Comment on Peter Dorman on ‘The Death of Shame’
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Peter Dorman concludes: “I would like our culture analysts, who are so adept at discerning subtle shades of colonialism in language and art, to take up the study of shame and its progressive disappearance from public life. In the meantime, those of us who are disgusted by the shameless behavior of those in power should have no illusions. We won’t get them to back down by uncovering further evidence of their misdeeds, although evidence remains the basis for rational judgment and should always be sought.”
The authors of so-called Holy Books produced literary fiction by mixing NONENTITIES and NONEVENTS and unverifiable PROPHESIES with banal elements of reality in order to get their message across. So, it has been a fact for at least 3000 years that one can tell people any garbage/lie without fear of any unpleasant physical, societal, or psychological consequences.
It is hard to tell what is more astounding, the lack of any good sense on the side of the storytellers or on the side of the recipients. The fact is that the complementary stupidity/ corruption of the participants of public communication worked fine throughout the ages and still works for ninety-nine percent of any population.
The success of priesthoods and their narratives did not get lost on philosophers, princes/ politicians, historians, journalists, sociopaths, criminals, secret societies/agencies, marketers, psychologists, propagandists, and the entertainment industry. The control of the narrative is the precondition of the control of society.
History as a reliable account of actual events got effectively lost with the invention of mass media and war propaganda at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, the average citizen cannot tell whether the photo he sees is authentic, whether the news he watches is staged, whether the report he reads is made up, or whether the authority he trusts is corrupt. Worse, he cannot know which information has been temporarily or forever put beyond his reach.
Since Adam Smith/Karl Marx, economics claims to be a science. However, there are two economixes: political and theoretical economics. The main differences are: (i) The goal of political economics is to successfully push an agenda, and the goal of theoretical economics is to successfully explain how the actual economy works. (ii) In political economics anything goes; in theoretical economics, the scientific standards of material and formal consistency are observed.
Theoretical economics (= science) had been hijacked from the very beginning by political economists (= agenda pushers). Political economics has produced NOTHING of scientific value in the last 200+ years. Economics is what Feynman called a cargo cult science.
Political economics is an institutionally closed selection system that begins with the peer-review of the journals, proceeds with funding, and ends with the fake Nobel Prize. The visible outcome is the peaceful coexistence of four approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism ― that are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent and that got the pivotal concept of the subject matter ― profit ― wrong.
Agenda-pushing extends to the econblogosphere and takes all forms between outright lying, false applause, and real suppression. EconoSpeak is no exception.
So, Peter Dorman’s complaint about the Death of Shame is rhetorical. On EconoSpeak he is in one boat with two notorious fake scientists/agenda pushers, Barkley Rosser and Sandwichman, who shamelessly blather, disinform, misinform, distract, applaud one another, and suppress posts they do not like.
The ultimate stage of economists’ shamelessness is reached when the shameless whine about the Death of Shame.
Egmont Kakarot-Handtke