John Gray. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
3,239 words
I once wrote a book about terrible economic ideas. Ironically, it made no money.
Called False Economies, if I was writing it today, I would have definitely included a chapter on a former long-term adviser to the Bank of England (BoE) called Helen McCaw, who enjoys something of a sideline as a UFO enthusiast. Well, so do I. The difference is that, merging her two fields of expertise into one overarching whole, McCaw has just released some rather strange policy proposals advising the BoE to comprehensively remodel its entire economic model to be able to cope should aliens ever land in London, thereby badly devaluing the value of the British pound.
During her old BoE day-job, McCaw’s specific role was as a “Senior Analyst in Financial Stability,” laying out potential emergency plans for what to do should oil prices tumble, investment funds go bust, or worse. For McCaw, the widespread presence of aliens in the United Kingdom would probably cause the country’s economy to collapse entirely, possibly because the ETs would bring colossal stores of precious metals with them, thus undermining the value of the BoE’s gold reserves. She sent a letter to the BoE’s Governor, warning that official disclosure of the existence of aliens by Donald Trump’s White House, which she deems potentially imminent, might “induce ontological shock and provoke psychological responses with material consequences,” thereby causing “extreme price volatility in financial markets” as terrified traders in London panic.
As may be expected, Ms. McCaw’s ideas were reported as being a total joke in the British press. But, in a certain sense, she may actually have a point: invading aliens really have had a deleterious effect upon the UK economy and social fabric alike of late. It is just that the “aliens” in question came not from far-off planets and star-systems like Mars and Alpha Centauri, but from lands slightly closer to home, like the Middle East and Africa.
Labor Pains
Western leaders are constantly lecturing us that we absolutely need mass immigration of aliens into our homelands, legal or illegal, otherwise jobs will remain unfilled, and our economies wither and die. Even despite our diminishing birth-rates, I find this unlikely.
There is a budget car-wash in my town, which, until around ten years ago, was staffed by white Eastern Europeans. Then, it started being staffed by vaguely tanned Balkan-type persons. Now, it appears to be staffed by char-grilled Ethiopians or something; every time they squeeze out one of the sponges, you expect them to take a desperate, drought-parched drink from it, just for old time’s sake. Meanwhile, all across town, numerous able-bodied white people—some of whom are no doubt from Eastern Europe themselves, but now qualify for welfare benefits due to the amount of time spent living here—sit around idle and unemployed. Why can’t people just wash their own bloody cars? Or perhaps take them to the rival automated mechanical car-wash which sits just around the corner? Its admittedly owned by Pakistanis, but I think my point still stands.
The overall impression any impartial observer would gain from looking at such a ludicrous situation would be that the true motivation behind the mass importation of aliens to fill native British jobs has much more to do with ideology than economics. Certainly, greedy employers always want cheap foreign labor—and other, less immoral employers, are then effectively forced to follow suit or go bust due to now having higher payroll overheads than their competitors. Less comprehensible, though, is why national governments like Britain’s allow cheapskate employers to operate like this in the first place, by letting endless new alien workers pour in unimpeded, seemingly forever.
One good stab at an answer was arrived at by the English political philosopher John Gray in his prescient 1998 economics text False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, which portrayed globalist, hyper-free-market economics as a kind of secular pseudo-religion, particularly among the West’s open-borders leadership castes of the 1990s. Admittedly, its first edition came with a glowing quote from George Soros inside—but don’t let that put you off, George was just trying to deter sensible people from reading it!
Writing during the alleged post-Cold War “End of History,” Gray demonstrated how it came to be established wisdom [sic] amongst the victorious side’s governing class that all nations and people on the planet were due to adopt a liberal, globalist, Western-style political and economic model, thereby rendering everyone on Earth a fungible global citizen, whose growing shared common values would make them all endlessly interchangeable with one another, forever. Allowing some random Saudi to train as an airline pilot in America would cause no discernible problems whatsoever, for example.
You’d think 9/11 might have come as a bit of a repudiation of such a hypothesis, come 2001, but no: the truly devout are impervious to all evidence to the contrary of their beliefs. When Gray’s book was first published in 1998, it was widely rubbished. Why? First and foremost, because he forecast that, one day, the globalist economic party across the West would come to an end: and those who ended it would be the West’s own native people.
Gray’s Eminence
Gray argued that the trend for free-market globalization which began to be adopted at hyper-speed in the 1980s under the transatlantic free-market Thatcher-Regan alliance contained within itself the seeds of its own inevitable downfall. Ironically, Gray said, the process of globalization would act in the long-term only to reduce the overall amount of globalization that ever-more disillusioned and disappointed voters would actually allow to take place.
Much to the incomprehension of the globalist automatons of Davos, ordinary people tend to not like their neighborhoods being altered beyond all recognition by mass immigration in the sole name of increasing GDP, or seeing London cupboards sold for £500,000 apiece due to the housing stock’s dubious recent redefinition as “investment assets” for rich buyers, or experiencing huge job losses because of firms easily transferring roles abroad to take advantage of cheap foreign slave-labor. Subsequent votes for Brexit and Donald Trump certainly suggest that Gray’s analysis of what the hyper-capitalism of the 1980s and 1990s would end up leading to—i.e., its substantial rejection by the ordinary Western voter-base—was fundamentally correct.
In Gray’s account, the hyper-capitalism of today was an accidental phenomenon, arising (within a UK context) out of the success of Margaret Thatcher’s financial reforms of the 1980s. In and of themselves, Thatcher’s monetarist policies made perfect sense, and worked admirably. The problem was that their unintended social and political consequences later ended up being in many ways the precise reverse of what she had originally desired. In her day, the Right tended to oppose mass immigration, for instance, whereas nowadays many Right-wing free-marketeers totally buy the fake economic arguments put forward for it.
The Conservatives may now paint themselves as being “the party of business” (i.e., of the untrammeled free market), but Mrs. Thatcher herself was a conservatively-minded soul when it came to most other matters. Aside from her economic program, Gray says, Thatcher wanted to preside over a return to 1950s-style standards in terms of morality, culture, and traditional, cohesive community values. She could never have imagined what they would truly help lead to twenty to thirty years after she left power: utter social and demographic chaos. [1]
Creative Self-Destruction
Gray shows that contrary to popular belief, Thatcher’s reforms began largely as pragmatism, a commendable desire to defeat the excessively powerful hard-Left UK trade unions of the 1970s and rescue Britain from looming bankruptcy. Yet, as time in office hardened her beliefs and she started to go a bit loony, Maggie’s initial ideas ended up becoming a messianic dogma which preached the apparently endless virtues of what the influential Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (influenced by Marx, ironically enough) had once termed “creative destruction.”
Amongst certain high priests of what came to be known as “Thatcherism”—the word was not coined by Mrs. T herself, but by her opponents, and intended abusively—the way that unprofitable businesses or industries sometimes closed down came to be seen not as a deeply unfortunate necessity of the rules of economics, and an occasion for expressing genuine human sympathy, but as something to be applauded. The idea went that unemployment was actually a good thing, as were full-blown recessions, as joblessness enabled workers to escape to new and better roles in some innovative new industry elsewhere, which would inevitably spring up in response to the previously undiagnosed needs of the all-knowing market.
Monetarism, the financial philosophy propounded by economists of the so-called “Chicago School” like Milton Friedman, whom Thatcher came to revere, holds that there is a “natural level” of unemployment within a developed economy around 5%, and that attempting to artificially drive this down can lead to even more unemployment and hiked inflation, which does appear to be true. Governments and economists should not in any way ignore this fact—but neither, I would suggest, should they actively celebrate it, as some now do.
According to economist John H. Cochrane, once of Milton Friedman’s old haunt of the University of Chicago, for instance, “We should have a recession. People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do.” Like pounding nails into Cochrane’s own intellectual coffin, maybe? In the words of Milton Friedman himself:
All of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers, thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. It has never come about from permanent unemployment, but temporary unemployment, in the process of shifting people from one area to another.
In narrow economic terms, Friedman and Cochrane do have a point. . . if you’re financially blinkered enough to be able entirely to separate the economy from society, that is. The fact that large numbers of people would be forced to uproot themselves far away from their homes and families under his model was considered by such Chicago-influenced economists to be a good thing, even though such processes, if they went too far, would inevitably end up destroying the very cohesive (ethnically and otherwise), traditional 1950s-style communities which Margaret Thatcher wished to protect.
People were increasingly told from the 1980s onwards that they could go anywhere and be anything they liked. Want to move to London from the Midlands to pursue a new career once the local car-factory has closed-down and moved to India, where the employees will work for rice and cow-turds? Feel that you can’t because you have a wife and children who don’t want to leave? Why not simply divorce your wife and abandon your children, then!
Meanwhile, are you a random man from the Indian subcontinent who speaks no English and has no interest whatsoever in adopting the English way of life, but would like to move to the Midlands to earn a higher wage than your current pittance nonetheless? No problem, we’ll give you a work-permit and pretend that you’re British. Why not take a job in the same sector as the original man who was forced to move to London and undercut his wage while you’re at it, thus guaranteeing he can never move back there, too!
This is apparently called “economic efficiency,” though a suitable synonym might well be “madness,” or maybe even “evil.” This was not Thatcher’s specific intention, Gray argues. Due to the state of economic and social collapse which far-Left 1970s trade unions had pushed Britain into, much of what Thatcher did had to be done—one old Thatcherite mantra was “TINA,” or “There Is No Alternative”—but her program of financial remodeling set in motion some most undesirable consequences.
There is a famous Silicon Valley anecdote about the potential dangers of Artificial Intelligence. The idea goes that, one day, an intelligent paperclip-machine could be created and tasked with manufacturing paperclips in the most efficient way. However, it might then get out of control and conclude that the most efficient way of doing this would be to turn the entire world into paperclips, thus destroying it, because the machine has no off-switch. Was Margaret Thatcher herself the human equivalent of this unstoppable paperclip-machine?
She’s now been switched off for good, but it looks as if her AI has lived on within the economic matrix, become corrupt and virus-ridden, and begun transforming everything (and, more to the point, everyone) on the planet into interchangeable gray economic mush with a price-tag. And, now, it seems as if many people have just had enough: the mush is hardening back up and revolting.
Economic Earthquakes
You can’t pretend the ultimate downfall of this system at the hands of its internal flaws could never have been predicted, however, because it was. Here is what John Gray said would happen:
Re-engineering [i.e. turbo-boosting] the free market is hardly a conservative political project. Its effect is to sever cultural and institutional continuities, not to renew them. The Right’s [free market economic] project in present circumstances cannot be the conservation of cultural traditions. It claims to want progress – but progress without any fixed goals … [Today, the word] “progress” denotes the incessant social change forced on people by the imperatives of free markets. . . The permanent revolution of the free market denies any authority to the past. It nullifies precedent, it snaps the threads of memory and scatters local knowledge. By privileging individual choice over any common good it tends to make relationships revocable and provisional. In a culture in which choice is the only undisputed value and wants are held to be insatiable, what is the difference between initiating a divorce and trading in a used car? [2]
This process is not creative destruction, as Schumpeter praised, it is pure destruction, of a sort which increasing numbers of people are beginning to conclude they do not want. An amusingly hyperbolic recent development of this trend has been the argument advanced that the literal destruction of a society is good for the economy, in the sense that natural disasters like earthquakes can boost GDP by forcing upgrades in infrastructure and “innovative” changes in people’s employment-patterns due to the fact their workplaces have been totally obliterated and their workmates killed en masse. (It has long been held that the Black Death in medieval Europe led to a rise in wage-packets, as surviving workers had less competition for jobs and thus became more mobile and able to demand greater reward for their labor, so such opinions do actually have precedent.)
Some commentators have provocatively suggested that the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan which killed at least 28,000 people and led to a nuclear meltdown at Fukushima might in the long-term prove to have been a good thing for the Japanese economy, even in spite—no, because—of the massive loss of life, limb, and property. Perhaps one day Kim Jong Un will kindly put the Japanese economy back on track himself by nuking their cities, as frequently threatened?
Schumpeter’s notions have begun to mutate into something very nasty. According to Milton Friedman’s view, “Only a crisis. . . produces real change.” All those livelihoods and families ruined. . . but never mind, people don’t really exist as anything other than statistical abstractions, and the theories are more real than the things they’re supposed to be modelling. You can see how some economists have ended up rubbing their hands in glee at earthquakes; maybe Fukushima was really just one of those fake cardboard cities you see getting trampled on in old 1970s Toho Studios Godzilla films.
In imitating the rampant over-reliance of arrogant contemporary economists upon intangible mathematical models and the elevation of abstractions such as GDP over the well-being and desires of their own citizens, particularly when it comes to issues surrounding mass immigration, many of today’s hyper-globalist politicians totally invert what an economy is supposed to be for. As Gray said:
The argument against unrestricted global freedom in trade and capital movements is not primarily an economic one; it is, rather, that the economy should serve the needs of society, not society the imperatives of the market. [3]
Yet, in the age of Kali Yuga inversion, it is often the other way around—as the insane employment practices of my local car-wash demonstrate in clear ethnic microcosm.
Moral Bankruptcy
Mainstream politicians must have known that millions of the people they allegedly represent did not want all this to happen. Therefore, said Gray, the rules of world trade had to be “elevated beyond any possibility of revision through democratic choice” by being handed over to unaccountable transnational organizations like the IMF or the EU.
Gray suggests that the hyper-Thatcherite free market is actually a rather unnatural thing, which must be forced upon people by the centralized State; because true laissez-faire free-for-alls can lead to undesirable social consequences of the sort detailed above. The more democracy there is, the more people try to place curbs on such abuses. For instance, we can see that in Victorian Britain, as more citizens got the vote, various Factory Acts were introduced putting limits on working-hours, forbidding child-labor, and so forth. These impeded the workings of the market, but certainly improved society.
The trouble is that such impulses can go too far until you end up with unpleasant situations like the 1970s, when the unions ruled Britain and various state-sponsored enterprises were inefficient, unprofitable, and rotten to the core. At such points, the market has to be liberated again as Thatcher did, but, says Gray, in order to ensure that it cannot become clogged up once more by future socialists, the political successors of Thatcher (who herself eventually grew to hate transnational organizations like the EU as brakes upon national sovereignty) steadily transferred their own previous sovereign powers across to unaccountable global organizations headed by persons who completely shared their own mindsets, thus making the unrestricted free market’s reign eternal and unbreakable. [4]
Gray told the world’s economists and politicians that they had completely misunderstood the message of Joseph Schumpeter:
Today’s believers in worldwide laissez-faire echo Schumpeter without comprehending him. They believe that by promoting prosperity free markets advance liberal values. They have not noticed that a global free market engenders new varieties of nationalism and fundamentalism [in counter-response] even as it creates new elites. By eating away the foundations of bourgeois societies. . . global capitalism is endangering liberal civilization. [5]
Yes, I certainly hope so!
Naturally, Gray was criticized at the time for telling the truth, as are all candid prophets out of tune with their own age. But he was proved largely correct in his predictions. Immediately after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in the 1990s, such persons would have had a very limited audience. Now, after 30-plus years of hyper-globalization, they are beginning to sound increasingly as if they are correct. If liberal free market politicians of a globalist cast of mind don’t like it, they should look in the mirror and punch their own reflections, because it is their own stupid fault.
Once the aliens begin to invade by their millions, the only natural and sane response is to expect people to begin to fight back against them, isn’t it? Even if, like Helen McCaw fondly imagines, they do (supposedly) come in spaceships bearing bars upon bars of soul-corrupting gold.
Notes
John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (London: Granta, 2009)
John Gray, Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings (London: Penguin, 2016)
[1] Gray, 2016, p.520
[2] Gray, 2009, pp.36–7
[3] Gray, 2009, p.82
[4] Gray, 2009, pp.8–9, 18, 211–12
[5] Gray, 2009, p.210
4 comments
It has become a vicious cycle at this point. Managerial capitalism devours what’s left of the high-trust European society, which promotes the rule of jackals in the elite, which in turn feeds even more of the remaining capital to the Machine. Traditional institutions either wither away or degenerate into transmitters of decline. At this point reforms become impossible as the System is only able to perpetuate the cycle and hunt for its enemies which engenders anarcho-tyranny. Leninist “Who-Whom?”appears on the horizon as patriotism (and to a great degree- nationalism) are no longer able to preserve healthy instincts and virtues in an increasingly nihilistic and atomized population.
Gray suggests that the hyper-Thatcherite free market is actually a rather unnatural thing, which must be forced upon people by the centralized State; because true laissez-faire free-for-alls can lead to undesirable social consequences of the sort detailed above.
This system couldn’t have emerged without the modern all-encompassing State which is why we ended up in a post-free-market world, where the state-corporate complex divides the loot, centering redistribution policies around social engineering principles. Holistic thinking about the State and the Nation gives way to managing the growing areas of peripheries around metropolitan centers. We’re creating what amounts to cosmopolitan quasi-city-states inside our withering nations.
Overall it sounds like a great diagnosis of what was to come. The economy should serve the people, not the other way around – you know, that sounds like the (ahem) other kind of Austrian economics!
Similarly to how the parents take care of the obedient child, not forcing the kids in the mines to fund dad’s gambling and mom’s alcohol habit.
Great article. It was/is an insane age, in which the needs of the economy were considered more fundamental to a nation than political and social needs. And the grubby little bank clerk Milton Friedman was regarded as the great sage of the era. I question whether Gray was altogether right about “the hyper-capitalism of today” being “an accidental phenomenon, arising (within a UK context) out of the success of Margaret Thatcher’s financial reforms of the 1980s.” There was a great theoretical push behind it; hyper-capitalism (and libertarianism) were seen as antidotes to the encroaching socialism of the Cold War. Ayn Rand was preaching hyper-capitalism to the masses shortly after WW II. And the Reaganites were fully locked and loaded with globalist free market ideas before they entered office in 1980. And there were lots of big money forces behind it as well.
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