Only a stupid person would say that.
Well, and yet I’ve just said it.
Yes.
But to get back to the question in hand, who do we think actually enacts the market as such? By which I mean to say, who theorizes it, who implements it, who administers it, who defends it?
The police. It being the law.
So but can we then assume that those people who make the laws are deeply implicated?
Yes.
But lawmakers are often lawyers themselves, notoriously bereft of ideas. Can we assume they get their ideas about law from others?
Yes.
And who are some of those others?
Think tanks. Academics.
Meaning MBA professors.
All kinds of academics. And very quickly their students.
Economics departments, you mean.
The World Trade Organization. Stock markets. All the laws, and the politicians and bureaucrats administering the laws. And the police and army enforcing them.
And I suppose the CEOs of all the companies.
Banks. Shareholder associations, pension funds, individual shareholders, hedge funds, financial firms.
Might the central banks indeed be central to all this?
Yes.
Anyone else?
Insurance companies, re-insurance companies. Big investors.
And their algorithms, right? So, mathematicians?
The math is primitive.
And yet even primitive math still takes mathematicians, the rest of us being so clueless.
Yes.
Also I suppose simply prices themselves, and interest rates and the like. Which is to say simply the system itself.
You were asking about the people doing it.
Yes, but it’s an actor network. Some of the actors in an actor network aren’t human.
Balderdash.
What, you don’t believe in actor networks?
There are actor networks, but it’s the actors with agency who can choose to do things differently. That’s what you were trying to talk about.
All right, but what about money?
What about it?
To my mind, money acts as if it worked as gravity does— the more of it you gather together, the more gathering power it exerts, as with mass and its gravitational attraction.
Cute.
Ultimately this is a very big and articulated system!
Insightful.
All right then, back to the ones who administer our economic system as such, and teach others how to work it, and by a not-so-coincidental coincidence, benefit from it the most. I wonder how many people that would turn out to be?
About eight million.
You’re sure?
No.
So this would be about one in every thousand persons alive today.
Well done.
Thank you! And the programs they’ve written.
Stick to the people.
But if the non-human elements of the system were to break?
Stick to the people. You were almost getting interesting.
Who matters the most in that group of eight million?
Government legislators.
That’s a bad thought.
No it isn’t. Why would you say that?
Corruption, stupidity—
Rule of law.
But—
But me no buts. Rule of law.
What a weak reed to stand on!
Yes.
What can we do about that?
Just make it stick.
18
The PTSD model uses the word “trigger” as both noun and verb, to suggest the speed of a PTSD reaction, and the way it can be switched on by some incident that should be the equivalent of a small curved piece of metal, innocuous except when placed in a gun. One must learn not to pull these things.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a hard thing to learn. One of the main strategies involved asks you to label the type of thought you are having, identify it as unhelpful or painful, and then switch tracks to a more positive train of thought. Often this strategy fails. You know what’s happening, you know it’s inappropriate— on it goes anyway. Your palms sweat, your heart pounds in your chest like a child trying to escape, and over that throbbing animal reality, you can be thinking to yourself, Wait, no danger here now— this isn’t a situation to be frightened in, you’re just sitting at a café table, midday, light wind, low clouds, all well, please don’t do this, don’t start crying, don’t leap up and run away— just still your shaking hands, just pick up your coffee cup—
But the trigger is pulled, and you are looking right down the barrel of the gun.
Enough times like that, and looking down the actual barrel of an actual gun, its trigger under your actual thumb— not your forefinger, because you have the gun pointed at yourself, resting against your sternum, and it’s the thumb that can best pull (or in this case push) the trigger— this can be seen as a huge relief, as a promise that the fear will finally stop. This happens all the time. It happens so often that one form of PTSD therapy goes like this— you don’t have to worry so much, because if it stays this bad you can always kill yourself. And for some sufferers this thought is a real comfort, sometimes even the anchor point of a way back to sanity. You can always end this misery by killing yourself; so give it another day and see how it goes.
It’s not easy to stay unafraid. It can’t always be done. Try as you might, want it ever so much, things are out of your control, even when they are in your mind, or especially because they are in your mind. The mind is a funny animal. If it were just conscious thought; or if conscious thought was something we could control; or if unconscious thoughts were conscious; or if moods were amenable to our desires … then maybe things could work. Things like cognitive behavioral therapy, or the project of sanity itself. Just make it happen!
But no. You’re swimming in a river. You can get carried out to sea on riptides not of your making, or at least not under your control. You can find yourself swimming against a current much stronger than you. You can drown.
Frank was drowning. He had that same shortness of breath. Therapy had mostly made it crystal clear to him that he would never be cured.
In a sense, maybe that was progress. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. What did that mean? Could you live without hope? There was
