Seeing freedom differently

The effect of the mortgage crisis has been to expose a distorted interpretation of freedom upheld by powerful dogma.

A dogma insists that matters are far too complicated for you to grasp and your only responsibility, to prevent chaos, is to surrender personal judgement. "Serve x with all your might and all will be for the best" is its principal demand.  This time x was the Economy , while in the past it's been the Pope (papal infallibility), the King (divine right) etc. 

When everything appears to be headed in the right direction, the effect on people's minds is total. The dogma seems to cover everything, like the sky. Until suddenly, what was thought to be the sky turns out to be just a painted décor, a trompe l'oeuil. A small crack and the illusion shatters. Through this crack we're seeing hints of a much wider more unpredictable sky. The new air rushing through feels very different to the clammy air of certainty we breathed before.

There's a gradual realisation that the axioms setting the direction in which society moves are not immutable, that there are many other possibilities - that the economy itself is not the measure of all things. It is remarkable how critics of faith often seem to miss the major and most problematic one: the faith in the Invisible Hand - now long hard-coded in our social behaviour.

The problem is more profound even than the "do as thy wilt" (the thought that some kind of common good emerges from the sum of all selfish actions) embedded in the Faith. The very idea that the world is composed of separate individual minds making rational choices is fundamentally flawed and upon it the whole sorry edifice of economics is based.

“We interpret a dependence, in our civilisation, upon economic competition, as proof that this is the prime motivation that human nature can rely upon”. Ruth Benedict

One of the Faith's most nefarious offshoots has been to make an idol of the values of competition. This has created a raft of ills we are now going to be spending the next century divesting ourselves of. Deeply embedded social Darwinism, the notion of 'just deserts' in the distrubution of wealth, reductive thinking invading every sphere of life, even the most intimate, the obsession with growth rather than finding a balance, the tacit acceptance that creating a "necessary stupidity" in society is worth it because it's good for business, the redemptive power of money and therefore the ends justifying the means in any way that's not overtly criminal (i.e. lack of responsibility) - creating terrible lesions in the body of society.

What we have taken for freedom is an efficient organisational framework that provides opportunities for acquiring wealth. A kind of vast opportunity machine. It gives certain people a measure of freedom by virtue of allowing them to exist within this framework in more favourable terms than others.

There may be some freedom in all this, but not quite in the way we imagine. We imagine there’s a much fuller freedom, at least just round the corner. But as awareness of the millions serving at the lower rims of the vast pyramid increases, when the correlation between one person’s freedom and another having less becomes clearer - then it all becomes less appealing.

So much depended on an "aversion of the gaze" that may have been maintained were it not for the combined effects of the banking crisis, the growth of the Web and ecological movements, making it unavoidable to dwell on the interconnectedness of things.