Wages of Rebellion

Wages of Rebellion by Chris Hedges Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: Wages of Rebellion by Chris Hedges Read Free Book Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
is our goal. As Marcos said:
    Maybe it’s true. Maybe we were wrong in choosing to cultivate life instead of worshipping death.
    But we made the choice without listening to those on the outside. Without listening to those who always demand and insist on a fight to the death, as long as others will be the ones to do the dying.
    We made the choice while looking and listening inward, as the collective Votán that we are.
    We chose rebellion, that is to say, life. 18

    I t was a brisk February morning in Oxford, England, when I left the Macdonald Randolph Hotel, a stately Victorian Gothic building, on Beaumont Street. I walked along the narrow cobblestone streets, pastthe storied colleges with resplendent lawns and Gothic stone spires, to meet Avner Offer, an economic historian and Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History at Oxford University.
    Offer, author of
The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-being in the United States and Britain Since 1950
(2006), has explored for twenty-five years the cavernous gap between our economic and social reality and our ruling economic ideology. According to Offer, our ideology of neoclassical economics—the belief that, as E. Roy Weintraub wrote, “people have rational choices among outcomes” that can be identified and associated with values, that “individuals maximize utility and firms maximize profits,” and that “people act independently on the basis of full and relevant information”—is a
“just-world” theory
. 19 “A just-world theory posits that the world is just. People get what they deserve. If you believe that the world is fair, you explain or rationalize away injustice, usually by blaming the victim.”
    But, he warned, if we continue down a path of mounting scarcities, along with economic stagnation and decline, this neoclassical model becomes ominous.
    “Major ways of thinking about the world constitute just-world theories,” he said. “The Catholic Church is a just-world theory. If the Inquisition burned heretics, they only got what they deserved. Bolshevism was a just-world theory. If Kulaks were starved and exiled, they got what they deserved. Fascism was a just-world theory. If Jews died in the concentration camps, they got what they deserved. The point is not that the good people get the good things, but the bad people get the bad things. Neoclassical economics, our principal source of policy norms, is a just-world theory.”
    Offer quoted the economist Milton Friedman: “The ethical principle that would directly justify the distribution of income in a free market society is, ‘To each according to what he and the instruments he owns produces.’ ”
    “So,” Offer went on, “everyone gets what he or she deserves, either for his or her effort or for his or her property. No one asks how he or she got this property. And if they don’t have it, they probably don’t deserve it. The point about just-world theory is not that it dispenses justice, but that it provides a warrant for inflicting pain.”
    Offer, a transplanted Israeli who came to Oxford after serving as a soldier in the 1967 war, said that the effectiveness of an ideology is measured by the amount of coercion it takes to keep a ruling elite in power. Reality, when it does not conform to the reigning ideology, he said, has to be “forcibly aligned.” The amount of coercion needed to make society adhere to the model is “a rough measure of the model’s validity.”
    “That the Soviet Union had to use so much coercion undermined the credibility of communism as a model of reality,” he said. “It is perhaps symptomatic that the USA, a society that elevates freedom to the highest position among its values, is also the one that has one of the very largest penal systems in the world relative to its population. It also inflicts violence all over the world. It tolerates a great deal of gun violence, and a health service that excludes large numbers of people.”
    As larger and

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