It’s clear to me that I’m deep inside a line of thought that is impossible to reduce to the sort of snippet suitable for social media. Nevertheless, I’ll try.
Let’s assume for a moment that scientism, the idea that science can be made to explain all things in the universe, is the new religion of those who turned away from the theological kind a couple of hundred years ago.
Then mathematics is a secret kind of sorcery in which spells can be formulated and wielded to create and alter realities. How irresistible to the billions drawn into fantasy worlds from Tolkien to Rowling.
Bear with me. It’s not that science or mathematics are those things. Only the way they are used by people to try and achieve things that cannot be achieved with real science and mathematics.
So, for example, scientism can be harnessed to the notion that psychiatry or neuroscience can tell us in a deterministic sense about what occurs when a person decides to build a bookshelf, or undertake some housework, meaning that we can learn to manipulate human, contextual decision-making arbitrarily, with words or medical procedures. Science cannot actually do those things. It can explain phenomena and describe their components, and it can describe methods to interfere with them, but not in the deterministic sense that the decision to build a bookshelf or do housework can be changed to a specified other activity.
There is always a human actor (or groups of them) using science to attempt to achieve specific outcomes. Science is not an independent actor, and can never ‘do’ anything in itself.
Likewise, mathematics is not capable of explaining anything at all. However, it can be used by people to describe concepts which are then interpreted by people to mean things that have no solid existence. That are entirely abstract.
Think of this as the math used by the scientists working on the first nuclear weapon. The calculations themselves did not possess any determinism, demanding the building of a weapon. They were not radioactive or fissionable. They were purely abstract uses of formulae by people. And people had to interpret them to mean things in other domains of knowledge, like physics, chemistry, engineering, and so on.
So where am I going with this?
Political economy. Our current way of talking about economics relies on underlying metricated observations or theories that are interpreted to mean specific things by specific people, without any rational proof that they mean anything of the kind. After all, if we were certain that the meanings assigned are actually true, manipulating a national or global economy would be child’s play, wouldn’t it.
Instead, we seem to bumble along, using hit and miss interventions to maintain a political economy that has completely uncertain outcomes, implodes with alarming regularity, and nevertheless demands our absolute obedience for the benefit of a very few people and institutions.
Looking at this rationally, scientifically, how could I conclude anything but that it’s irrational, and even insane. The way religions are when they demand obedience to arbitrary rules with no observable reality.
How could I conclude about the underlying mathematics anything but the proposition that apparently some otherwise sane, rational adults are trying to invoke magic spells with figures and formulae they just don’t understand? Meaning that such people—economists, political scientists, bankers, business executives, and so on—are attempting to make mathematics mean something it just does not, and never can mean.
Unless enough people wish it did, to create a kind of mass delusion that this meaning really is immanent in the mathematics rather than the wishful thinking of the people involved.
So what?
Ordinarily this kind of delusion would be uncovered pretty readily and dispatched, but it relies on the scientistic religion, which has the sort of power that has kept superstitions alive for thousands of years. And the delusional edifice offers clear paths for power and domination, which are sought after in their own right. The way they always were by people without any religious views, but a sense of how to use its appearance. Or by people made insane by their sense of religion, and driven to impose their conception of it on others.
It seems to me that current political economy—call it neoliberalism if you will—is driven by religious lunatics who believe in some perverse necessity to impose the imagined ‘requirements’ of a particular conception of political economy on everyone else. Or by perfectly sane mercenaries manipulating superstitious masses on the basis of their belief in sorcery. Or by some of both kinds. But whatever the case, it is an absurd, Kafkaesque conception of our reality.
We all become like the broom in Walt Disney’s Fantasia: animated as slaves to an idea that might have seemed sensible to begin with, but turns into unremitting disaster as it is slavishly adhered to. Stopping it, in its exponentially accelerating nihilism, is beyond the scope of even the most powerful spells and wizards. Or is it?
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