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Dichter’s psycho-economic age entailed the creative destruction of personal identity through consumption, a search that ceaseth only in death—or lack of money, which amounted to the same.
(Dichter’s meticulous attention to the psychic and sensuous texture of desire enlivened his tales of market research: the “emotional facets of glass,” the “soul of metals,” the “secret life of a fruit,” the erotic messages of cigarette lighters.)
The conclusion of Dichter’s phenomenology was inexorable: a soul thus projected is redeemed through consumption, a consummation afforded only through the ritual of purchase and the sanctifying grace of money. Thus Dichter’s philosophy of futility restated the foundation of pecuniary metaphysics: as the criterion of reality in capitalist life, money is the root and quintessence of all things. And as money must move for capital to accumulate, Dichter emphasized that the ceremonies of consumption must be constantly reenacted.
Since people inevitably “project themselves into objects” and perpetually suffer from “constructive discontent,” advertisers should promote and orchestrate this “dynamic relationship of constant interaction.” Dichter realized that constructive discontent would be the axis of a new moral imagination, mandating a transvaluation of values as profound as any ever envisioned
Yet one of the more remarkable aspects of American culture in the 1960s was the popularity of countercultural apostasy—the affirmation and embrace of its mutiny and flamboyance not only by youth but also by many of their middle-class elders. The sheer ubiquity of sympathetic books and articles on the counterculture in the popular press—capped by Yale law professor Charles Reich’s dulcet paean to The Greening of America (1970)—suggests that the “counterculture” may not have been as “counter” as both contemporaries and later observers thought.
Thus, like the new prophets of corporate iconoclasm, the counterculture grew out of very real frustrations; it reflected a general crisis of capitalist enchantment. Yet it harbored two very different legacies. One continued the Romantic lineage of anticapitalism, repudiating the ideal of commodified abundance, rejecting the dogmas of pecuniary metaphysics, and calling for an enchanted, sacramental alternative to the counterfeit disenchantment of corporate modernity.
The other—complicit with the conquest of cool—dovetailed perfectly with the stylistic, moral, and metaphysical lineaments of the nascent corporate counterculture.
So when Pirsig wrote in his best-selling Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)—one of the canonical texts of the countercultural imagination—that “the Buddha, the Godhead, resides just as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer … as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower,”
he hinted not only at the romance of cybernation but also at the ideological affiliation of countercultural mysticism and the emergent corporate world of research, networking, and techno-entrepreneurial zeal.
Still, though presented as the savior from the Protestant malevolence of Fordist bureaucratic rationality, Brand’s cyber-romanticism remained capitalist—albeit inflected with the flippancy of cool. “I’ve yet to figure out what capitalism is,” he told an interviewer in 1970, “but if it’s what we’re doing, I dig it.”
But cybercultural mysticism would find its ultimate incarnation in the predatory figure of Steve Jobs, whose status as a techno-visionary rested on the harshest conditions of industrial exploitation.
Although Brand clearly hoped that the supersession of Protestant industrialism and the spread of cybernation would inaugurate an age of digitalized communion, he assisted instead in creating a template for neoliberal technologies of the self and in wiring the ideological circuitry for the rise of a bohemian, technocratic plutocracy. The machines that would watch over all of us would not be imbued by any loving grace.
Warhol’s quip that “in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes” becomes either a herald of cultural democracy or a spectacular falsehood of late capitalism, an oracle of—if there can be such a thing—the pathos of postmodernity.
He certainly made no secret of his mercenary estimation of art; as he put it flatly in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), “being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art … good business is the best art.”
if you want to buy a $200,000 painting, “you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.”
Max experienced an epiphany. As he remembered the episode some years later, a white-bearded man appeared out of a cloud and nodded, “as if to say, ‘It’s all right. I will come.’ ”69 The man in the cloud soon arrived, and Max finally understood “the grand scheme of things.” A week after his vision, anticipating “something wonderful,” his friend Conrad Rooks (heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune) introduced Max to Swami Satchidananda, an Indian yogi then living in Sri Lanka. (Though Max was reluctant to help Rooks make a movie with the Swami, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, he relented
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The genealogy of neoliberalism stretches back at least to the 1940s, when an aspiring hegemonic bloc of intellectuals and business leaders hostile to the New Deal commenced an eventually successful crusade to recover the holy land of unfettered accumulation. Joined by conservative Protestant clergy and businesspeople baptized in the evangelical dispensation, neoliberals, in this account, both undermined the New Deal order and reinstituted a pristine culture of capitalism.
In the neoliberal imagination, a human being is, in Mirowski’s words, an “entrepreneurial self,” a package of vendible talents and qualities: “a product to be sold, a walking advertisement … a jumble of assets to be invested … an offsetting inventory of liabilities to be pruned, outsourced, shorted, hedged against, and minimized.”
Encapsulated in Toffler’s “modular man,” neoliberal freedom is absolute subservience to the dictates of the market.
Mirowski’s characterization of neoliberalism as a “catechism” suggests that it constitutes a moral and metaphysical imagination. Neoliberals, he writes, admonish the individual to relinquish her “selfish arrogance” and “humbly prostrate … before the Wisdom of the Universe”—a Wisdom contemplated with reverent awe by Friedrich Hayek and President Reagan. Justifying the ways of the market to mere mortals, Hayek insisted that the “spontaneous order” of competitive enterprise must not be disrupted by fallible human judgments.
Reagan mused in 1982, “there really is something magic about the marketplace whe...
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As DuPont executive Jasper Crane wrote to a friend near the end of World War II, Christianity “made little progress until … it had the writings of the New Testament; Communism got nowhere until Marx wrote Das Kapital … National Socialism needed Mein Kampf to be effective.” What businessmen require, Crane concluded, was a “New Testament of capitalism,” a “ ‘bible’ of free enterprise” that delineated the inerrant and inviolable edicts of the Market.
they took their affluence to be manna from heaven, material grace of a providential market.
When they railed against the welfare state and its socialist subsidies to heathen indolence and recalled the nation to the covenant theology of Christian capitalist enchantment, they recast the jeremiad as a redemptive account of virtuous, domestic consumerism.
Sun Belt evangelicals were reactionary modernist pioneers of the new cybernetic capitalism. Evangelicals became, by the mid-1970s, the amen chorus of corporate enchantment.
Proper religious indoctrination was central to the survival of capitalism, in Pew’s view; if businesspeople “want to be free to continue in business, the leadership of the people of our country must believe in the fundamentals of Christianity.”
The evangelical industrial-educational complex churned out graduates who often joined lay church groups committed to building God’s city of business.
A vehicle of “free enterprise—the economic system with the least amount of government and the greatest amount of Christianity,” Christian Economics peaked at 200,000 biweekly readers in the early 1960s.
Until the Pew family stopped covering the magazine’s losses in 1972, Kershner occupied a national pulpit in the Church of Jesus Christ, Free Market Economist, proclaiming that “the laws of economics are part of the laws of God.”
Thus, as God’s primer on all of creation, “the Bible is the greatest book on business ever written”;
“I, Pencil” fused theology and commercial cosmology into a narrative of market animism.
But while they thought themselves besieged and persecuted by a (phantom) liberal consensus, their impact on the American moral and political imagination proved immense and indelible.
Even—and perhaps especially—where neoliberalism was purportedly secular or disenchanted, it served to divinize market forces and exalt the entrepreneurial self, affirming the most complete apotheosis of pecuniary metaphysics in the history of capitalism.
Since “property and freedom are inseparably connected,” Kirk assumed that the bond was a godly decree, and that the status of property was emblematic of a society’s spiritual condition.
conservatism has been, at bottom, less a concern for the preservation of tradition than “an animus against the agency of the subordinate classes,” a determination that society remain “a federation of private dominions,” especially in the workplace and the family.
These depredations were the work of the new, nonpropertied elites in the professional-managerial class, who were usually, he claimed, “recruited from the mob of the spiritually impoverished.”
Kirk’s elevation of small business owners into a “natural aristocracy” betrayed the perennial desire at the heart of the reactionary lineage: the protection of property and rank from democracy, not fidelity to “tradition.”
Neoliberalism marked a pure culture of capitalism, the most pristine regime of pecuniary enchantment, a covenant theology of pure market power first adumbrated in Emersonian transcendentalism.
Averse both to the term and to the ambience of “conservatism,” many of the earliest neoliberals insisted that they were liberals, even radicals.
as liberals.” In Capitalism and Freedom (1962), one of the charter documents of postwar libertarianism, Friedman capped his case against state certification of physicians by asserting that “liberal principles do not justify licensure.” Lamenting that “liberalism” had been stolen and corrupted by Keynesian enthusiasts for activist government, Friedman continued to use the term because, in his view, “ ‘conservatism’ ” was “not a satisfactory alternative.”
Although neoliberalism is often considered synonymous with “deregulation of business,” its acolytes have sought not so much to limit state power as to redirect it toward the promotion and extension of market activity. Hence the privatization of many state services; the reconstruction of those remaining public to resemble the institutions of corporate enterprise (“running government more like a business”);
