Creating false demand, with an aside on evil

This is the wrong way of viewing things entirely. You cannot literally create demand. You can hijack it, you can confuse it, you can subvert it, you can alter it, you can divert it, you can exaggerate it, you can do all kinds of things to it except create it. So to speak of the creation of demand by the supply class is similar to speaking of creating energy or creating matter. You cannot create it, you can only transform it. There is no ex nihilo creation of demand.

So if they aren’t creating false demand, what are suppliers doing? Most likely, hard as it is to believe, supply-side providers see a (at least potential) demand and are trying to fill it. They may be misunderstanding it. They may be ignorant of larger concerns beyond their own desire to succeed. They may be well-meaning or malevolent and selfish. They may simply see the easiest and most profitable way to fulfill a demand in some shallow sense without fulfilling it in a deeper sense (and not care about or recognize the difference). Or maybe they don’t have the imagination to see or the conscience to care that filling it at the expense of other valid demands (or to the degree to which they’re trying to fill it) runs counter to other needs and demands that have holistic significance for human flourishing.

There are so many things that are likely going on, some of them good, some of them bad, and some of them thoughtless or neutral or ignorant or merely confused or mistaken. But none of it is so simple as supply creating “artificial” demand by some infernal artifice. That is merely an amusing fiction that plays a useful or pleasing role in a narrative we are spinning based on our prejudices. It’s up there with Marxist doctrines and anti-Semetic doctrines that argue that the middle-men class doesn’t actually do anything or produce anything but simply steals everything from someone else. It doesn’t belong in the realm of the serious science of economics.

Even the greatest of evils cannot create. It can only distort, only misuse. People figured that out across many cultures thousands of years ago. Even our most central concept of evil, sin, does not refer to a thing that has being in itself but rather to something that has missed what it was aiming at. The positive capacity is in there somewhere, giving the process its power. It’s just gone astray.
Sin, or evil or injustice or distortion (however it pleases you to label it), is less than parasitic because it has no life to it except that which it piggybacks on from its host. Sin itself produces nothing, only the unbeing and ungrowth and undevelopment and unarrival of whatever it was that you were actually trying to aim at or create. Loss of meaning, loss of order, loss of purpose, loss of result. Death, in other words. The dispersion of the creative and purposive process. It produces the not-the-result. It doesn’t create. I don’t intend to get all mystical. This is just a basic fact of human behavior that’s been long recognized by vast swathes of humanity but that us clever moderns with all that knowledge at our fingertips have somehow forgotten. It applies to economics as it does to all aspects of human creativity. Economics is a domain of human creativity.

Why does this matter? Mostly I think it’s a matter of proper framing. How you frame what is happening affects your ideas of what is possible and how you interpret the actions and motives of the people involved. If you think people just created something fake and false from nothing, that it has no place, no reality or value to it, out of malevolence or greed, you’re going to take a different attitude to it than if you think there’s some complex process at work that has some sort of grounding in reality (however distorted).

Partly, this positioning forces you to work harder to explain why and how something is distorted or got distorted, since you can’t just dismiss it as “purely” artificial. In addition, it changes what your options are for action. Let’s be honest, these aren’t just academic questions. People, including non-academic individuals, will develop opinions and feelings and plans for action based around ideas like these. If the construction in question is purely artificial and evil, then you are probably justified in simply destroying it or outlawing it without asking any further question questions. Removing it wouldn’t hurt anyone. It’s a pure parasite.

But, if there’s something real under it all, if the thing you’re dealing with is a diseased but still important part of the patient, then you have to be a bit more careful in your operation. It also opens up the possibility of cure, of redemption, as an option. You’re forced to develop a more powerful positive theory of what that underlying living mechanism is supposed to do and what it could be for. And you can try to figure out how to help it grow into that rather than just amputating it. That doesn’t mean that amputation isn’t sometimes necessary, at least as a temporary solution, to prevent the cancer from spreading and the disease from taking down the whole organism. Even with children, sometimes we take away certain freedoms and keep them for a later time because accessing them at that stage of life consistently leads to disaster. But the key fact that differs in the position is that, when you see artificial demand as a distortion rather than a creation, you’re forced to recognize, whatever you may end up having to do, that there is something underneath it all, and there is some nonzero possibility that it could be redeemed and corrected and made healthy again.

Many people fear this approach because they don’t have a sophisticated enough idea of good and evil to be confident that they could tell the difference between them or be able to take the necessary action if they don’t reduce them down to simple categories with completely different natures. Having a simpler idea of both frees up your ability to identify and label both and act toward both.

Just because this to her perspective opens up a more complex view of good and evil doesn’t mean that it’s less robust though. In fact I would say that the idea of evil being a purely separate or artificial thing from good is too weak a conception of its reality; it doesn’t do it justice. Evil as a distortion is a far more robust concept of what it is and explains its power and genesis far better than the ex nihilo (those are just bad things and bad people) approach. Evil has real power because it comes out of something good, something vital. But evil itself, in itself, is also so much less than an alternative to good. Take away the good from it and you’ve got less than nothing left. It is entirely dependent in nature. It is a hell that would not leave a taste in the mouth of a flea.

And that explains why we must wrestle with it, with evil. Because in some sense we are wrestling against good. Good gone wrong. There is real power behind both sides. And simply destroying the other won’t yield any real long term victory. Only the victory from within, the victory that can find what it is that has gone wrong and what it means to go right and separate and realize them is a true victory. Evil that is not defeated by becoming goodness cannot truly be defeated. It will simply take another form.

This is also why the attempt to defeat evil so often results in the ascendency of some new evil. Because the distortion was never truly confronted or cured. We simply set up an opposition and smashed what seemed false to us. And sometimes that is what needs to happen, in that moment. But you have to be very wary of those who offer to help fight and cure the evils that confront us but lack a sufficient conception of the good that they are pursuing and hope to realize even for their enemies. Someone who sees only enemies, only the bad, is unlikely to have a sufficient conception of evil to be able to confront it on any but the most basic and obvious levels, and the power that you have to grant them to do it is quite likely to just create a new abberation in the process of defeating the old one.

Again, I’m not saying that confrontation on the most basic level isn’t something that doesn’t need to be done, but that it comes with some serious inherent risks, if that is the limit of your understanding. And the failure to comprehend that evil is a danger that lies in the heart of every person, including yourself, leaves you vulnerable to becoming the evil you defeat. Thinking you stopped it “out there” and taking the power to yourself necessary to do so are two of the most powerful preconditions for your own corruption. They’ve brought many a person, many a political leader, to ends they and others could scarcely have imagined. History’s truly great tragedies have often been the work of heroes. Their power for good was what gave them such great potential for evil and harm.

Nazi Germany, to pick an easy example, didn’t accomplish what they did because they were so barbaric and unsophisticated, but because they were so incredibly orderly and clever and industrious and focused and civilized. And the Nazi party gained ascendency by vote, because the people raised them up to confront and resist other perceived threats and dangers. And many of those perceived threats had a real basis. The Marxist and Maoist and Cambodian revolutions were also themselves attempts to raise up the power of good to confront evil. So what went wrong? They learned the danger and the cost of empowering people with an insufficient conception of the good, of their own proclivity for evil, of the distorted goodness that underlies evil (so you must take care), and of the possibility of redemption.