How Cults Use Language to Control

 

AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation

Yuval Noah Hariri in The Economist

Fears of artificial intelligence (ai) have haunted humanity since the very beginning of the computer age. Hitherto these fears focused on machines using physical means to kill, enslave or replace people. But over the past couple of years new ai tools have emerged that threaten the survival of human civilisation from an unexpected direction. ai has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. ai has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.

Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our dna. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures.

Money, too, is a cultural artefact. Banknotes are just colourful pieces of paper, and at present more than 90% of money is not even banknotes—it is just digital information in computers. What gives money value is the stories that bankers, finance ministers and cryptocurrency gurus tell us about it. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes and Bernie Madoff were not particularly good at creating real value, but they were all extremely capable storytellers.

What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new ai tools, they are often drawn to examples like school children using ai to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of ai tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults.

In recent years the qAnon cult has coalesced around anonymous online messages, known as “q drops”. Followers collected, revered and interpreted these q drops as a sacred text. While to the best of our knowledge all previous q drops were composed by humans, and bots merely helped disseminate them, in future we might see the first cults in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Religions throughout history have claimed a non-human source for their holy books. Soon that might be a reality.

On a more prosaic level, we might soon find ourselves conducting lengthy online discussions about abortion, climate change or the Russian invasion of Ukraine with entities that we think are humans—but are actually ai. The catch is that it is utterly pointless for us to spend time trying to change the declared opinions of an ai bot, while the ai could hone its messages so precisely that it stands a good chance of influencing us.

Through its mastery of language, ai could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews. Although there is no indication that ai has any consciousness or feelings of its own, to foster fake intimacy with humans it is enough if the ai can make them feel emotionally attached to it. In June 2022 Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, publicly claimed that the ai chatbot Lamda, on which he was working, had become sentient. The controversial claim cost him his job. The most interesting thing about this episode was not Mr Lemoine’s claim, which was probably false. Rather, it was his willingness to risk his lucrative job for the sake of the ai chatbot. If ai can influence people to risk their jobs for it, what else could it induce them to do?

In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is the most efficient weapon, and ai has just gained the ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people. We all know that over the past decade social media has become a battleground for controlling human attention. With the new generation of ai, the battlefront is shifting from attention to intimacy. What will happen to human society and human psychology as ai fights ai in a battle to fake intimate relationships with us, which can then be used to convince us to vote for particular politicians or buy particular products?

Even without creating “fake intimacy”, the new ai tools would have an immense influence on our opinions and worldviews. People may come to use a single ai adviser as a one-stop, all-knowing oracle. No wonder Google is terrified. Why bother searching, when I can just ask the oracle? The news and advertising industries should also be terrified. Why read a newspaper when I can just ask the oracle to tell me the latest news? And what’s the purpose of advertisements, when I can just ask the oracle to tell me what to buy?

And even these scenarios don’t really capture the big picture. What we are talking about is potentially the end of human history. Not the end of history, just the end of its human-dominated part. History is the interaction between biology and culture; between our biological needs and desires for things like food and sex, and our cultural creations like religions and laws. History is the process through which laws and religions shape food and sex.

What will happen to the course of history when ai takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. ai is fundamentally different. ai can create completely new ideas, completely new culture.

At first, ai will probably imitate the human prototypes that it was trained on in its infancy. But with each passing year, ai culture will boldly go where no human has gone before. For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.

Fear of ai has haunted humankind for only the past few decades. But for thousands of years humans have been haunted by a much deeper fear. We have always appreciated the power of stories and images to manipulate our minds and to create illusions. Consequently, since ancient times humans have feared being trapped in a world of illusions.

In the 17th century René Descartes feared that perhaps a malicious demon was trapping him inside a world of illusions, creating everything he saw and heard. In ancient Greece Plato told the famous Allegory of the Cave, in which a group of people are chained inside a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. A screen. On that screen they see projected various shadows. The prisoners mistake the illusions they see there for reality.

In ancient India Buddhist and Hindu sages pointed out that all humans lived trapped inside Maya—the world of illusions. What we normally take to be reality is often just fictions in our own minds. People may wage entire wars, killing others and willing to be killed themselves, because of their belief in this or that illusion.

The AI revolution is bringing us face to face with Descartes’ demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Maya. If we are not careful, we might be trapped behind a curtain of illusions, which we could not tear away—or even realise is there.

Of course, the new power of ai could be used for good purposes as well. I won’t dwell on this, because the people who develop ai talk about it enough. The job of historians and philosophers like myself is to point out the dangers. But certainly, ai can help us in countless ways, from finding new cures for cancer to discovering solutions to the ecological crisis. The question we face is how to make sure the new ai tools are used for good rather than for ill. To do that, we first need to appreciate the true capabilities of these tools.

Since 1945 we have known that nuclear technology could generate cheap energy for the benefit of humans—but could also physically destroy human civilisation. We therefore reshaped the entire international order to protect humanity, and to make sure nuclear technology was used primarily for good. We now have to grapple with a new weapon of mass destruction that can annihilate our mental and social world.

We can still regulate the new ai tools, but we must act quickly. Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, ai can make exponentially more powerful ai. The first crucial step is to demand rigorous safety checks before powerful ai tools are released into the public domain. Just as a pharmaceutical company cannot release new drugs before testing both their short-term and long-term side-effects, so tech companies shouldn’t release new ai tools before they are made safe. We need an equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration for new technology, and we need it yesterday.

Won’t slowing down public deployments of ai cause democracies to lag behind more ruthless authoritarian regimes? Just the opposite. Unregulated ai deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When ai hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy.

We have just encountered an alien intelligence, here on Earth. We don’t know much about it, except that it might destroy our civilisation. We should put a halt to the irresponsible deployment of ai tools in the public sphere, and regulate ai before it regulates us. And the first regulation I would suggest is to make it mandatory for ai to disclose that it is an ai. If I am having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an ai—that’s the end of democracy.

This text has been generated by a human.

Or has it?

Why the BJP must read the Harvard paper quoted by Modi

 

The collapse of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto con, how it soared & why it vaporized

 

Yearning for the Miracle Man

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn


After rough weather and stormy seas battered the country for three quarters of a century, a nation adrift saw two miracle men arise. Separated by 50 years and endowed with magical personalities, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Imran Khan set the public imagination on fire by challenging the established order.

After Bhutto was sent to the gallows, many PPP jiyalas self-flagellated, with several immolating themselves in despair. Till their fiery end, they believed in a feudal lord’s promise of socialist utopia. Similar horrific scenes occurred after the assassination of his charismatic daughter. That the father was instrumental in the break-up of Pakistan, and that during the daughter’s years Pakistan fell yet deeper into a pit of corruption, left jiyalas unfazed. Today’s Sindh remains firmly in the grip of a quasi-feudal dynasty and the Bhutto cult.

But still worse might lie ahead as Imran Khan’s cult goes from strength to strength. Writing in Dawn, Adrian Husain worries that a matinee idol with a freshly acquired messianic status is skillfully exploiting widespread anger at corruption to sow hate and division among Pakistanis. Fahd Husain evinces alarm that PTI’s flag-waving ‘youthias’ can see no wrong in whatever Khan says or does. He wonders why even those with Ivy League degrees put their rational faculties into deep sleep. Conversing with PTI supporters, says Ayesha Khan, has become close to impossible.

What enabled these two men to command the senseless devotion of so many millions? Can science explain it? Forget political science. The dark secret is that this isn’t really a science. So, could neuroscience give the answer? Although this area has seen spectacular progress, it is nowhere close to cracking the brain’s inner code.

Instead one must turn to the animal kingdom. Gregariousness and suppression of individuality helps protect members of a species because leaders give direction in a difficult environment. But there is a downside. Herds of sheep are known to follow their leader over a cliff and self-destruct. Human groupies have done similarly.

Specific social attitudes — groupthink and its diametrical opposite, scepticism — explain why some societies crave messiahs while others don’t. At one level, everyone is a sceptic. When it comes to everyday life — where to invest one’s life’s savings, what food to eat, or which doctor to see for a serious health problem — we don’t simply believe all that’s told to us. Instead, we look around for evidence and are willing to let go of ideas when contrary evidence piles up. But in political and religious matters, open-mindedness often turns into absolutism.

Absolutism has made Pakistani politics less and less issue-oriented and more and more tribal. It is hard to tell apart PML-N or PPP from PTI on substantive matters such as the economy, foreign debt, or relations with neighbouring countries. The only certainty is that the government in power will blame the previous government for everything.

This absolutism makes most party supporters purely partisan — you are with us or against us. Zealots willingly believe accusations aimed at the other side but dismiss those aimed at their own. A rational PTI supporter, on the other hand, will entertain the Toshakhana as possible evidence of wrongdoing just as much as Surrey Palace or Avenfield Apartments. He is also willing to admit that all Pakistani political leaders — including Khan — have lifestyles at odds with their declared assets and income. Rational supporters who can say ‘yeh sub chor hain’ exist but are few.

Instead, a culture of intellectual laziness feeds upon wild conspiracy theories coupled with unshakeable belief that political destinies are controlled by some overarching, external power. The ancient Greeks believed that the world was run by the whims and desires of the great god Zeus. For the PTI zealot, the centre of the universe has shifted from Mount Olympus to Washington.

In the zealot’s imagination, an omnipotent American god sits in the White House. With just the flick of his wrist, he ordered Imran Khan’s (former) military sponsors to dump him and then stitched together his fractured political opposition into organising a no-confidence vote. Of course, everyone dutifully obeyed orders. And this supposedly happened inside one of the world’s most anti-American countries! But we know that pigs can fly, don’t we? (Incidentally, America’s severest critic for over 60 years, Noam Chomsky, has reportedly trashed Khan’s claim of a regime change conspiracy.)

Fortunately, not all who stand with a political party, PTI included, are zealots. They do recognise that the country’s entire political class is crass, corrupt, self-seeking, and puts personal interest above that of the electorate. Knowing this they choose a party that, in their estimation, is a lesser evil over a greater one. Democracy depends on this vital principle.

To see this, compare the mass hysteria generated by Khan after being voted out of office with the calmness that followed France’s recent elections. Though despised by the majority of those who voted for him, Macron won handsomely over Marie Le Pen, his far-right, Islamophobic opponent. To her credit, Le Pen did not attribute the defeat either to Washington or to a global Islamic conspiracy. That’s civilised politics.

Why democracy works for France but has had such a rough time in Pakistan is easy to see. It’s not just the military and its constant meddling in political affairs. More important is a culture where emotion and dogma shove truth into the margins. What else explains the enormous popularity of motivational speakers who lecture engineering students on methods to deal with jinns and other supernatural creatures?

Pakistan’s education system stresses faith-unity-discipline at the cost of reason-diversity-liberty. This has seriously impaired the ordinary Pakistani’s capacity to judge. Even in private English-medium schools for the elite, teachers and students remain shackled to a madressah mindset. Why be surprised that so many ‘youthias’ are burger bachas? Unless we allow children to think, the yearning for Miracle Man will continue. It will long outlast Imran Khan — whenever and however he finally exits the scene.

The state of Pakistan: Isn't the support for BJP similar?

Fahd Hussain in The Dawn

Imran Khan’s supporters can see no wrong in what he says or does. We have witnessed this phenomenon unfurl itself like a lazy python these last few years, but more so with greater intensity during Khan’s pre- and post-ouster days. On display is a textbook case of blind devotion. Such devotion entails a deliberate — or perhaps subconscious — suspension of critical thinking. Only mass hysteria can explain absolute rejection of facts and a willing embrace of free-flying rhetoric untethered by verifiable information.

And yet, does this really make sense?

Bounce this explanation off actual people around you — friends, families, acquaintances — and you start to feel uncomfortable with the laziness of the explanation.

On your left, for instance, is the professor with a doctorate in natural sciences from one of the top universities in the world, someone whose entire educational foundation and career is based on the power of empirical evidence and scientific rationalism — and here he is hysterically arguing why the PTI deputy speaker’s violation of the constitution is no big deal. On your right is the top executive of a multinational company with an MBA from an Ivy League school, someone whose training and practice of craft is based on hard data crunched with power of sharp logic — and here he is frothing at the mouth in delirium while yelling that the Joe Biden administration actually conspired with the entire top leadership of the PDM to topple Imran Khan. 

These are rational people, you remind yourself. You have known them for years, and admired them for their academic and professional achievements — perhaps even been motivated by their pursuit of success — and yet you see them experiencing a strange quasi-psychedelic meltdown in full public glare. It just does not add up.

It is not just these metaphorical persons — resembling many real ones in all our lives, as it so happens — but hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis from all walks of life locked inside a massive groupthink spurred by sweeping generalisations dressed up as political narrative. No argument, no logic and no rationale — no, nothing makes sense, and nothing is acceptable or even worth considering if it does not gel perfectly with their preconceived notions.

What we are witnessing is a seminal moment in our political evolution — progressive or regressive is a matter of personal perspective — and this moment is situated bang in the centre of a social and political transformation so impactful that it could define the shape of our society for the years ahead.

In an acutely polarised environment, it is easy to pass judgement on those sitting across the fence. Most of us yield to this temptation. When we do, we help reinforce caricatures that have little resemblance to people around us, and these fail to explain why people believe what they believe.

So why do such a large number of people believe what they believe even when overwhelming evidence points towards the opposite conclusion? In our context, this may be due in part to the visceral politicisation of the national discourse and the deep personal loathing of rivals that the PTI has injected into what should otherwise be a contest of ideas and ideologies. At the heart of this is the revulsion against the system because it has not really delivered what it exists to deliver: improving the lives of citizens through protection of rights and provision of services. It is therefore easy and convenient to blame the system, and in turn all those institutions that constitute the system as a whole.

Imran Khan has modelled himself well as the anti-system crusader. He insists very persuasively that he has neither been co-opted nor corrupted by the system; that when he says he wants to change this system, it implies that there is nothing sacrosanct about the system, or for that matter, about the exalted institutions that make up the system. He has been able to establish this narrative successfully because the central theme of his narrative is, in fact, true: the system has not delivered.

But the argument is only half done here. The other half is perhaps even more crucial — diagnosing why it has not delivered. It is here that Imran Khan goes off tangent. And he does so not just in terms of his solutions, but his own shockingly weak performance as the prime minister who had it all but could not do much with it. In fact, after nearly four years in power, and having precious little to show for them, Imran has for all practical purposes joined the long line of those who are, in fact, responsible for the sad reality that the system has not delivered.

But someone forgot to break this news to the PTI supporters.

In essence then, if Pakistani society wants to row itself back from this stage where the electorate is at war with itself on a battlefield littered with semi-truths, partial facts and outright lies, it will need to face up to a bitter fact: what we see unfolding in front of us is the contamination of decades of social and educational decay injected with deadly and potent steroids of propaganda, brainwashing and ‘otherisation’ of anyone who looks, speaks, acts or believes differently.

Those social studies books you read in school and thought you would outgrow — well, now you know how wrong you were?

In this cesspool, everyone points fingers at everyone else when no one really has the right to do so. Seven decades of wrong governance laced with wrong priorities and fuelled by wrong policies have led us to a stage today where traditional parties cannot stomach the aspirations of a new generation, and new parties cannot digest the requirements of what constitutes governance, statecraft and institutional equilibrium within a democratic society.

And you thought holding elections was our biggest problem today. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Company or Cult?

The dividing line between firm and sect is often thin. How to tell them apart asks Bartleby in The Economist

 

Here are some common characteristics of cults. They have hierarchical structures. They prize charismatic leaders and expect loyalty. They see the world as a hostile place. They have their own jargon, rituals and beliefs. They have a sense of mission. They are stuffed with weirdos. If this sounds a bit familiar, that is because companies share so many of these traits. 

Some cult-companies are easier to spot than others. Their bosses are more like deities than executives. These leaders have control of the company, and almost certainly founded it. They have name recognition among the masses. They really like rockets and have a brother called Kimbal.

But in other cases it can be hard to tell where a company ends and a cult begins. That is true even of employees. So here is a handy guide to help you work out whether you are in a normal workplace or have fallen into the clutches of an even stranger group.

Workforce nicknames. It is not enough to be an employee of a company any more. From Googlers and Microsofties to Pinployees and Bainies, workforce nicknames are meant to create a sense of shared identity. If you belong to one of these tribes and use its nickname without dying a little inside, you may be losing your grasp of reality. If you work in the finance team and are known as one of the Apostles of the Thrice-Tabbed Spreadsheet, you already have.

Corporate symbols. Uniforms are defensible in some circumstances: firefighters, referees, the pope. And so is some corporate merchandise: an umbrella, a mug, a diary. But it can easily go too far. Warning signs include pulling on a company-branded hoodie at the weekend or ever wearing a lapel pin that proclaims your allegiance to a firm. If your employer’s corporate swag includes an amulet or any kind of hat, that is also somewhat concerning.

Surveillance. It is reasonable for executives to want to know what their workers are up to. But it is not reasonable to track their every move. Monitoring software that takes screenshots of employees’ computer screens, reports which apps people are using or squeals on them if a cursor has not moved for a while are tools of mind control, not management.

Rituals. Rites are a source of comfort and meaning in settings from sport to religion. The workplace is no exception. Plenty of companies hand out badges and awards to favoured employees. Project managers refer to some meetings as “ceremonies”. ibm used to have its own songbook (“Our reputation sparkles like a gem” was one of the rhymes; “Why the hell do we have this bloody anthem?” was not). Walmart still encourages workers in its supermarkets to bellow a company cheer to start the day. Some of this is merely cringeworthy. But if you are regularly chanting, banging a gong or working with wicker, it becomes sinister.

Doctrines. More and more firms espouse a higher purpose, and many write down their guiding principles. Mark Zuckerberg recently updated his company’s “cultural operating system”—which, among other things, urges Metamates (see “Workforce nicknames”) to defy physics and “Live In The Future”. Amazon drums its 16 leadership principles (“Customer Obsession”, “Think Big”, “Are Right, A Lot”, and so on) into employees and job candidates alike. Corporate culture matters, but common sense doesn’t become a belief system just because capital letters are being used. If values are treated like scripture, you are in cult territory.

Family. Some companies entreat employees to think of their organisation as a family. The f-word may sound appealing. Who doesn’t want to be accepted for who they are, warts and all? But at best it is untrue: firms ought to pay you for your time and kick you out if you are useless. At worst, it is a red flag. Research conducted in 2019 into the motivations of whistle-blowers found that loyalty to an organisation was associated with people failing to report unethical behaviour. And the defining characteristic of families is that you never leave.

If none of the above resonates, rest easy: you are not in a cult. But you are unemployed. If you recognise your own situation in up to three items on this list, you are in an ordinary workplace. If you tick four or five boxes, you should worry but not yet panic; you may just be working in technology or with Americans, and losing your sense of self may be worth it for the stock options. If you recognise yourself in all six items, you need to plan an escape and then write a memoir.

Bhakti

Our cult of personality is leaving real life in the shade

George Monbiot in The Guardian

By reducing politics to a celebrity obsession – from Johnson to Trump to Corbyn – the media misdirects and confuses us 

Illustration: Ben Jennings


What kind of people would you expect the newspapers to interview most? Those with the most to say, perhaps, or maybe those with the richest and weirdest experiences. Might it be philosophers, or detectives, or doctors working in war zones, refugees, polar scientists, street children, firefighters, base jumpers, activists, writers or free divers? No. It’s actors. I haven’t conducted an empirical study, but I would guess that between a third and a half of the major interviews in the newspapers feature people who make their living by adopting someone else’s persona and speaking someone else’s words.

This is such a bizarre phenomenon that, if it hadn’t crept up on us slowly, we would surely find it astounding. But it seems to me symbolic of the way the media works. Its problem runs deeper than fake news. What it offers is news about a fake world.

I am not proposing that the papers should never interview actors, or that they have no wisdom of their own to impart. But the remarkable obsession with this trade blots out other voices. One result is that an issue is not an issue until it has been voiced by an actor. Climate breakdown, refugees, human rights, sexual assault: none of these issues, it seems, can surface until they go Hollywood.

This is not to disparage the actors who have helped bring them to mainstream attention, least of all the brave and brilliant women who exposed Harvey Weinstein and popularised the #MeToo movement. But many other brave and brilliant women stood up to say the same thing – and, because they were not actors, remained unheard. The #MeToo movement is widely assumed to have begun a year ago, with Weinstein’s accusers. But it actually started in 2006, when the motto was coined by the activist Tarana Burke. She and the millions of others who tried to speak out were, neither literally nor metaphorically, in the spotlight.

At least actors serve everyone. But the next most-interviewed category, according to my unscientific survey, could be filed as “those who serve the wealthy”: restaurateurs, haute couturists, interior designers and the like, lionised and thrust into our faces as if we were their prospective clients. This is a world of make-believe, in which we are induced to imagine we are participants rather than mere gawpers.

The spotlight effect is bad enough on the culture pages. It’s worse when the same framing is applied to politics. Particularly during party conference season, but at other times of the year as well, public issues are cast as private dramas. Brexit, which is likely to alter the lives of everyone in Britain, is reduced to a story about whether or not Theresa May will keep her job. Who cares? Perhaps, by now, not even Theresa May.

Neither May nor Jeremy Corbyn can carry the weight of the personality cults that the media seeks to build around them. They are diffident and awkward in public, and appear to writhe in the spotlight. Both parties grapple with massive issues, and draw on the work of hundreds in formulating policy, tactics and presentation. Yet these huge and complex matters are reduced to the drama of one person’s struggle. Everyone, in the media’s viewfinder, becomes an actor. Reality is replaced by representation.

Even when political reporting is not reduced to personality, political photography is. An article might offer depth and complexity, but is illustrated with a photo of one of the 10 politicians whose picture must be attached to every news story. Where is the public clamour to see yet another image of May – let alone Boris Johnson? The pictures, like the actors, blot out our view of other people, and induce us to forget that these articles discuss the lives of millions, not the life of one.

The media’s failure of imagination and perspective is not just tiresome: it’s dangerous. There is a particular species of politics that is built entirely around personalities. It is a politics in which substance, evidence and analysis are replaced by symbols, slogans and sensation. It is called fascism. If you construct political narratives around the psychodramas of politicians, even when they don’t invite it, you open the way for those who can play this game more effectively.

Already this reporting style has led to the rise of people who, though they are not fascists, have demagogic tendencies. Johnson, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg are all, like Donald Trump, reality TV stars. The reality TV on which they feature is not The Apprentice, but Question Time and other news and current affairs programmes. In the media circus, the clowns have the starring roles. And clowns in politics are dangerous.

The spotlight effect allows the favoured few to set the agenda. Almost all the most critical issues remain in the darkness beyond the circle of light. Every day, thousands of pages are published and thousands of hours broadcast by the media. But scarcely any of this space and time is made available for the matters that really count: environmental breakdown, inequality, exclusion, the subversion of democracy by money. In a world of impersonation, we obsess about trivia. A story carried by BBC News last week was headlined “Meghan closes a car door”. 

The BBC has just announced that two of its programmes will start covering climate change once a week. Given the indifference and sometimes outright hostility with which it has treated people trying to raise this issue over the past 20 years, this is progress. But business news, though less important than environmental collapse, is broadcast every minute, partly because it is treated as central by the people who run the media and partly because it is of pressing interest to those within the spotlight. We see what they want us to see. The rest remains in darkness.

The task of all journalists is to turn off the spotlight, roll up the blinds and see what’s lurking at the back of the room. There are some magnificent examples of how this can be done, such as the Windrush scandal reporting, by the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman and others. This told the story of people who live far from where the spotlight falls. The articles were accompanied by pictures of victims rather than of the politicians who had treated them so badly: their tragedies were not supplanted by someone else’s drama. Yet these stories were told with such power that they forced even those within the spotlight to respond.

The task of all citizens is to understand what we are seeing. The world as portrayed is not the world as it is. The personification of complex issues confuses and misdirects us, ensuring that we struggle to comprehend and respond to our predicaments. This, it seems, is often the point.

The scandal that rocked Bikram yoga

 Bikram Choudhury leads a class in San Diego in 2010. Photograph: Rebecca Greenfield/Polaris/ eyevine

Richard Godwin in The Guardian


We’re 15 minutes into the Monday morning class at Hot 8 Yoga in Beverly Hills. Francesca Asumah, one of the most sought-after instructors in California, is putting 48 perspiring humans through a sequence of 26 poses and two breathing exercises popularised by the celebrity yogi Bikram Choudhury. The temperature is a sapping 40C. Sweat slicks over yoga mats. Beautiful bodies melt into shapes that seem beyond the realm of ordinary human geometry.

Asumah’s class, titled A Dance With The Ancients, falls somewhere between gym session and sermon. “You must learn to love yourself, guys!” she encourages us in a northern English accent (she’s half-Ghanaian, half-English, and from Manchester). “If everyone loves themselves, then the whole world will be loved. And beware false gurus! Gurus are middlemen. We are all born in the temple. If anyone claims to be your guru, run a mile, people!”

The message has a special charge in this room. This is the home of what the yogis in my class call “the Bikram community-in-exile”: people who used to be at the heart of the movement, and who say they suffered horrendous abuse in their pursuit of yogic enlightenment. Sweating next to me is Minakshi “Micki” Jafa-Bodden, 48, former legal adviser for the Bikram yoga company. She wants me to appreciate the hold that these poses have before she will talk any further: “You can’t understand me unless you understand Bikram yoga.” And it’s just as well Jafa-Bodden remains devoted to the 26 poses: last month, Los Angeles county court gave her control of the entire global empire.

***

If you’re not up on your chakras and pranayamas, you could be forgiven for thinking that “Bikram” is a term for a kind of hot yoga performed by celebrities and Hollywood types in unsanitary conditions. It is that: Andy Murray credits it with helping his “fitness and mental strength”; Serena Williams and David Beckham are said to be fans. But it is also a sequence of moves that takes its trademarked name from one man. At his early 2010s peak, the pony-tailed, waxed-chested image of Bikram Choudhury adorned the walls of around 650 licensed Bikram yoga studios across the world. For many, he was a spiritual leader as well as the inventor of an exercise class.

Little is known of Choudhury’s early life. Born in Kolkata in 1946, he claimed to have been invited to America by Richard Nixon, and to have taught yoga to the Beatles and Nasa astronauts. He once told a class that he invented the disco ball.

What is certain is that his yoga gave his students something they found life-changing. Asumah first went to a Bikram-affiliated studio in London in 2000. “I immediately saw the benefit of it,” she says. “At a normal yoga class, you do whatever poses the teacher feels like teaching you. Our form of yoga is different. I’m 64. My quality of life is so joyful and I know it’s because of the yoga.” She believes the 26 poses contain a “sacred geometry” that has been handed down from “the ancients”. Choudhury also claimed his form of yoga was more rigorous and authentic than westernised forms preaching peace and love.

Micki Jafa-Bodden: ‘You can’t understand me unless you understand Bikram yoga.’ Photograph: Steve Schofield/The Guardian. Hair and makeup: Ricardo Ferisse

Choudhury first set up a studio in a basement in Beverly Hills. From the mid-1970s onwards, he drew in a celebrity clientele, including Michael Jackson, Jeff Bridges, Shirley MacLaine, Barbra Streisand and Raquel Welch. His classes, heated to a regulation 40C (designed to mimic conditions in Kolkata), offered a combination of constructive hazing, cosmic wisdom and pantomime eccentricity. He would wear Speedos and issue bizarre commands; in 2011, a writer for GQ magazine went to a class and reported him telling a student, “You, Miss Teeny-Weeny Bikini! Spread your legs!” He loathed the colour green and banned people from wearing it. He had never seen carpet until he arrived in America, and believing it represented the height of luxury had all his studios carpeted, hygiene be damned.

Initially, Choudhury asked for donations and slept on the floor of his studio; but as his celebrity grew, so did his material demands. He claimed he had trademarked his sequence and filed aggressive lawsuits to prevent former students from adapting his 26 moves (including a suit accusing Raquel Welch of stealing his sequence for her exercise book). In 2012, a California federal judge dismissed Choudhury’s attempt to trademark his sequence, ruling that a series of yoga poses cannot be copyrighted. As a New York studio owner, Greg Gumucio, whom Choudhury tried to shut down, told ABC news: “It’s kind of like if Arnold Schwarzenegger said, ‘I’m going to do five bench presses, six curls, seven squats, call it Arnold’s Work, and nobody can show that or teach that without my permission.’”

Choudhury’s most reliable stream of revenue was his twice-yearly teacher-training sessions, where up to 400 students would pay around £10,000 to undergo nine weeks of intensive yoga to become certified Bikram instructors. These earned Choudhury a personal fortune estimated at $75m, including a fleet of 43 luxury cars.


I saw it as my forever job. It allowed me to combine my love of yoga with the legal and business side

Benjamin Lorr, who wrote a book-length study of Choudhury called Hell-Bent in 2012, attended a training course in Las Vegas in 2009 and found himself drawn to Choudhury, despite describing him as “clearly a buffoon”. By the third evening, Choudhury had told the class that he launched Michael Jackson’s career, cured Janet Reno’s Parkinson’s disease, was once best friends with Elvis, and had experienced “72 hours of marathon sex, where my partner has 49 orgasms. I count.” (He married his wife Rajashree, herself a certified Bikram instructor, in 1984.)

But for Lorr, Choudhury’s ridiculousness only added to his charisma. He had the quality of being present in the moment. “You see it with Donald Trump, too – it’s this unscripted responsiveness,” Lorr tells me. “Bikram has an incredible ability to zoom in on specific people, combined with an ability to act as if he’s being true to himself.” And then there’s what Lorr calls the “volume game”. “When there are 380 people in a room cheering, you begin to wonder: ‘Why am I the only who’s sitting out of this?’ So you find yourself clapping and cheering, despite the fact that what he just said was moronic, or homophobic, or racist, or offensive.”

It was at these training camps – held in large hotel resorts – that Choudhury’s worst alleged abuses took place; there are now six separate suits working their way through the California courts, ranging from sexual harassment to rape. Jafa-Bodden is so far the only woman who has managed to defeat Choudhury in court: last month, a Los Angeles county jury awarded her a total of $6.8m in damages for a range of charges including unlawful dismissal and sexual harassment.

But recovering her damages has not been easy. Choudhury has since fled to India; his fleet of cars has vanished. When cornered by a TV journalist from HBO’s Real Sports at a teacher-training camp near Mumbai last October, Choudhury insulted his accusers and claimed that 5,000 women a day would line up to have sex with him: “Why do I have to harass women? People spend $1m for one drop of my sperm. Are you that dumb to believe those trash?” he said on camera. He also boasted that “this yoga is worse than cocaine. You can get rid of cocaine, but once you’re used to this yoga, you can’t stop.”

Back in March 2011, when Jafa-Bodden first stepped into Choudhury’s Beverly Hills HQ, she was convinced she had just landed her dream job. She was born in Assam, India, received her legal training in Britain, and had spent her career moving between Europe, India and the Caribbean, working in international litigation. She was introduced to Choudhury by his Indian lawyer, Som Mandal. Choudhury insisted that she start right away, and he and Rajashree helped her with her immigration papers, going so far as to choose (and furnish) a flat for her.

As a single mother with a six-year-old daughter, it seemed the perfect opportunity. “I saw it as my forever job,” Jafa-Bodden recalls. “It allowed me to combine my love of yoga and spirituality with the legal and business side of things. I was ready to take on a bigger role, and I also thought I was coming to work for a family-oriented company.”

Jafa-Bodden has the supple movements and clear complexion that comes from taking three or four hot yoga classes a week. She combines a disarming friendliness with a lawyer’s caution. She insists on meeting me twice before she will answer my questions: once for afternoon tea, once for yoga. When I am finally granted a formal interview at her attorneys’ offices in Santa Monica, she welcomes me wearing a camouflage jacket with the words “TRUST THE UNIVERSE” spelled in diamante on the back.

Her first inkling that something wasn’t right came when Choudhury and Rajashree invited her to their mansion in Beverly Hills a couple of days after she took up her position. “It was like the lair of a Bollywood villain. It was very showy and elaborate, not quite what I was expecting from a yoga guru.” Still, she says, he was on his best behaviour. “I’ve dealt with high-net-worth individuals in all sorts of countries, and my read on Bikram was just that he was eccentric.”

Meanwhile, in her day job, she found “operational dysfunction: a total co-mingling of personal and corporate assets”. Choudhury had a tendency not to settle his hotels bills, so her first task was to fight Marriott hotels over an unpaid sum of $1.8m. Choudhury also liked to use the company account as a personal credit card. But initially Jafa-Bodden saw this as an opportunity; she felt she had the necessary expertise to straighten out the business. It was only when a lawsuit from a former trainee named Pandhora Williams landed on her desk that she realised the extent of her problems.

***

The Bikram teacher-training courses centre on two mass 90-minute hot yoga sessions a day interspersed with anatomy seminars, spiritual lectures and rote learning of 45 pages of copyrighted Bikram dialogue. Choudhury likes to conduct the evening class from a throne with one attendant typically brushing his hair and another massaging his legs. Francesca Asumah attended a course in spring 2002. “He walked in and everybody started jumping around and cheering,” she recalls. “Because I’m English, and we don’t really do cults, I didn’t really understand what was going on. But everybody was worshipping him.”

Choudhury teaching in Beverly Hills, California in 1982. Photograph: Joan Adlen Photography/Getty Images

She was 49, and believes her “difficult” attitude led to her being shunned by Choudhury’s inner circle; the typical attendees were aged 22 to 35 and seemed more impressionable. “There were a lot of really beautiful bodies, all dressed in tight shorts and bikinis.”

In the evenings, Choudhury would invite his favourites to watch Bollywood movies with him. Anyone who fell asleep would be woken up; the ordeal would often go on until 3am. The first yoga session of the next day was 8am, and was often accompanied by vomiting, fainting and weeping. Nonetheless, despite the hardships, most students agreed it was worth it. “There were a few people who would exchange looks and raise their eyebrows,” Asumah says. “But you’d spent your £10,000. And the yoga’s good. And you’d just try to bear what you can.”

The case that landed on Jafa-Bodden’s desk in May 2011, the suit from Pandhora Williams, related to a training session at the Town and Country Resort in San Diego the previous autumn. Williams’ lawyers alleged that Choudhury had invited the class to lie down in savasana (corpse pose) whereupon he launched into a homophobic rant, announcing that all gay people should be put on an island and “left to die of Aids”. After the class, Williams had asked, “Bikram, why are you preaching hate? Yoga is supposed to be about love.” She alleges that he replied, “We don’t sell love here, bitch,” then told an assistant, “Get that black bitch out of here. She’s a cancer.” Williams was ejected from the course – and Choudhury refused to refund her $10,900 fee. So she sued for racial discrimination.

“I realised that if half of this was true, we were facing a very serious situation,” Jafa-Bodden tells me now. She conducted internal investigations and challenged Choudhury on his behaviour. She found him unremorseful. “He would pick on someone in the crowd. If someone got up to go to the toilet, he would say, ‘Where are you going? To change your tampon?’ He uses profanities, he’s antisemitic, he’s homophobic. He’ll say things like, ‘Blacks don’t get my yoga.’ And once he starts on his tirade of profanity, he doesn’t stop. Once he’s picked on you, then you’ve had it for the entire class.”

Why did no one stand up to him? “There’s very little you can do. He’s up there on a podium, he’s miked up, and it’s really hot.” Many trainees feared losing the thousands of dollars they had already spent on the fees. “Their livelihood depends on putting up with it. The problem was that Bikram had set things up in such a way that, without his continued patronage, you can’t teach anywhere else. So some of his victims would come back to his training and just try to take precautions.”


Once people have bought into any cult, there’s no rational way you can change their minds

Further allegations followed. Jafa-Bodden was required to read the manuscript of Lorr’s book Hell-Bent for libel, but found nothing actionable. The book’s allegations of sexual impropriety opened the floodgates. “Once people have bought into any cult, there’s no rational way you can change their minds – it has to be an emotional change,” Lorr tells me. “It was only when people started to see how much hurt he had caused that they began to change their minds.”

In 2013, a series of rape allegations were made. A former student, Sarah Baughn, claimed that Choudhury had sexually assaulted her at a 2008 training camp, pleading, “I am dying. I can feel myself dying. I will not be alive if someone doesn’t save me.” A Canadian student, Jill Lawler, sued Choudhury for a litany of charges, including sexual assault, gender discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual battery; she was 18 when the alleged crimes took place. Another student, Maggie Genthner, alleged that he raped her twice, forcing her legs into yoga postures and laughing at her.

Jafa-Bodden says she repeatedly challenged Choudhury on his behaviour, but he simply expected her to make the allegations go away. “At the outset, he expected me to be submissive,” she says. “He told me he was a god who could do whatever he wanted and that I was ‘stupid and too westernised’.”

Jafa-Bodden claims that, on one occasion, Choudhury held a meeting in his presidential suite and encouraged her to join him in bed. “He would tell me to go and ‘shut up’ the witnesses,” Jafa-Bodden says. “One woman sent a Facebook message saying that Bikram had tried to put his penis in her mouth – a horrific allegation. I went to Bikram and said, ‘What is this?’ And he said, ‘I thought we’d taken care of that bitch in Hawaii.’” After she told him he wasn’t allowed to bring trainees to his bedroom, he mocked her in front of a class: “He stood up on his podium and said: ‘My lawyer tells me I can’t have a girl in my room. So I’m now going to have two!’”

Bikram Choudhury assists actress Carol Lynley at his yoga studio in Beverly Hills, California. Photograph: Joan Adlen Photography/Getty Images

Jafa-Bodden became depressed, which she says has led to ongoing problems with anxiety. “My entire life revolved around Bikram and his yoga. It was like living in a parallel universe,” she says. She considered leaving the country, but was trapped. “I never received my pay cheque on time or for the full amount agreed. I was dependent on Bikram for everything, including my work visa, my apartment, my car. My cellphone was connected to his and my every move was monitored. It would have been very risky to flee without a well-thought-out exit strategy. He would say they’d revoke my green card, so I’d be deported back to India.”

Finally, in February 2013, she was subpoenaed to testify in the Williams case, which sent Choudhury “crazy”. “He said ominously, ‘Well, we’ll just tell them we don’t know where you are.’ I was so frightened.” The next month, he terminated her contract. With no car and little money, she moved with her daughter to a guesthouse until she was able to find a small one-bedroom apartment.

Jafa-Bodden eventually turned to her former adversary, Carla Minnard, the Californian attorney who had subpoenaed her in the Williams lawsuit. “My motto is, where there is darkness let there be light,” Jafa-Bodden says now. “I feel I have to show my daughter that you have to fight through the fear.” She sued Choudhury for unfair dismissal and sexual harassment.

An Irish former employee, Sharon Clerkin (herself allegedly dismissed for becoming pregnant), testified at Jafa-Bodden’s trial that Choudhury continued to demean women at teacher training, calling them “bitches” and boasting about allegations that were then surfacing on social media (“it’s good for business”).

The jury unanimously ruled that Jafa-Bodden had been subject to sexual harassment, nonpayment of wages, wrongful dismissal and a number of further charges. In December, with Choudhury refusing to return to the US, the judge ordered that the income from his studio franchises and his intellectual property be handed over to Jafa-Bodden. Last month, she filed a separate suit against Rajashree, who divorced Choudhury in 2016 and remains in the Beverly Hills mansion. (At the time of the divorce, it was ruled that she wasn’t required to pay damages in any pending or future cases; Jafa-Bodden and her lawyers are challenging that verdict.)

To date, there have been no criminal charges brought against Choudhury; all the women are pursuing civil cases. Choudhury denied all of Pandhora Williams’ claims before they settled out of court in May 2013, and has dismissed the other allegations as “lies lies lies”. However, he has repeatedly refused to return to the US; last month he violated a court order to complete a video deposition in the Clerkin case. A few weeks later, his attorney in that case quit, saying Choudhury was no longer cooperating or paying his bills.

Responding to a Guardian request for comment, Bikram’s Indian lawyer, Som Mandal, last week denied all the allegations. He said that Bikram had hired new lawyers and would be appealing the verdict in the Jafa-Bodden case.

For her part, Jafa-Bodden says she is less interested in the money than in seeing justice done: “It’s about accountability.” Meanwhile, many Bikram studio owners are removing photographs of Choudhury and distancing themselves from their former guru. There are around 30 yoga studios that carry the Bikram name in the UK, and many are rebranding: Bikram Yoga North, West, City and Primrose Hill in London now go under the name Fierce Grace.

Outside the US, Choudhury continues to advertise training camps: his next teacher-training session in Acapulco, Mexico, this April is again priced at about £10,000. “That’s so concerning for us,” Jafa-Bodden says. “Innocent and impressionable young trainees might be going to these camps in jurisdictions where there may not be as many protections.”

You’d understand it if Jafa-Bodden never wanted to step inside another yoga studio again, but she remains devoted to the series of 26 poses. “It must seem mystifying to someone who is not into Bikram yoga,” she laughs, “but I do actually think yoga is the answer.” She credits Asumah with seeing her through her worst moments.

Asumah herself has every reason to leave yoga behind. Her first husband died of a heart attack after taking a yoga class in Ibiza, and she blames Choudhury for the failure of her second marriage. Yet she has forgiven him. “If you spoke to me when I was in the depths of hurt, I’d have spoken differently. But he didn’t make me bitter. The highest form of love is forgiving the unforgivable.”

All of which leaves Jafa-Bodden with a dilemma. She is effectively president of Bikram Inc. But there is a serious issue with the name: in the process of de-Bikramisation, she wants to separate the yoga from the man who created it – not so easy when it’s a brand known the world over (most devotees don’t make the connection with the megalomaniac in Speedos). And she still remains devoted to the Bikram community. Can she rebuild the business as something new? As Asumah says, “Sometimes you get a rotten branch, and you have to cut it off, but it doesn’t mean the whole tree’s gone.”

Libertarianism and the Leap of Faith – The Origins of a Political Cult

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland

You wanted God’s ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfil your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.

– Søren Kierkegaard

Political cults often have the strangest and most obscure origins. Take Marxism, for example. Today it is well-known that Marxist doctrine essentially sprang out of the obscure 19th century economic debates over the source of ‘value’. By ‘proving’ – that is, lifting the assumption from classical political economy – that all ‘value’ came from labour, Karl Marx went on to show that it was therefore only logical to assume the existence of something called ‘surplus value’ that was sucked out of labourers by a parasitic capitalist class. From out of this obscure debate flowed an awesome political movement – and a tyranny to match.

What is less well-known is that today’s most popular political cult – that is, libertarianism – was born in very similar circumstances; it too, arrived into the world out of the obscure 19th century debates over economic ‘value’. But before we explore this in any detail it might be appropriate to speculate a little on what characterises a political cult and why so many of these find their sustenance in economic theories of value.

What is a Political Cult and Why Do they Often Love Economic Value Theory?

A political cult is characterised by a political or economic doctrine that answers all the ‘big questions’ about life, the world and everything else. The doctrine that is handed down is then to be conceived of as a way to live one’s life – a project, handed down from Mount Sinai, that one is under the moral obligation to spread far and wide. This is why we refer to these movements as cults. And it is this that gives them such an awesome status in the glazed eyes of their devotees.

Under such circumstances, politics becomes a sort of religious calling. In these doctrines there is usually an ‘Evil Being’ who is opposing the spread of the ‘Good’ on earth and it is these that are to blame for all the bad things in the world. In Marxism this Evil Being is the capitalist; in libertarianism it is the figure who is at different times referred to as the ‘collectivist’, the ‘liberal’ or the ‘socialist’. Needless to say that, since these figures are usually ones of Extreme Evil they must be ‘liquidated’ or ‘eliminated’ at the first possible opportunity lest they spread their Demonic Gospel to the masses.

Political cults thus provide their devotees with a firm identity in an otherwise changeable and, let us be frank, confusing world. Like all cults they provide an anchor for their devotees with which they can fasten themselves to a rigid doctrine. They also typically lend their devotees a Holier-Than-Thou attitude as they provide them with ‘secrets’ that those outside of the cult cannot grasp. Not only does this allow the devotees to feel ‘special’, in modern political cults it also gives them practical, albeit ‘secret’ advice about what they should do in their day-to-day lives. (Think of the advice to buy gold or foreign stocks coming out of certain libertarian front men, for example).

Finally, the political cult will usually offer their followers the possibility of a Heaven on Earth. If the follower behaves well and spreads their beliefs to others they will eventually arrive at some sort of Utopia. This is their reward for believing in the doctrines, despite these doctrines being ridiculed by others.

So, why do these cults spring out of economic doctrines based on value? Well, this is a very complex question but there is one key aspect that is absolutely fundamental. In order to understand it a little better we must think for a moment about what economic ‘value’ supposedly is. It is, in fact, when we boil it right down, a moral entity. If we can tell what people ‘value’ and why, then we can make prognostications on what is Good for society as a whole.

In times past organised religions handed down fixed value systems to their adherents. Today people have become disillusioned with religious systems – ostensibly because they conflict with these peoples’ supposedly ‘scientific’ worldview. But the impulse among some for the self-assurance provided by a religion is so strong that they seek out ‘scientific’ systems that operate in an identical manner to religious or cult systems.

This is why the economic doctrine of ‘value’ is such a good foundational stone for such a cult. It provides a pseudo-scientific account about how people attribute value to things and in doing so tells the cult member a ‘Truth’ that they can use to make turn the world into a Utopia in which the optimal amount of ‘value’ is realised by the optimal amount of people.

Karl Marx claimed that ‘value’ was embodied labour and hence his followers concluded with him that all that was Good sprang from labour and that society should thus be based on free labour. The libertarians – together with the neoclassicals that they otherwise scorn – believe that all ‘value’ springs from utility maximisation. While the neoclassicals simply tinker with toy-models of ‘value’ to bolster their pseudo-scientific prestige, the libertarians undertake a leap of faith into the unknown and claim that in the theory of marginal utility they have found a ‘Truth’ that must be brought down from Heaven to Earth.

The Birthing of a Cult

Libertarianism was born out of the late 19th century doctrine of marginalism; a doctrine that went on to gain popularity with those opposed to Marxism. We will not dwell too much on the doctrine of marginalism when applied to the analysis of ‘value’ – having done so elsewhere. Here we will merely note that marginalism provides a moral defence for the supposedly ‘free market’ system that we live under today.

Marginalism, when applied to ‘value’ analysis, holds that it is in Man’s nature to follow a certain path in his consumption habits. These habits are determined by his maximising his utility. Most modern marginalists claim that they can use this concept to show that a ‘free market’ system is the fairest social system possible, since it responds automatically to Man’s marginal utility preference it delivers ‘value’ in a perfect and harmonious manner.

Markets deliver this ‘value’ through the mechanism of price. Prices, which reflect peoples’ desires to maximise their marginal utility, ensure that the most equitable distribution of ‘value-in-the-abstract’ is accommodated for by the ‘free market system’. And this is the point at which marginal value analysis becomes a value judgment in a very real sense.

The neoclassicals held, and continue to hold, that their models could capture this complex dynamic. Such an assertion was and is, of course, absolute rubbish. But the Austrians took a different tack. “Yes,” they said, “marginal utility theory is the correct way to go, but we cannot formulate models that adequately capture the inner workings of this great mechanism.”

In their book Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World, the authors provide a good summary of this approach. In the book they discuss what effect the discovery of marginalism’s inherent uselessness had on the Austrians:

Faced with the impossibility of mathematically deriving prices and quantities on the one hand and a metric of social welfare on the other, some Marginalists understood the limitations of their utility calculus. Mainly of an Austrian persuasion (most notably Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter), they even gallantly tried to use this failure to the advantage of their claims on behalf of untrammelled markets and against the encroachments of collective agencies, trade unions, governments etc.

This was a clever move. While the neoclassicals tinkered with their silly toy-models, trying to show how prices are determined through a sort of grand marginal calculus, the Austrians shrugged their shoulders as to how such a Divine Event could occur. Instead they began to think of price as a sort of Miracle that proved the divinity of the Market mechanism. They then went on deploy this argument to show that anything that encroached upon this Divine Being’s presence was inherently Evil:

If no degree of mathematical sophistication can pin down the ‘right’ prices and quantities, how can a government or any other form of collective agency work them out? How could a socialist economy, or even a national health service, ever price things? Thus, the market mechanism is indispensible because of the radical indeterminacy of prices.

Note what is happening here. The Austrians, like their marginalist brothers and sisters, thought that in marginal utility theory they had found the source from which ‘value’ truly flowed. They never for one moment questioned that. Even when they came to conclude that marginalist analysis could never definitively show anything useful about price determination, they remained confident – indeed, they became even more confident – that such an analysis was Truth.

In short, they postulated a theory and then when confronted with the inconsistencies of the theory when it was applied to any practical ventures they simply threw up their arms and claimed that such inconsistency showed just how true theory was and how much we should respect it. The knowledge that the theory imparted then became, in a very real sense, Divine, in that we meagre humans would never be able to grasp it and instead should simply bow down in front of the Great Being that possessed this knowledge – that is: the Market.

This is what gives the libertarians their religious zeal. In their quest for the Grand Truth they find this Truth to be inaccessible to Man. But in this inaccessibility they find a Higher Truth again; namely, that there is some other entity out there – a benevolent entity called ‘the Market’ – that possesses this Truth and all we have to do is follow the Laws which it has handed down to us and we will eventually reach Utopia. This is, of course, a leap of faith – a truly Kierkegaardian Leap of Faith.

From the Leap of Faith to the Knight of Faith

The Austrians were never quite content with the chicanery and political posturing that they had passed off as scientific debate. As alluded to above, their theories about market prices were forged in the debates with those who advocated a socilialistic planned economy. Being ideological to the core, the Austrians were, for a while at least, perfectly content with saying that while no economist could say anything worthwhile about price determination – and thus, any attempt at a socialist planned economy would be doomed to fail because there could be no perfectly informed coven of evil socialist economists who could administer it – they were still happy with the airy theory of market prices that they had just poked such a large hole in. Yes, they had undertaken a Leap of Faith by admitting that their logical constructions would never be whole but, as Kierkegaard well knew, every Leap of Faith needs a hero, a Knight of Faith – and the Austrians soon found theirs.

The Austrians had, although one suspects that they never fully realised this, essentially proved that their theories were inconsistent. There was always, lurking somewhere, that element that disturbed the calculation of prices in the market models.

Let us emphasise here that this element of disturbance was found, not in reality, but only in their models and in their minds. The fact is that the Austrians, even in out-stepping their neoclassical brethren, were still only exploring their own fantasies. This fact must always be kept in the front of one’s mind when considering their doctrines.

We highlight this because it was precisely at this point that the Austrians could have conceded that they were building castles in the sky – ideologically and emotionally motivated castles in the sky, no less – and that it might be time to grow up and give up on the whole sordid venture of trying to establish a ‘logical’ ‘economic’ basis for ‘value’ that would temper them with the moral certainty they needed to carry on their political crusade. But not so. Instead they found a Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith to fill the gap in their logic. And that Knight of Faith was the entrepreneur.

The Austrian economist Israel Kirzner put it as such in his fine paper ‘The Economic Calculation Debate: Lessons for Austrians’ (which is also an excellent historical overview of much of what we have here been discussing):

[T]he truth is that Hayek opened the door to an entirely new perspective on the “goodness” of economic policies and institutional arrangements. Instead of judging policies or institutional arrangements in terms of the resource-allocation pattern they are expected to produce (in comparison with the hypothetically optimal allocation pattern), we can now understand the possibility of judging them in terms of their ability to promote discovery.

And this ‘discovery’, of course, comes from the entrepreneur who was hereafter identified by the libertarian as the social hero who broke through all barriers in the pursuit of the creation of new ‘values’ – and by that, we mean economic ‘values’ – for the community as a whole. Kizner again:

For Austrians, prices emerge in an open-ended context in which entrepreneurs must grapple with true Knightian uncertainty. This context generates precisely the kind of choice that stimulates the competitive discovery process. In this context, the entrepreneur does not treat prices as parameters out of his control but, on the contrary, represents the very causal force that moves prices in coordinating directions.

In Kierkegaard’s writings which, like the writings of the Austrians sought to establish a theological metaphysic from which an individual could derive principles of moral certitude, it was the Knight of Faith – the true believer with complete faith and certainty in both himself and God – that filled in the logical gaps inherent in even the greatest philosophical systems. For the Austrians the entrepreneur filled the same role – except that this was a great hero that had both full faith in the Market and the ability to find opportunities to inject disequilibrium into the price system through innovation.

By now we are far outside the realm of anything even remotely resembling a science of ‘value’. What we have instead is a vast metaphysical and moral system that is built around a very specific – not to mention very narrow – conception of value, together with a sort of existential appendage in the form of the hero-entrepreneur. The hero veneers over the logical flaws in the metaphysical system, while that system remains in place as a faith-based explanatory schema which can be applied to the world around the libertarian.

Note how fantasy blends into reality almost completely at this point. No longer do we separate our supposedly ‘factual’ ideas about ‘value’ from the mythological figure of the entrepreneur. Fact and fantasy merge to form a sort of continuum the purpose of which is to insulate the devotee from any empirical evidence that might arise to prove them wrong – or, at least, misled – regarding, for example, more fundamental and more pressing macroeconomic questions. They simply know what is what because they have it all worked out – and no silly facts are going to tell them otherwise.

From the fertile source of marginal utility value calculus the Austrians thus constructed a pristine moral and metaphysical system. But in doing so – like all metaphysicians – they allowed their imaginations to run away with them. They never noticed the point at which they crossed that fateful line; that line that separates our attempts to represent the world accurately and dispassionately to ourselves from our attempts to create a fantasy world in which we can live. The Austrians had, at first, attempted to use their imaginations to explain the world around them and, in doing so, had fallen into a dream world of their own creation.

And so the foundations of the political cult we call libertarianism were firmly in place. It is an ingenious creation which even came to include what CG Jung and other mythologists might call a central ‘archetypal’ or mythic figure. Even more specifically, what the Austrians have done is insert into their narrative what the great American mythologist Joseph Campbell called the ‘monomyth’. The monomyth is a recurrent theme in mythologies from all over the world. It is essentially a ‘hero myth’ and, as Campbell argues, can be located in most major religious narratives (Christ, Buddha etc.). In this the Austrians provided the libertarian religion with their very own version of the monomyth.

That most libertarians are ignorant of the source of their beliefs – just as most of them are not very conversant with economic theory generally, their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding – only adds a sociological dimension to their cult. Their cult forms a hierarchy where those who are closer to the Grand Truth are supposed to know more than those who are less conversant. Those who are less conversant then scrutinise the Great Texts – which are largely taken to be Holy Writ – until they can advance up the priestly ranks.

The Malign Consequences of Political Cults

After experiencing what used to be called ‘Bolshevism’ we are well aware of the dangers of political cults if they should ever ascend to power. Indeed, we already had forewarnings of this danger in the cult of Reason that Robespierre erected in revolutionary France upon the intellectual architecture that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had constructed for him. All of these cults espouse liberty and freedom and end up creating regimes of pure tyranny. Why? Because in their violent desire to turn reality into a Utopia, they stamp all over reality as it fails to conform to the images in their minds.

Some have objected to fellow Naked Capitalism writer Andrew Dittmer’s ‘interview’ series as an attempt to misrepresent the libertarian movement by espousing the ideas of an extremist. This is unfair. The views of people like Hoppe may be fringe among libertarians – then again, they may not be – but the zealousness is the same across the whole movement.

Libertarians think that they have unearthed a Truth that no one else can grasp (because, of course, this Truth being so pure, anyone who could possibly grasp it must then by default recognise it as Truth). And they think that if they can get adequate social and political power to enforce this Truth we will all be better off for it. Hoppe’s vision of a totalitarian, corporatist future is thus realistic in that if libertarians were ever truly to get into power they would have to enact an immense violence upon the world to try to get it to conform to their vision of Utopia. In this, they are like every other political cult that has ever existed. And they are just as dangerous.

In fact, the libertarians are the direct heirs to the Marxist-Leninist throne. Even though their motives differ substantially, their Faith is based on very similar principles – which is not surprising given that both movements grew out of the same 19th century debate over economic value. In this regard it is useful to recall John Maynard Keynes’ characterisation of Marxism-Leninism:

[It] is the combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul – religion and business.

Keynes also highlighted an important point about how such cults become influenetial:

[They derive their] power not from the multitude but from a small minority of enthusiastic converts whose zeal and intolerance make each one equal in strength to a hundred indifferentists.

The goal may have changed, but the unswerving faith in pseudo-scientific – or, to be very precise, in the Austrians case, because they tend to eschew ‘scientificity’: pseudo-rational – economic doctrines has not. Let us just hope that such a cult does not deliver to us another era of primitive tyranny and medieval inquisition. It is our democracies that are at stake.