to evolutionary theory, Rand’s Machiavellian lie ought to be
   caustic to group cohesion.
   - *power relations* qualify as a type of altruism. In a power relation,
   one person submits to the will of another. Bob submits to Alice. By doing
   so, Bob sacrifices his own fitness for the benefit of Alice. That’s
   altruism. But if Bob’s subservience only benefited Alice, it would be an
   evolutionary dead end. The Bobs of the world would die out, having given
   all their resources to the Alices. Since power relations have not died out,
   something more must be going on.
   - On the face of it, freedom and power seem to be opposites.
   - Business firms, you may have noticed, don’t use the market to organize
   their internal activities. They use hierarchy. Firms have a chain of
   command that tells employees what to do. Given this fact, the growth of
   large firms is as much an assault on the free market as is the growth of
   government.
   - To measure the growth of private hierarchy, I’ll use the size of the
   management class — the portion of people employed as ‘managers’. Here’s my
   reasoning. Managers work at the tops of hierarchies.
   - Anthropologists Carla Handley and Sarah Mathew recently found that
   cultural variation between human groups is far greater than genetic
   variation. Put simply, this means that ideas matter. What we
*think* probably
   affects our behavior more than our genes.
   -

   The reason is that human life is marked by a fundamental tension. We are
   social animals who compete as groups. For our group’s sake, it’s best if we
   act altruistically. But for our *own* sake, it’s better to be a selfish
   bastard. How to suppress this selfish behavior is the fundamental problem
   of social life.      The solution that most cultures have hit upon is to
   lie.
   - The alternative is that free-market ideas *do* promote altruism … just
   not the kind we’re used to thinking about. They promote altruism through
   power relations. And they do so through doublespeak. Free-market ideology
   uses the language of ‘freedom’ to promote the accumulation of power.

Just for a taste of why this all seems so weird: "Free market ideology" is
not the promotion of selfishness writ large, it is the idea that people
should look for beneficial deals when buying and selling goods. Like, if
you could buy a car for $15,000, or get an equivalent car for $12,000, you
should buy the cheaper one; but if you are selling, and you could sell for
$12,000 or $15,000, you should sell for the higher price. That's it. Free
market ideology has nothing to do with whether you should support the local
PTA or whether you should invest in your children beyond the time-corrected
dollar value you expect them to give you in return. And similarly, my
manager's ability to tell me what to do at work has little to do with
whether I buy rice in bulk at the asian grocery where it is cheaper.  (And
if you want to talk about Ayn Rand as promoting selfishness writ large,
then we would need a separate conversation about what "selfish" means in an
"Objectivist" context, and how that has only a loose relation with "free
market ideology".)


Eric C
<echarles at american.edu>


On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 5:24 PM ⛧ glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Why Free Market Ideology is a Double Lie
> https://evonomics.com/why-free-market-ideology-is-a-double-lie/
> "So yes, free-market thinking is a lie. But it’s not the lie you think it
> is."
> --
> glen ⛧
>
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