John Maynard Keynes was a prophet of mature, or non-ideological capitalism. He defended it against its rival religion of communism, then on the rise (1920s and 1930s).
Keynes’s works are hard to read. The arcane language fits with a view of him as a magus of his mythology. It’s as though he and others must make their language obscure for a proper mystery religion and not profane it by making it plain English and thus accessible to the vulgar. Later, George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway would bring about the emphasis on concision and clarity as tools of written and spoken truth. We should be thankful for their work.
Keynes’s economics is not elitist; it is in fact associated with the left-wing. But at moments he betrays a sort of default elitism characteristic of the British social elite of his time.
Capitalism is a central mythology of the developed world. Let me clarify. First, by capitalism, I mean the preoccupation with producing goods and services to produce growth in wealth on the scale of persons as well as markets (nations and trading blocs). By capitalism, I don’t mean the concentration of privilege and political power, which has existed from the beginning of humanity and will persist to its end.
Second, by mythology, I mean a “system of values” that is based on a common set of sacred articles (private property, enterprise, constitutional law) and that gives rise to preoccupation, differentiation, and meaning. The point is that capitalism is not “natural”; it is a cultural construct.
Capitalism as mythology and as an ordering force is an improvement on previous mythologies. The previous ones were more violent and bloody. The “free market” as a sacred ordering principle is less evil than historical manifestations of the violent sacred which produced bloody sacrifices, wars, and endless and odious amounts of oppression.
That many are not cognisant of capitalism as a mythology testifies to its effectiveness as such. Many believe that capitalism is natural — that the sacred articles of capitalism are givens. This happens whenever mythologies become too successful. But then, once they are taken for granted, the enforcement of the sacred ceases to be enforced and they unravel. A new mythology is then needed, based on new articles sacralized by divine violence.
The post-capitalist era is one of capitalism becoming threadbare as a mythology. Young people in the developed world look upon the developing world (which often shows up in the form of immigrants to their countries) and they see peoples with much stronger sense of identity. Why is this? Loyalty, virtue, and tradition? How are these seemingly more effective mythologies different — better or worse — than the exhausted mythology of economics?
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