The first instalment in this series is available here.
The conversation that led to these essays started, as my better conversations often do, with an attempt at a grand formulation that I wasn’t entirely sure I meant.
I found myself describing what I do in terms that sounded almost theological. I took a trinitarian theme. There is, I said, “the world” as it is. And then there is “us” as conscious beings within it. And finally, there is the tension, contradiction, brokenness, or “viciousness” that appears to separate us from it. What the relationship between those three creates is the question of whether any reconciliation between them is possible.
My wife, who has a reliable instinct for when I am disappearing into my own abstraction, let me finish and then offered a rather more direct account of the same thing. “What you do”, she said, “is point at what is wrong, and you then help people realise they are not helpless. You seek to establish their agency in the presence of adversity”. That, I think, is true. But I want to sit with the more complicated version for a moment, because I think it captures something important.
The world I spend most of my time writing about is genuinely broken. This is the first element, and it is not broken in a rhetorical sense, nor as a polemical device. It is broken in the precise sense that the systems meant to serve the common good have been reorganised, over several decades and through considerable deliberate effort, to serve the interests of those who already have most in our society and those of a similar sort around the world.
Tax systems exist that allow the wealthy to route income through structures unavailable to anyone else.
Financial markets extract from the productive economy rather than fund it.
Political institutions are captured by the interests they were designed to regulate.
These are not temporary glitches. They are the shape of the thing. And we are inside it. That is the second element. We are not neutral observers of this broken world. We live in it, work in it, and feel its effects in concrete ways, in what we can afford, in what services exist when we need them, in the pervasive background anxiety of economic life that most people carry, to name but a few of the real world’s consequences for us. The relationship between the broken structure of the world and the lived experience of it is real and tight, even when it is not visible.
The third element, the tension, contradiction, brokenness, or “viciousness” as I think it might be called, is the gap between those two things. The brokenness of the structure and the rawness of the experience are connected, but the connection is usually hidden.
That is not accidental. One of the chief functions of mainstream economics, as I have spent a good deal of my working life arguing, is to make that gap appear natural. The aim is to present the outcomes of very specific, historically contingent, politically chosen arrangements as if they were the necessary results of how markets must work and how human nature compels us to behave. If you believe that framing, then the viciousness we observe is just the way things are meant to be; the weather we always take with us, as Crowded House once sang. There is nothing to reconcile in that case. Only endurance is required.
The creator’s job, as I understand it in this situation, is to make the connection visible and to show that the gap between what the world is and what people experience is not just weather, but deliberate policy. It is not a chance of nature, but the result of deliberate choice. The significance is clear. It is that choices, unlike the weather, can not only be different, but can be changed.
This, then, is about seeking a kind of reconciliation. It is not about creating acceptance or making peace with things as they are. It is about the restoration of a relationship between cause and effect that has been deliberately obscured. When that relationship becomes visible, something changes. The world is still broken. But its brokenness now has an address.
You just described my job as a teacher. Leading the revolution, one lesson at a time. As the Redskins sang, "Keep on Keeping on".
Thanks for writing this Richard.
We are suffering from a self-serving propaganda that has successfully persuaded us that particular ideas about human nature and our economic systems are expressions of the natural order of things.
When ideology has morphed into objective truth the work of propaganda is to mock any and all attempts at challenge as simply wrong headed and dangerous.
As JK Galbraith said “nothing serves power better than a theology that disguises its exercise”
What we are seeing now is propaganda designed to deflect and distract. Culture wars and scapegoating immigrants are the key examples.
Distraction and deflection are happening in my view because there are too many people asking too many questions, too many people wanting (needing) things to change and the ideological propaganda is starting to crack.
This is why democracy is under attack, why authoritarianism is on the rise imho.
Because the right wing are losing the argument and their grip on their version of reality.
This is why I am optimistic even in these dark times.
I see Trump, Farage and Putin and I see their fear and the fear of the people who are paying them.