Re: People who think that "rational economic man" is sociopathic might find this a bit humorous

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

 Julio Huato wrote:

> Ted's summary of Keynes' views on capitalism is excellent.  May I
> just add that, in the Keynesian long run, the economic problem will be
> solved, detestable money making will be superseded, but also -- why
> bother -- "we will all be dead."

Keynes's point, in the context where the claim you're alluding to
here is found, concerned using deductive reasoning to reach
conclusions about the long run.

His point was that, in social theory, long run predictions usually
can't be rationally based on deductive reasoning from fixed axioms.
The reason is that, where relations are "internal relations", such
reasoning is only valid where the relevant relations can be assumed
to be sufficiently stable to maintain the validity, in relation to
the purposes of the argument, of the axioms.  In the case of social
phenomena, this condition is usually not satisfied "in the long run",
so valid conclusions about the long run can't usually be reached in
this way.

He also claimed that rational treatment of the long run was made
difficult by fear of the death it necessarily holds in store.  He
explained dogmatic attachment to mistaken forecasting methods as an
overdetermined obsessional symptom expressing unconscious denial of
the fact that "in the long run we are all dead",  i.e. such
attachment expresses the same psychopathology as capitalist
"purposiveness" itself.

Another obsessional feature of the mentality involved is its sadism.

Keynes claimed Hayek's arguments exemplified both features.  Thus
Hayek, the "remorseless logician", made mistaken use of deductive
logic to "end up in Bedlam", i.e. to reach the conclusion that real
wealth was growing faster in the Great Depression than it had in the
preceding boom because the former was correcting the misdirection of
investment produced by the long run forecasting errors stemming from
the inflation of the boom, a correction that would produce "long run"
benefits that would more than compensate for the suffering created by
the Depression.  Keynes claimed the unconscious motivation
underpinning this mistaken argument was "sadistic puritanism" - i.e.
the suffering satisfied sadistic aggressiveness both directly and
indirectly (by providing relief for an unconscious sense of guilt
associated with the reworking of the aggressiveness into a sadistic
super-ego).

As the passages I quoted show, Keynes, like Marx, rejected the
Benthamite conception of "rational economic man" as a realistic
conception of either rational or capitalist "purposiveness".  For
both of them, the focus of a rational existence would be activities
that are ends in themselves - creating and appropriating beauty and
truth within relations of mutual recognition.  In an ideal community,
rational "purposiveness" defines the "realm of necessity" constituted
by the instrumental ("purposive") activities that meet the needs of
the end in themselves activities that constitute life in the "true
realm of freedom".

Ted