Mastering the Market State

Postliberal economist Philip Pilkington argues that we can’t simply dispense with a market state, but must give it new purpose in a postliberal political economy.

In the wake of the Brexit and Trump votes some of us started to sense that something was wrong. Little did we know how correct we were.

The direction things have taken since the mid-2010s is shocking on just about every count. The culture has soured completely and seems to have entered a nihilistic death spiral. Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you if you had told me where we would be today; today I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw publicly celebrated cannibalism in another ten.

I recently watched an early live music performance by the pop punk band Blink 182. It must have been the mid-2000s. The band is playing by a pool party. Everyone is having fun. The bassist is wearing no clothes and is using his guitar as a loincloth of sorts. But the mood is light, and everyone is having a good time—this is the era of Fred Durst rockin’ the set, newly liberated F-bombs, and Spring Break. A generation of misfits and messers—the Jackass generation. Our generation.

Little did we know what would come after the party. The heavily tattooed drummer of Blink 182 has now been elevated by our media overlords from fringe oddball to aspirational figure—if you look like him you can marry into the Kardashian monarchy simulacrum. A causal relationship has been established in the public mind between quantity of tattoos on the body and social worth. Our societies are reverting to primitive barbarism. People are becoming increasingly unmoored and, not just irrational, but post-rational. It is starting to feel like you could convince them to tolerate—or perhaps even do—almost anything.

Postliberalism has come a long way in this time. The trends are now undeniable. But what can we do about them? Much energy so far has focused on cultural discussion. This is no bad thing. In the past few years, a genuine counterculture has started to emerge. The craziness is becoming seen not just as evil and destructive—but as cringe. A meme I saw recently captures the mood of the counterculture perfectly. It has an online Wojak character in a confessional: “Bless me father, for I have cringed” the caption reads.

After the cultural shift will be followed, one would hope, a discussion of legal changes. I can already catch a whiff of legal cordite in the air; full-scale lawfare seems almost certain to follow. But will it be enough? I increasingly do not think so. What we are witnessing right now is world historical, almost civilizational. The response will need to be comprehensive enough to meet this challenge.

Consider the collapse of the Roman Empire and the emergence of Christendom. If the Roman Empire collapsed and was simply replaced by the Christian communities that lived under it, we would have seen the proliferation of small self-sufficient Christian communes. Instead, we got the Holy Roman Empire.

Why? Because the Christians took what was there and built on it. They had no choice. The Roman Law—the Lex—was all-encompassing. You could not simply rewind the tape and create a new Christian Lex from scratch. The only way out was through—and so Christians mastered Roman law. Had the Christians not embraced the Lex they would have lost and been superseded by a group that would. We could well have had, not a Holy Roman Empire, but a Gnostic one.

Today we have something far more comprehensive and all-encompassing than the Roman Lex. We have the enormous machinery of the market-state. That is, the corporate sector that operates on monopolistic market-based principles; and the state bureaucracy that pursues goals through law and diktat. The market-state is today loosely integrated and becoming increasingly tight.

What is the ideology of the market-state? I think it can accurately be described as something between neoliberalism and ordo liberalism. That is, liberal market forces are used to pursue certain ends. Even the state uses incentive-based market structures to achieve many of its ends. This is not surprising. As a tool of social engineering there is nothing like incentive and disincentive—a fact that would not have surprised St Augustine.

What is the telos of the present market-state? What does the “Blob” want? This, it seems to me, is the core problem of a potential postliberal statecraft. And the answer is quite simply that the Blob wants . . . nothing in particular. We banished telos during the Enlightenment. We replaced it with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism worked so long as the institutions of the market-state Blob had to be forced to conform to the precepts of utilitarianism.

But once we arrived at this destination—I would say some time in the 1990s—we realized that the machine functioned, but it had no purpose. Without purpose—and with strong incentives to maximize profit, and thereby to reproduce itself endlessly, at the expense of all else—we descended into nihilism. First comes the guitarist with the bass guitar loincloth—he’s just having fun; then within two decades his drummer encourages you to tattoo your eyeballs—he’s trying to destroy your civilization.

What then, is the potential for a postliberal political economy? I would say, quite simply, to take the reins of the market-state “Blob” and master it, seize, redirect and guide it toward the Common Good. The market-state is our Lex, our Roman law. It is not going away. We have no choice but to master it.

The market-state is perhaps the most effective and efficient means of channelling and, it could be argued, directing people. The market-state is then, I would say, a Jesuitical dream. Highly offensive to the liberals, I am sure. But then it was the liberals that created it.

OK, so what would mastering the market state look like? I will try shortly to give you some sense. But first, I think, it is more productive to concentrate the mind in such a way as to think about the problem properly. A great epistemologist once said: “I am pointing at the moon, and you are looking at my finger.”

Let’s focus a little harder on the moon. And what is the moon? Oh, anything really. Falling birth rates is one moon. Family breakdown is another—I think they share a gravitational field. But what about soaring sexual abuse rates in schools where teachers and pupils of the opposite sex interact? That moon is as yet undiscovered even in the more esoteric corners of the New Right. Yet it’s so clearly a problem. An early study in Britain showed that nearly half of all sexual abuse victims had that abuse take place at school. The second largest category was at the victim’s or abuser’s home, but that only accounted for around 20%. Our schools are where the vast amount of child sexual abuse takes place—yet we ignore it completely.

What about the impact closing the asylums has had on the proliferation of homeless people? If I were an astrologist, I would say that when this particular moon rises, we feel great shame—and rightly so. Yet, lacking the reflective capacities of an astrologer, we never discuss the cause of these problems.

And that, I think, is the issue. We see an awful lot of problems around us. Some of them have been there for time immemorial and may well be with us forever. Has growing GDP really disproved Jesus when he told us that “the poor you will always have with you”?

But others are new. I mentioned a few. But use your imagination. The house is a mess. It is embarrassing. The neighbours are laughing at us.

Here is a formula that might help us in our mission: “If there is something that is awful and seems like it probably did not exist until recently, there is a good chance that this something has a cause and that this cause, in turn, can be tackled and therefore the problem can be dealt with.”

Tackled by whom or by what? By mastering the market state, of course. If you were not paying attention, I will state it again: the market-state is the most efficient social engineering tool ever created in human history.

Conservative social engineering? Heresy, surely. Perhaps. But we did not create the Blob. We did not ask for it—the liberals, those great proponents of liberty, created it in their strange twentieth-century laboratory. We did not ask that it be turned loose in its immature, feral state to absorb everything around it in its nihilistic utilitarian goo. Frankly, we have no choice but to master it.

What else did we think family policy was? Massive subsidies to impact the behavior in one of the most intimate spheres of our lives? I hate to be the one to reveal the magician’s trick, folks, but that’s social engineering. And if you’ve been following the debates on it, you’ll likely realise at this stage that it is completely necessary because, if we don’t do it, the economy will collapse.

Perhaps I was supposed to give you a list of demands from the mysterious realms of economics. A macroeconomic manifesto—perhaps with intimidating modeling and other things not meant to be understood. I have one. Ask me later. But the real goal here is to recognise what needs to be done on a much broader scale. We need to stop thinking solely in terms of ideas and start thinking in terms of cause and effect—of problems to be solved. Society is the puzzle. We are the engineers.

Yes, some problems will require highbrow macroeconomic solutions. But most do not. I recognised the obvious problem of sexual abuse in mixed-sex schools because it is in the papers constantly, often told in the most lurid detail and often focused on sad cases of recently divorced female teachers and immature teenage boys. Yet we remain paralyzed. We read about these things as a fact of life when a moment’s reflection would lead us to conclude that there is an obvious structure of cause and effect. One which could be broken—and in many cases breaking this causal link would merely require returning to the status quo that was in place before the 1960s or so.

Nor are most of these supposed facts of life even popular anymore. Fifty or sixty years ago there was an active discussion of the merits and demerits of, say, mixed sex schools with mixed sex teachers. There were two sides of this debate and the public got to hear from them. Today no one even questions the system. We see it as a fact of life—even though I would argue it is creating enormous problems. Where is public opinion on the matter? It is nonexistent. Because there is no public discussion of the merits and the demerits. This is particularly surprising because it is not even a taboo issue. My sisters and I all went to single sex schools and those schools are still there—no one is talking about integrating them. Although we did have female teachers— something I never saw any upside to in an all-boys school and only downside.

Here, right before our eyes, an enormous social experiment that has lasted half a century—I take it as an example not because it is some sort of hobbyhorse of mine, but rather I am trying to highlight an extremely obvious, widely discussed problem that we sweep under the rug for no good reason. We do not discuss it simply because we lack the imagination. And this at precisely the time that the people who used to support these changes to the status quo that ruled for centuries—broadly speaking, the Left—is full of frankly stupid people who completely lack the intelligence or the creativity to mount a defense. In our generation—I mean the millennials—the Left has not produced a single interesting thinker of note.

All we need to do is recognize these problems and rather than just ignoring them or complaining about them, ask ourselves and each other what is the cause of them and how we can solve them.