Idols of the Marketplace (John Michael Greer)

  Aug. 13, 2008 (Archdruid Report) -- As last week’s post suggested, the forces that keep American families stuck on an economic treadmill, trying to meet new and challenging conditions with old and increasingly dysfunctional responses, are by no means entirely economic in nature. Despite the polite fiction that all players in the economic game are rational actors pursuing their own interests in free exchanges, most of the decisions individuals make in the course of that game involve precious little of the sort of rational deliberation the fiction suggests.

  To begin with, of course, a great many of the choices are enforced. I think it was Anatole France who pointed out that equality under the law, as often as not, amounts to forbidding the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, steal bread, or beg for coins in the street. For many Americans, and most people elsewhere in the world, the freedom to exchange their labor for money amounts to a Hobson’s choice between sweatshop labor at poverty wages, on the one hand, and starving in the streets on the other. America’s caste system is somewhat more flexible than average, and its privileged classes long ago figured out the advantages of opening their doors to a trickle of aspirants from below, but access to economic opportunity in America still depends to a very large extent on how much money your parents made.

  Yet the power of cultural narratives and myths, a frequent theme in these essays, also plays a massive role in leading supposedly rational actors into the irrational decisions that shape so much of our collective lives these days. The twilight of the household economy, the theme of last week’s post, is a good example. A number of my readers responded to the post with emails describing couples they knew who maintained two salaries, even though the costs incurred by doing so – professional childcare, commuting, office clothing, and more – far exceeded the income of the less lucrative of the two jobs. This is quite common nowadays, because the cultural narratives surrounding employment make it impossible for most American families to notice that their economic status might be improved noticeably by giving up one salary in exchange for full-time involvement by one family member in the household economy.

  Behind the narratives that prop up this curious blindness, though, lies a broader pattern, and it’s this that I want to discuss this week. For reasons rooted in history, it’s difficult to talk about the theme I have in mind without stirring up passions of the most irrational and intemperate kind. Still, the attempt has to be made, because the narrative in question is turning out to be a massive barrier to constructive change as we approach the twilight of the industrial age. The cultural story I have in mind is the myth of the market.

more