Good Morning Friends,

Slavoj Zizek speaks of the practicing religious fundamentalist as one who actually does not "believe" in God. Given everything we have reviewed thus far, we can concur. If they really believe why do they need to maintain such elaborate structures of justification?

I am going to argue the same for practicing free market fundamentalists. I'm going to argue that they do not, and perhaps had never believed in capitalism itself.

Remember I said that Israel, according to information which Zizek cited (Authors@Google talk), is one of the most atheistic countries in the world paradoxically. The first prime minister of Israel, Golda Meier, was asked if she believed in God, and she famously answered something like: "I believe in the Jewish people and the Jewish people believe in God."

A classical kind of non-answer, yes? Individual Jews do not have to believe. They can project their belief onto someone else or some distant "specter," to use Zizek's term, for the system of belief to function.

I think the same is so for conservative academic and journalistic, in other words, ideological proponents of the free market capitalism and the actual, practicing "free market" capitalists - the huge multinational corporations of all kinds. The latter project this "belief" onto the former, who project it onto the latter.

The latter are the non-believing practicing free market fundamentalists. The conservative ideologues are the specter onto which they project real belief.

Not only do the practicing capitalists not believe in capitalism but they are hostile to it. I will try to show that this hostility is historical, universal, and traditionally relentless. I will argue that crisis in capitalism is caused by the big capitalists trying to escape capitalism en masse. This movement, in the form of financialization and other things, is highly destabilizing in the same way an attempted prison break by sixty percent of the prison population would be destabilizing to the prison.

I will try to show that that is precisely how the capital ruling class (note I said capital ruling class as opposed to capitalist ruling class) actually views capitalism, like a prison they have the run of but which they still perceive as limiting their traditional power. They want to escape into what they perceive as the higher realm of pure capital exploitation that they had enjoyed when they had been called Kings, Lords, Dukes, and so forth.

Question: What is the ideological root of the traditional hostility of so-called Old Money to New Money?

Answer: Man is the desire to become God. All of us measure our nearness to "God," whether we know it or not, by our material success or lack of it. The "age" of a family's wealth adds another dimension. Old Money carries with it a sense of the eternal and inevitable. It is as if these families were always rich, as though their position had been ordained by God.

New Money feels more transitory and insecure, not rooted in the eternal. As such, New Money has always been an uncomfortable reminder to Old Money that wealth just does not fall from heaven on the few divinely favored due to their intrinsic awesomeness; and as such, wealth, at some point, needed work to acquire. Therefore New Money casts a tarnish on the desired, perceived celestial, magical majesty of wealth, graceful living and so forth.

I'll talk more about this later.

wingedcentaur.