rp Keynes’s proposal that governments should intervene in the economy to restore stability in the system was widely adopted after World War II. The result was both massive and sustained economic growth, as defined by the meretricious GDP measure, and a somewhat fairer distribution of resources in Western countries which reduced the vastly disproportionate share accruing to capital since at least the Gilded Age. This era has been called the Golden Age of capitalism. The stagflation crisis of the 1970s ended this era.

Neo-Classical Economics, hereafter called NCE, the system of economic thought and practice hegemonic in the world today, is a psychopathic and schizophrenic pseudoscience masquerading as a rigorous and scientific academic discipline. The global hegemony of NCE is manifest and reflected in the near worldwide adoption of the Washington Consensus from the late 1970s by nation-states and international financial and governance institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and the WTO. The Washington Consensus, coined by the economist John Williamson who reportedly came to dislike its use, refers to the views held by economic and political decision-makers in the West that human welfare, especially in developing countries, will be best advanced by the governments of countries privatizing state-owned economic enterprises, deregulating and liberating their economies. The NCE-inspired Washington consensus is simply the politico-economic establishment in most countries insisting that the perfectly competitive market model of social interaction should be the end state for humanity. Even the less extreme adherents of NCE who would allow government intervention to correct for both Market Failure and Failure of Markets believe that the perfectly competitive market is an ideal to which humanity should aspire.

Psychopathy and schizophrenia have both technical medical and popular meanings typically reserved for human beings. Still, they can be applied to ideologies and institutions that induce the mental and behavioural traits of psychopathy and schizophrenia in their adherents.

The words psychopathy and schizophrenia are much bandied about carelessly today, especially for phenomena and people that one heartily dislikes, but most of the defined traits of psychopathy and schizophrenia describe quite well the premises, precepts and practices of NCE.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes psychopathy as a “mental disorder especially when marked by egocentric and antisocial activity, a lack of remorse for one’s actions, an absence of empathy for others, and often criminal tendencies” and schizophrenia as a –

1: medical: a mental illness that is characterized by disturbances in thought (such as delusions), perception (such as hallucinations), and behaviour (such as disorganized speech or catatonic behaviour), by a loss of emotional responsiveness and extreme apathy, and by noticeable deterioration in the level of functioning in everyday life

Note: Schizophrenia often involves an inability to orient oneself with reality, a withdrawal from social interactions, and a failure to integrate thoughts with emotions so that emotional expression is inappropriate.

2: contradictory or antagonistic qualities or attitudes”

Let’s briefly recap the history of modern economics. Adam Smith is widely considered to have founded modern economics with the publication of “The Wealth Of Nations” in 1776. The book argued for a system of laissez-faire economic production where private economic producers and consumers could freely exchange goods and services without interference from the government or any other collectivist or public authority. The book argued that a harmonious social order was best guaranteed by private individuals strictly pursuing their private interests in economic transactions with each other. However, Smith recognized power asymmetries between owners of capital and labour and the need for government in the provision of public goods and services that private capital couldn’t provide at a profit. Adam Smith took for granted the brutal enclosure of public commons in previous centuries, which had created a class of “free” labourers who were consequently forced to sell their labour to the capitalists, who had accumulated capital based on the brutal enclosure of public commons, the slave trade, and grossly unequal exchange with the colonies, to get income to survive. He also popularized the fallacious economic history of barter as the primordial economic system. This fallacious history was foundational in creating an alternate reality of a linear economic history inhabited by NCE ideologues. It’s crucial to note the falsification of history by NCE believers because it is central to the ahistorical ideological edifice they construct whereby capitalists accumulate capital by delayed gratification, hard work, sheer brilliance and foresight. As for the labouring classes and the proletarians, their culture of instant gratification, laziness, dullness, and lack of foresight made them miss out on the opportunities of acquiring capital and so were rightly forced to sell their labour (being the only thing they owned) to the so much smarter capitalists. While Adam Smith criticized the abuses by his British nation of native Americans, Africans, and Indians; he failed or refused to connect the wealth of his country to the brutal extermination of native Americans and the pillage of their resources, the slave trade in Africans and the colonization and the despiolation of India.

Though Smith recognized the need and desirability of cooperation and altruism in his other book “The Theory Of Moral Sentiments”, understandably neglected by NCE ideologues, and criticised the tendency of owners of capital to combine to raise prices and cause social disorder, his enduring legacy is his philosophy that a harmonious and materially plentiful social order is guaranteed by the government retreating from the economic sphere where consumers and private consumers are guided by competitive price signals, that like an invisible hand, guides them into making optimal choices that reflect society’s underlying resource endowments. It must be admitted though, that the libertarian sect of the NCE religion took his philosophy much further than he would have recognized.

Adam Smith’s economic philosophy was taken up and refined and elaborated by others like David Ricardo. But by the next century, either because the government had stubbornly refused to stop interfering in economic activities or the philosophy wasn’t just working, many voices arose to protest the widespread poverty and suffering amidst the plenty produced in the factories of the Industrial Revolution. Some of the most notable voices were Karl Marx, Frederich Engels, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in political economy and Charles Dickens in literature.

It was from this period in the middle and later part of the 19th century when widespread revolts by workers against their miserable conditions had begun to earn them grudging concessions from the capitalist class, now fully embedded in the ruling class with the feudal aristocrats, that NCE as a psychopathic and schizophrenic modification of the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo was birthed in the Marginalist Revolution.

The Marginalist Revolution proved extremely useful to the capitalist class because social reality was no longer the basis of analysis for economists in the NCE school. Economists, instead, began to study an abstract representative rational individual solely concerned with maximizing their utility at the margin, which meant individuals as consumers or producers consuming or producing to the point where utility or profit becomes equal to the cost of consuming or producing.

So, everyone interacting in the economic sphere was assumed to be self-interested maximizers without social interactions or motives. The consequence of this assumption was to remove effectively the analysis of power asymmetry between economic actors. Therefore, the industrial magnates of the 19th century could then claim there were no power imbalances in their interactions with their slum-dwelling labourers.

This schizophrenic abstraction from social reality continued with the Formalist Revolution in NCE in the 1930s, where “mathematical tractability”-the ability to express interactions in the economic sphere purely in abstract and highly complex mathematical equations became the sole determinant of sound economics.

The Formalist Revolution heralded the death knell of other schools of thought in economic analysis like the Marxist and Institutionalist schools which had a much stronger grasp of economic and social reality but had always been marginalized since their policy prescriptions were uncongenial to the wealthy and powerful. These heterodox schools had been tolerated because they had informed policies that had staved off the worst excesses of capitalism.

John Maynard Keynes who inaugurated macroeconomics could be said to be part of the heterodox tradition, at least within classical economics, because he realized, after NCE failed its first reality test in its inability to predict the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the attendant economic depression, that capitalism didn’t tend to a benign equilibrium of socially optimal distribution of goods and services but was inherently prone to instability and crises. Keynes’s revolutionary recommendations weren’t far-reaching enough because he still believed in the capitalist structuring of economic life just with the essential involvement of the state and government to correct for what he acknowledged as capitalism’s intrinsic proneness to instability and crisis. Keynes’s reformism which formed the basis of welfare capitalism and full-employment policies like the American New Deal and Great Society programs and European Social Democracy had serious limitations which were seen with the stagflation crisis of the 1970s and the ensuing capitalist reaction that had been predicted by Michael Kalecki in his “The Political Aspects of Full Employment”.

Keynes’s proposal that governments should intervene in the economy to restore stability in the system was widely adopted after World War II. The result was both massive and sustained economic growth, as defined by the meretricious GDP measure, and a somewhat fairer distribution of resources in Western countries which reduced the vastly disproportionate share accruing to capital since at least the Gilded Age. This era has been called the Golden Age of capitalism. The stagflation crisis of the 1970s ended this era.

The inability of Keynesian measures to address the crisis enabled the capitalists and the Western governments beholden to them to reverse whatever gains the workers made in the era of Keynesian state welfare capitalism. They did this by, among other things, funding and promoting the Formalist Revolution which cast a false mantle of physics-like scientific rigour on economic theorizing that made the qualitative analysis of the heterodox schools seem biased and partisan. Two branches emerged from this revolution- the liberal neoclassical school and the libertarian neoclassical school. The US Army and quasi-governmental entities like the Rand Corporation funded liberal neoclassicists like Ken Arrow and Debreu who proved the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in an abstract economy using highly restrictive axioms and conditions that were meaningless in the real world. The national real estate lobby and other big business interests funded the libertarian school founded by right-wing extremists like Milton Friedman who blithely asserted the irrelevance of realism in selecting axioms for model-building provided models yielded sufficiently accurate predictions. Friedman’s predictions failed spectacularly wherever they were applied, beginning from Chile and Brazil to the rest of the world. Possibly, his single accurate prediction was the stagflation crisis of the 1970s which was equally predicted by economists like Nicholas Kaldor and Joan Robinson using radically different axioms and premises. The Formalist revolution meant that one could take and combine any axioms or premises about social life, no matter how ludicrous, and use mathematical deduction rules to arrive at even more ridiculous but dependably capital-friendly policy conclusions.

These two schools together ushered in Neoliberalism/the Washington consensus in the late 1970s. The central defining message of Neoliberalism is the complete and exclusive operation of the market system, i.e. the complete absence of the state, community or any other social body in economic activities, as the only organizing principle of human life. This is precisely what makes NCE schizophrenic and psychopathic. The market system which is simply the perfectly competitive market system requires that:-

(1)economic agents act to maximize ONLY their self-interests without any regard for social utility. This axiom fails the antisocial test of a person or system not being a psychopath.

(2) economic agents have a stable set of internally consistent preferences and always act rationally given their constraints; they always act to maximize their utility. Research from behavioural psychology and neuroscience has shown that people have limited rationality, for example, most people usually mistake two equivalent choices offered to them depending on how they are framed. People also tend to use mental heuristic (intuitive probabilistic trial and error methods) decision models rather than always rigorously calculating every possible combination of options. In other words, given limited computing brainpower, humans aim for a moderate level of satisfaction, not optimality. Another test for fidelity of perception to the real world, a requirement for not being a schizophrenic, is failed.

(3) Economic agents have costless and perfect information and mobility, and no agent, whether as a consumer or a producer, has power in the marketplace. Economies of scale and pervasive network effects characterize virtually all modern economic activities and this inexorably gives rise to monopolies and oligopolies. Information asymmetries are rife in the modern world between corporations and their customers, so it beggars belief that it could have ever been adopted as an axiom in the 1950s, and anybody assuming this today is a prime candidate for a Thorazine drip in a psychiatric institution.

Modern pedagogical and research economics is broken down into microeconomics which deals with small chunks of economic reality by analyzing how consumer choices and the production decisions of firms result in equilibrium in a particular market for a good or service; and macroeconomics which deals with economic aggregates like the total output produced by all markets, the inflation, exchange, and unemployment rate across the economy.

The introductory microeconomics sections of NCE textbooks define economics as a science which studies how to allocate scarce resources that have alternative uses to competing ends. This directly contradicts macroeconomic definitions which emphasize the study of how and what makes resources and output growth volatile in the short run and steadily increasing in the long run. This contradiction manifests in established economists who may even be macroeconomic researchers in places at the IMF and the World Bank invariably prescribing policies based on microeconomic definitions and assumptions. Thus NCE fulfils the second Merriam-Webster definition of a schizophrenic entity having contradictory or antagonistic qualities or attitudes. Incidentally, economists in the post-Keynesian tradition of Pierro Sraffa accuse the liberal neoclassicists who claim to be faithful to Keynes of perverting Keynes’s message by assuming equilibrium in the long run but granting that instability can be caused by price stickiness in the short-run. The Post-Keynesians mean economists like Paul Samuelson and John Hicks who developed complex, elegant and completely irrelevant mathematical models which removed Keynes’s central message of instability and equilibrium. Hicks in particular created the static IS-LM models which analyze investment, savings and monetary decisions in a stationary economy. He reportedly later repudiated the model.

Econometrics, the most mathematically sophisticated part of economics which is supposed to verify empirically economic relationships, was derided by Keynes, himself no mean mathematician (he was seventh wrangler at Cambridge University), in his correspondence with Jan Timbergen, a pioneer econometrician who was co-awarded the first fake Economics Nobel prize.

Virtually all econometric models assume that all the variables needed to study a particular economic phenomenon have been identified i.e. they are complete. The models also presume the correct functional and stable causal relationship between social and economic variables has been identified. Any teen with a knowledge of basic social history knows that relations in the social world which affect economic variables are not stable or invariant. And so another test for fidelity to the real world is failed. That’s why econometric models can prove just about anything provided that its regression models and variables are “tortured enough”.

NB: The Economics Nobel Prize is fake because it was not one of the original prizes founded by Alfred Nobel which were first awarded in 1901. It was in 1969 that the conservative capital-friendly Swedish central bank managed to insinuate the prize in economics into the ceremonies of the real Nobel prizes and thereafter forever associate economics with the rigour of hard sciences like physics in the minds of many.

NCE thus resoundingly fails all the tests that require a system not to be psychopathic and schizophrenic.

Perhaps the single most illustrative case of how acceptance of the ideology of NCE engenders psychopathy and schizophrenia is the case of oil giant Exon-Mobil, ignoring the warnings of its scientists in the 1970s of fossil fuel-caused global warming to continue to amass inordinate wealth from fossil fuel production at the expense of the earth their GRANDCHILDREN will inhabit. Exon-Mobil resorted to the deceptions pioneered by the tobacco industry (a textbook case of the psychopathy of capitalism choosing to kill its consumers rather than not turning a profit) to cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change.

A lesser but more blood-chilling illustration of the psychopathy and schizophrenia of NCE is the existence of for-profit prisons in countries like the USA. At least, libertarian sophists can make bizarre and contorted arguments for limitless oil production and the free choice of autonomous adults to smoke cigarettes. But what possible rationalization could be made for a profit motive (i.e. accumulating capital for investment and growth ) in incarcerating people?

It should now be apparent that the psychopathy and schizophrenia of NCE may be what will doom humanity because the institutionalisation of the market logic has meant minimizing or ignoring the looming climate apocalypse. Nuclear annihilation is also courted by the insistence on removing social considerations from economic life which has meant ignoring politico-military realities like the activities of weapons manufacturers whose commendable(in NCE logic) self-interested pursuit of profit has resulted in the continuous stockpiling of nuclear weapons. (The present stock is already large enough to end humanity several times).

The psychopaths managing the economic and political institutions in the hegemonic West have, through relentless propaganda from the mainstream media which they own, normalized the acceptance by many that, in the beyond cartoonishly evil Margaret Thather’s words, there is no such thing as society and that there is no alternative to free-market capitalism (TINA). This mindset was perfectly illustrated by some libertarian commenters on social media a few years ago. I can’t remember most of the details, but there was a natural disaster in Australia that trapped a lot of people and public emergency first responders were slow. When people began lamenting the deregulatory and privatisation policies that had crippled and made inordinately expensive many public services, some libertarians defended the policies and responded by saying private taxis could augment the rescue efforts and that the cab drivers should choose whom first to rescue by applying supply and demand analysis i.e. the perfectly competitive market model to the disaster situation!

There is a mistaken tendency to assume that the liberal faction of NCE is to be preferred to the openly virulent libertarian faction. But as Malcolm X warned in his parable comparing conservatives/libertarians to wolves and liberals to foxes; libertarians are openly psychopathic while liberals hide their psychopathy beneath a veneer of social justice posturing. The saying “Scratch a fascist and liberal bleeds” perfectly captures the libertarian-liberal equivalency. Liberals are even incomparably worse than libertarians because they deceive by pretending to care about economic, social, and racial justice and so disarm resistance to capitalism. The late Glen Ford called liberals the more effective evil. Libertarians are unrepentant believers in Just World theories that posit that one’s economic condition at any time is one’s just and fair deserts. A particular manifestation of this belief is the “real business cycle ” theory that libertarian economists used mathematical astrology to develop. The real business cycle theory essentially states that any particular economic condition, even recessions, is a long-run equilibrium reflecting society’s optimal use of its resources and hence doesn’t require government intervention to correct.

The exemplification and culmination of capitalism’s structural imperatives of profit-maximization driving insatiable and continuous growth, which then leads to instability and crisis, is the ongoing live-streamed genocide of Palestinians by Israel, the US, the UK, Germany, France, and most Western states with the tacit consent of Western-backed Gulf state satrapies like Saudia Arabia and the UAE. Capitalism’s technological and organizational dynamism necessitates a continuous search for new markets, new resources, new products, and new technologies which in turn necessitate resource and land-theft imperialism. Western capitalist countries like the UK and the US have been funding and arming Israel since its creation in 1948 as their settler colony ally in the Middle East to help them dominate and control the oil reserves there. This is the relentless logic driving the genocide of the Palestinians by Israel and the West in full view of the world.

To return to the fact of liberals being worse than libertarians; Genocide Joe (Biden), Holocaust (Kamala) Harris, and the psychopathic Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton along with previous Democrat administrations partnered and sponsored Israel in their genocide of the Palestinians to mild and non-existent criticism from liberals who are now pretending to vocally care now that equally psychopathic but boorish Trump is in power. That’s the reality of the liberal-libertarian equivalency and not the charade of well-intentioned liberals irreconcilably opposed to the villainous libertarians/conservatives presented to the Western voting public. As I said, Western capitalist interests are driving the genocide, especially as seen in their long-time coveting of Gaza’s offshore oil reserves. But the liberal faction, peopled by corporate ghouls like the trillion-dollar assets under management company Blackrock co-founder and CEO Larry Fink, as usual, is circumspect; while the Trump libertarian faction is openly drooling about converting Gaza to a resort hub.

Capitalism, from its inception in the brutal enclosures of the public commons of European serfs that transformed them into wage slaves or property-less workers; the extermination of the natives of the American continent and the theft and pillage of the lands and resources of the said natives; the slave trade in sub-Saharan Africans; and the conquest, colonization, and imposition of unequal trade regimes with countries in the global South, is now driving ecocide, a live-streamed genocide in Palestine, resource wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in Congo, instability and violence in Sudan, and extreme wealth inequality and poverty in both global West and South countries. And this is an inevitable result and effect of the teachings and practice of NCE. The persistence and dominance of the NCE paradigm are thus understood because it unerringly leads to the fantastical enrichment of the capitalist class and consequently to stratospheric levels of income and asset inequality within and between nations.

It is now a matter of life and death for people to understand that the human extinction death cult that is NCE will destroy the human race. That is why NCE has to be destroyed if humanity is so to survive. This is the stark choice facing the human race.