The 9.9 Percent by Matthew Stewart

Author:Matthew Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

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THE MARKET MYTH IS SIMILAR to its cousin the merit myth in this respect: the less it explains, the more it seems to matter. Even as the actual economy moves ever farther from anything that may count as a genuine market, paradoxically, the myth tightens its grip on the office-bound imagination. Indeed, one of the great mysteries of the modern economic age is how the useful, limited, and inherently leveling idea of the market—which really ought to point in the direction of equality—has evolved into the ideological justification for its opposite: a regime of escalating inequality and unfreedom. This is the contradiction that shapes the religious life of my friend Marty, not to mention that of my grandfather. It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, something that their religion has in common with the political ideology of the American slaveholders of the nineteenth century. Back then, too, the loudest champions of freedom were the greatest beneficiaries of unfree labor.

To a significant degree, it should be clear by now, the rise and rise of the market myth is a matter of naked self-interest. When all the marbles roll across the table in one direction, the people with all the marbles are liable to insist that the table is just as flat and as even as can be. Those whom the existing laws of property favor will ever favor the existing laws of property. The seemingly unstoppable spread of the market myth is also quite obviously a consequence of successful propaganda. All of those investments in free-market think tanks and economics faculties have paid off. And yet there is something more to the story. If you have spent time with people like Marty or my grandfather, you will know that they aren’t faking it. When it comes to acknowledging the many unfreedoms on which their own freedom relies, they’re more like the proverbial fish who have no idea what water is. Something happens in times of rising inequality that makes it almost impossible for people to see what is keeping them afloat.

At the core of this strange phenomenon lies a certain cognitive failure, or so I would suggest. Let’s call it the property delusion. We humans are sometimes prone to thinking that we “own” our cars and houses in exactly the same way that we “own” our arms and legs. But the truth is more complicated. Our property in things never amounts to more than promissory notes from other people, most of whom also have arms and legs, involving what should happen in the event that anyone else should run away with “my” car or invade “my” house. These promissory notes, moreover, come with many stipulations and debatable provisions about what exactly will count as “mine,” and they aren’t always worth the paper they are printed on. In a healthy society, where the equality and interdependence of human beings is recognized, this distinction between self and property is easier to see, and the delusional belief that we have some direct relation to our toys and cars, unmediated by other people, is less common.

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