Crime Against Humanity: Pensée Unique in Economics, 11

It’s not merely that incentives based on wrong motivations may not work, worse than that. It has been said that you reap what you sow: what you reward you tend to get, what you penalise you tend not to get, and paying attention to something or ignoring it is a form of rewarding or penalising it. Therefore using incentive structures based on the lowest motivation people can be reduced to exerts a constant, widespread concealed degrading pressure on them. A suppressive pressure. It has been said that the criminal sees others in his or her own image, and indeed the influence of a criminal on his or her environment is still degrading and suppressive, whether he or she is carrying forward a deliberate plan to this end or not.
That such a manipulated exploitation of motivations is suppressive can be easily seen in how self interest in the strict sense of neoclassical economics alone degenerates into suicidal parasitism. I’ll discuss that in detail later on, suffice here to say that if such self interest is the one and only goal, then sooner or later one switches from exchange to robbery, from economy to finance, and one kicks off the spiral of speculation which is intrinsically destructive and lethal because, being essentially a pyramid scheme, it would require to endlessly expand esponentially, whereas there are no infinite resources in the world. And also because, while on its way to the final destruction, it gets a head start on it by leaving behind a widespread trail of destruction, now.
In fact, Werner tells us that while it has been demonstrated time and again by scientific studies that it is not such a materialistic self interest that motivates people, this trail of suppressive destruction based on this assumption takes the form of forcing the world in the very opposite, and wrong, direction: the hamster wheel. If one is motivated by self interested, one has to earn in order to have; incentive structures based on this assumption force people towards self interest as the imposed only motivation, and when it becomes the only motivation that allows one to survive, then people must either steal or work themselves to death to beat each other out. Thus reducing to the hamster wheel people who would aspire to a full life in communion with one another is most definitely suppressive.