Religion is a system propounding absolutes, constructed out of human primeval apprehensions; and deployed in the never ending attempt to explain reality, or allay primeval and ultimate fears bordering on the scandalous finitude of the human situation and congenital search for meaning. Religion has variously been described as the opium of the timid and the narcotic for cowards, who being afraid of life; prefer comfortable pseudo-explanations to the harsh and inclement truths harbored by reality. The jury is still out on that. Nigerians for instance, are very religious. They love the gods of their various amphitheaters. Their ways lead daily to their various shrines to pay worship. Alongside this rein of religion, Nigerians are ranked among the most corrupt nations on earth. The chasm between religiosity in Nigeria and the way Nigerians comport themselves socially validates Marx’s assertion that religion is really an opium for the powerless masses.
Ideologies and dogma of all state and status equally assume religious vibrancy and systematic absolutism to the extent that they create prophets out of their proponents. Priestcraft in almost all religions have seen to the institutionalization of vicious ignorance, criminal stupidity, and sanctimonious hypocrisy. Socio-economic, political, racial, eugenic and cultural supremacist dogmas have equally created priesthoods and colleges of prophets out of simple primitive ideas. And once these assumed religious overtones, became deadlier and packed destructive powers at the fundamental level like many fundamentalist religions. Racism had the KKK as its high priests. Antisemitism created Hitlerist Nazism as its own priesthood. Fundamentalist Islam created a reactionary terrorism that hates everything and everyone outside its embrace. Neo-liberal capitalism deploying what Naomi Klein articulated as the Shock Doctrine, has been on rampage wrecking the economies and well-being of the people, who in this conceptual scheme are viewed as the raw material base for empire. The list is endless.
Nowhere is this absolutism more destructive as when it gains economic prominence or political power. We see the overt consequences in Hitler. This may have been so overt as to attract oppositions which saw to the demise of the pathological knave and his ideas. If this is the case, the most dangerous species of this tyranny of absolutism could be seen in economic theories which seeks a revert to the morning of human infancy, as to avail itself the tabula rasa needed for its vision of a new social order free from all let, as it marches to imposed an unfettered version of either capitalist or communist socio-economic model.
At the end of the stock market crash of 1929, John Maynard Keynes, the people-oriented economic thinker advocated a mixed economy with government control and moderation of the key sectors. His views were informed by the fact that laissez faire capitalism, which is absolute in recommending an unfettered, unregulated market, was what led to the human tragedy that was the 1929 stock market disaster. Keynes’ brand of economics counseled that giving pure and unfettered reign to profit and the market is really never in the interest of the human elements of the society. He was among those who wanted to see economics go back to its roots, which is moral philosophy, in taking cognizance of the social and moral implications of theories its advances and its impacts on the people. He construed the role of government as a moderator of the influence of unparalleled reign of profit over collective good.
But Milton Friedman and his Chicago school rose to become the prophets of profit and major patrons of the rights of the strong to unfettered exercise of their might. The poor should be allowed to compete in a very unequal playing field, this school advocated. And for them, that is the only way that markets could unleash prosperity. This school seemed to be blind to the fact that a man who has his hands and feet bound cannot compete on equal terms with an unfettered man in the ring. They were oblivious that this is simply target practice for one party and can never be a solution to the problem environing the disadvantaged guy. This bondsman would never profit from the proceeds accruing to him from the fight if he is killed in the ring. And the way the fight was rigged in to his disadvantage is simply wired to ensure his annihilation.
The Chicago school armed with its triune mantra of privatization, deregulation and cuts in social spending were instrumental to the dismantling of the social safety programmes, which acted as a buffer between the poor and the corporations whose ontological desire is to gobble them up. Structural adjustment programmes, SAP grew out of this economic dogma, and was instrumental to the destruction of many economies in Africa, as well as it was for the enthronement of the scandalous inequality where the poor has been denuded of their social safety nets to enrich the rich. This programme mortgaged the existence of the poor across the globe for the profit of the corporate conglomerates, whose bounden duty is to swallow them up in obedience to the commandments of their avaricious needs for unfathomable profit. And this economic mantra instead of unleashing and making more wealth available to more people constricted and concentrated the factors of production in the hands of the rich. The poor kept getting poorer and the rich kept getting richer.
If this was achieved within the ambit of ethical guidelines guaranteeing justice for all, it would not have been a problem for our sensibilities. But the introduction of this economic model has been paid for with the blood and pain of millions of people across the globe. Starting from the sacking, plundering, and mortgaging of the Chilean and many Latin American economies to ITT, United Fruits and other America rogue conglomerates in the 1970s to the financing of coups, wars and other insurrections geared towards securing their narrow interests; this economic dogma has been forced down the throat of most of the world with the jackboots of military threats, and the economic muscles of an irresponsible superpower.
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