Oh Come ON, All Ye Faithful!

The economic crisis seems to have become for many, a crisis of faith. After the end of the Cold War, the Good News was that universal democracy would mean the end of war and universal capitalism the end of poverty. If there were still wars and famines, they were trifling exceptions, in countries which were too new to democracy and/or capitalism to have got the hang of them, like Africa and the Balkans. Then the president of the world's most powerful democracy decided, for no obvious reason, to flatten a country on the other side of the world, and now the capitalist countries (almost everyone, these days) are spiralling into recession. So much for the New World Order.

It is not surprising that some people who were joyfully proclaiming the end of history are now trying to wake up from it, while unrepentant leftists like myself are singing "I told you so," and thumbing our noses at all and sundry. What is more interesting is the way some people's faith is unshaken—and we really do seem to be seeing a faith-based approach to economics here. Take, for example, Mathew Parriss' article in The Spectator entitled "Oh Ye of Little Faith!" This claims that the current crisis is a sign that markets are really working. What those of little faith do not realise is that markets are supposed to go into recession. Recessions are not just something that markets are naturally prone to in the way that teenagers are prone to acne; they are actually signs of the wonderful self-correcting nature of the Free Market:

The present collapse is evidence that the market is working. Confidence bubbles are an inherent feature of a free market system. Panics—confidence vacuums—are an inherent feature too. The test of the theory of market capitalism is whether the system provides from within itself the means to prick both.

It does. The first—a confidence bubble—has been pricked. We are now sucking ourselves the other way: into a confidence vacuum. In time this too will be pricked. The market will steady.

Or as Robert Anton Wilson put it, if you can't see the Invisible Hand at work in the most unlikely places, it is simply because you aren't looking hard enough—and the same goes for the Tooth Fairy. What amuses me here is that the author consciously uses religious analogies:

I feel as a priest must feel when a member of his flock abandons the faith because her child has died. Children (the priest might respond) do die; accidents do happen. You knew that. You knew when you embraced the faith. Theology has explanations for human suffering. You knew that too.

One problem with the analogy is that while theology does have explanations for human suffering, they generally aren't very good ones. Another is that becoming a Christian doesn't actually make your child die (unless you join a sect that seriously misinterprets the story of Abraham and Isaac), but unbridled capitalism does, by the author's own admission, cause wild fluctuations. But Parriss has an answer for this too: "Free markets require—often demand—limits to the exercise of their freedom." Now you understand: if you can't see the Invisible Hand at work, you aren't looking hard enough. Even when governments act so as to make markets less free, that is actually a sign that the market is really free. It's like when countries go to war, this is really a sign that peace is working, because peace demands war.

Those who find all this economics hard to understand (and let's face it, who doesn't?) may prefer to explain the workings of capitalism in terms of the Law of Attraction. Bob Proctor, quoted in The Secret, asks: "Why do you think 1 percent of the population earns around 96 percent of all the money that is being earned? Do you think that's an accident?" No, I don't think it's an accident. I thought that rapid industrialisation, first in Europe and then in its colonies, destroyed both feudalism and the system of cottage industries that supported it, and enabled the rise of a new entepreneurial class (actually often members of the old land-owning class under a different name) who were able to make huge fortunes at the expense of unemployed craft workers and landless peasants, setting in place a self-perpetuating system of wealth inequality which was ameliorated, but not radically changed, by the rise of workers' organisations and social-democratic policies. But apparently I was wrong. It's because "These people understand something. They understand the Secret." Ah. So these people got rich because they believed they were going to get rich. They asked the Universe for loads of money, had faith they were going to get it, and the Universe obligingly exploited the labour of the rest of us to give it to them.

But if that is true (You at the back! Stop sniggering, boy!) then how do we explain the current crisis? Did the Bavarian Illuminati "small, select group of people" suddenly stop believing in their wealth? Did some malicious anarchists get hold of the Secret too and use it to screw them? Did the Universe just get fed up with the greedy little buggers? Not according to that same Bob Proctor, who is now saying "The Movie Based on the Law of Attraction is Pop Culture Fluff!" Talk about biting the invisible hand that feeds you. What is wrong with The Secret, and the reason why so many secretoids are now broke, says Proctor, is that it only has three laws. There are actually eleven more laws to learn, hence the name of his website, www.the11forgottenlaws.com.

Things like the Law of Forgiveness … Which contains a mental trick that transforms debt into abundance—nearly overnight. It's almost like turning water into wine.

Or the incredible Law of Increase, where you'll discover the shortest route to tap into higher consciousness and pinpoint accurate answers for all your most pressing questions.

Note that the names of the laws don't have anything to do with what they are supposed to achieve. Note also that now "laws" are apparently not mathematical descriptions of physical processes (it's the maths that promotes a theory to a law, by the way); they are techniques for achieving results. This is a definition of "law" that only a lawyer would go along with.

But enough of this nonsense. The important point is that Parriss and Proctor represent different points on the spectrum of denial. Imagine that they are on board the Titanic, faced by angry passengers and crew who want to know why Parriss told them the ship was unsinkable and Proctor told them their thoughts of floating would prevent it from sinking. Parriss would simply say that sinking is what ships are supposed to do, and the fact that this particular ship is sinking is just proof that it was designed correctly. Proctor, on the other hand, would give them a dozen other things to think about to keep it afloat—or at least to provide something to distract them as it sinks.