The whole point of the system, essentially, is to justify what cannot be justified, namely, to preserve and maintain inequality and injustice for as long as possible. Can such an arrangement and scheme continue indefinitely and forever? For instance, the central bank is the ruler and sovereign of the United States as opposed to the people. And the central bank claims that its role is “to provide liquidity and stability for the system.” But how is this possible and how can this be true and how can we take them for their word when there is clear instability and shakiness in the financial sector all the time and for some reason there is always a need for a bailout? The appearance of providing “liquidity and stability for the system” actually diverts focus away from the reality of a bunch of shareholders taking whatever they can from everyone while the going is good. And when a major bank runs to Iran to do business and then gets fined for it by national authorities, what does that say about the state of the banking system and about the credibility and legitimacy of the central bank and thus the credibility and legitimacy of the system? And why does John Bolton, a war criminal who planned the Iraq War years before 9/11 even happened, get Secret Service protection?
These are issues and questions which we must ponder on and in turn resolve over the course of time, given that it is highly unlikely that a system whose raison d’être is to preserve and maintain inequality and injustice forever can actually last forever. When certain experts and scholars seek to find the fundamental defect or flaw in the system, this is perhaps the fundamental defect and flaw in the system, namely, that the system has to somehow maintain injustice and inequality forever in order to survive, which is contradictory and oxymoronic and futile by nature.
As Thomas Piketty wrote: “The history of human societies can be seen as a quest for justice. Progress is possible only through detailed comparison of personal and historical experiences and the widest possible deliberation.” As a result, the status quo has to be “superseded” somehow, given that a natural and innate quest for justice and the perpetuation and preservation of an “inequality regime” cannot be reconciled or squared with one another over the long run. And the mainstream whitewashing of reality through the celebration and touting of maniacal and wild Wall Street stock charts and updates do not help. As Piketty wrote: “In reality, it is only by combining economic, historical, sociological, cultural, and political approaches that progress in our understanding of socioeconomic phenomena becomes possible.”
The “autonomization of economic knowledge” is part of a deeper philosophy, ideology, and outlook towards reality, namely, a nihilistic, fatalistic, and hedonistic one which is the cause of huge problems and social malaise, with one of these problems being the dichotomization of society based on an “inequality regime” and the fact that the people are not the real rulers and sovereign of society. Protests and strikes in France on a regular basis do not occur out of the blue. They occur as a result of a deeper philosophical, ideological, and worldly outlook which in turn manifests the political and social crisis that we see on the surface. Why is it that there is a prevailing and widespread sentiment in an economically and socially advanced society like the West whereby large numbers of people feel that that they are socially disadvantaged, exploited, and are facing bias and prejudice, despite the economic and social advancement of the society in which they live? In essence, and in short, there can only be a “democratic solution” as well as an egalitarian one to this question, which at the moment is being hindered and stonewalled by a range of entities and personalities on different levels of society and in different settings of society.
Adam A. Azim 