When the fundamental deformation of history was evidently attributable to scale economies, it was only natural to speak primarily of Leviathan — the seizure of historical time by the gigantic. It might therefore be considered a significant symptom — of something — that a substitute term now seems more persuasively applicable. Leviathan remains vast, and growing, but it is more exactly specified as the Cathedral, because its principal ratchet mechanism owes less to sheer magnitude than to a mastery of deceit.

Deceit is nothing new, in matters of power, or any other, but it is open to innovation. A state religion that pretends to be the negation of religion is something new, as is propaganda in its strict sense. There is no precedent for an intolerant, precisely coded system of belief, trending to a totalitarian form, whilst presenting itself as inevitable progress towards general disillusionment.

Economies of deceit, like those of scale, draw historical momentum from the fact that they are profoundly automatized. No one decided that large-scale social organizations should be advantaged. Similarly, the revolutionary efficiency of deceit was never a point of deliberation. Deceit works, due to contingencies of deep evolution. More specifically, it works because propaganda machinery was never a factor in the archaic human environment, so that stimulus sensitivity was never provided with the opportunity to adapt defensively in respect to it.

The total power of deceit can be understood most clearly when examined backwards, from its final destination, which is shared with the entire utilitarian sphere. At the end there is the wire-head, the social and technological destination of direct neurological rewards, where the message “I have received what I want” has been divorced from all real acquisition or accomplishment. Do you want this thing? Or do you want the feeling that you have this thing? The latter can be strengthened, sharpened, and in every way subjectively perfected. It is also, given suitable historical conditions, vastly cheaper to deliver. Hence, the economy of deceit.

For those paying attention, the entire structure of economic thought and policy switched onto this track roughly a century ago. The demetalization of money is the most obvious indicator, trending towards a pure signal of wealth, entirely disconnected from the extravagance of physical reality. Keynesianism, in its essence, is wire-head economics, focusing on the policy question: how do we best deliver the stim? The idea that growth of the real economy might be the best route to this goal marks its proponent out as a hopeless crank, entirely out of touch with the recent development of the discipline. What matters is the wealth effect, delivered in carefully calibrated jolts, down the wire. (I’ve tried to thrash this out before.)

Gradually, but inexorably, propaganda swallow everything. All macroeconomic aggregates — GDP, inflation, capital stock … —  tend to senseless garbage, because their only robust anchor point is Cathedral-political: what can we make you feel? The latest evidence is telling. It is time, apparently, to definitively break with archaic questions of economic production, and instead to work solely with the macroeconomic garbage data, in order for it to tell us that we’re richer than we think we are.

You can’t make this s%&t up. Yes we can!