Crime Against Humanity: Pensée Unique in Economics, 31
I often stress the importance of detecting the strategy I label “passing off the cause of the illness as its cure” at work. In confronting here the direct correlation between the neoclassical reshaping and the state of Japanese economy, it is apt to have an idea of the degree of neoclassical reshaping correlated with such results; the reason is comparing the claims of its insufficient application to the actual degree of its application. Werner informs us that “by the end of the 1990s the scale of structural reforms had reached such proportions that even structural reform proponents were in awe.” So, if such a degree of application is “insufficient”, where would a “sufficient” degree lead us?
And, finally, to all this it must again be added the meaning of these dry figures in the flesh of people’s lives: it is important that we pay due attention to it, because figures and graphs may tend to be overlooked as “cold and meaningless”, and we may fail to confront fully what does each slump in a graph mean in terms of real sufferings in real lives of real people like us. Furthermore, there are the further social costs – an euphemism for human sufferings –, in the undocumented terms of unemployment rate, injury rate, crime rate, suicide rate, etc., that usually escape the GDP and Gili index figures. Has the fog lifted completely?
If it hasn’t, and some fog bank still floats, let’s blow it away by touching upon the fact that many of the injuries caused to people by the advocates of the Pensée Unique are of a very precise type: divide et impera, divide and rule. How many wars among the poor are provoked? How many casualties are caused by every war among the poor? What is a war among the poor other than putting us all agaisnt each other, through hunger or some other pretext? And who is doing that and thus is responsible for all the casualties?
And now that the fog has lifted, there’s even something else that becomes visible behind that. Should you ever be puzzled by the strong position held by the Pensée Unique and its false dogmas in the fields of media, education, government, and not only in finance, as I previously said, if anyone has a price, now someone has the money; and these antisocial, suppressive assumptions are instrumental in paving the way: the more one can be conditioned to believe that self−interest and the accumulation of material wealth are the only motivating values of anyone, self included, the more one is liable to become willing to have a price.
