> The original architects of American global power did something very clever that no other empire had ever done before: they deliberately hid the instruments of their power.
> Specifically, they institutionalized the hard power of the post-WW2 American military into a "rules-based international order" and the organizations needed to run it.
> ...
> The reason they did this is because repeated use of hard military power is fragile and self-defeating: it engenders resentment and breeds defiance.
I think a similar thing happened to the people with the ideology of markets: they're presented as some neutral, optimal thing, but they aren't. They encode biases and preferences that suit powerful interests, which can take a lot of effort for a common person to discern. But since there's no leader or decision-maker to point to and defy, so it's hard to organize people about the problems, and then it's hard to point them at the right root cause/solution.
Spot on. “The market” is presented like it’s some state of nature, some law of the universe like physics. It’s been said Slavoj Žižek, Mark Fisher, and Fredric Jameson, but it appears Jameson was likely the first:
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
> Specifically, they institutionalized the hard power of the post-WW2 American military into a "rules-based international order" and the organizations needed to run it.
> ...
> The reason they did this is because repeated use of hard military power is fragile and self-defeating: it engenders resentment and breeds defiance.
I think a similar thing happened to the people with the ideology of markets: they're presented as some neutral, optimal thing, but they aren't. They encode biases and preferences that suit powerful interests, which can take a lot of effort for a common person to discern. But since there's no leader or decision-maker to point to and defy, so it's hard to organize people about the problems, and then it's hard to point them at the right root cause/solution.