Alan Greenspan and David Koresh are not the same guy.
That would be ludicrous.
And, lest you be prone to argue, here are are three easy ways to distinguish between them.
1. David Koresh, famed cult leader, perished in 1993, consumed in flames of his own making. ||| Alan Greenspan, famed cult leader, helped kindle a fire for fifteen more years. When it finally erupted last week, Greenspan got away without so much as singed eyebrows.
2. When the gun-toting feds finally stormed Mount Carmel, David Koresh was there, a willing martyr. ||| When the feds finally stormed Wall Street, Greenspan was nowhere to be found. Having passed his high priest status on to Henry Paulson, Greenspan had since assumed the new role of neoliberal evangelist (via Greenspan Associates LLC).
3. David Koresh believed he was a prophet and messiah-figure (hence the self-given name “Koresh”, Hebrew for Cyrus), and ultimately decided he was the Messiah himself. Through the sheer strength of his ardent faith and fervor, Koresh worked his way up to both high priest and “Big Papa” of the Branch Davidian sect. ||| Alan Greenspan believed he was a prophet, but certainly no messiah. If Koresh was a Jesus-figure, Greenspan was more like a tight-lipped Moses. The former was the Word of God. The latter merely transcribed the word of God – the holy writ of “free market” capitalism – to the unappreciative masses below.
One similarity, however, I will concede. Both men, I am certain, did nothing to let the very flames themselves threaten their own looks of serene self-certainty. Faiths unshaken by God Himself! Or at least we have the pretense.
This, of course, was surely a more easy feat for Koresh. After all, Koresh knew he would die a martyr; he had predicted these flames would come. Greenspan, it appears, has imagined green fields and blue skies forever. After all, aren’t such promises all there in God’s own writing, scrawled from head to arse upon the unregulated “financial markets in their [sacred] collective wisdom?”
Dwight N Hopkins (ed.), in Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases, goes beyond claiming that religion and globalization are tightly intertwined. Hopkins insists, in fact, that globalization — we might say Greenspan’s globalization — is a religion. Which Hopkins so defines:
Religion is a system of beliefs and practices comprising a god (which is the object of one’s faith), a faith (which is a belief in a desired power greater than oneself), a religious leadership (which demonstrates the path of belief), religious institutions (which facilitate the ongoing organization of the religion), a theological anthropology (which defines what it means to be human), values (which set the standards to which the religion subscribes), a theology (which is the theoretical justification of the faith), and revelation (which is the diverse ways that the god manifests itself in and to the world). — “Globalization as a Religious System,” p.9, my emphasis.
In light of Hopkins’ essay, I stand corrected. Greenspan’s neoliberalism is not a cult – a branch off of something larger. It is, instead, its own full-fledged religion, and this is far more frightening still. Neoliberalism is that “something larger” itself; Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand” is now God’s hand, plain and simple.
Something as deep-seated and expansive as this Old Time Religion will never go quietly into the night. It dies hard if it ever dies at all. Are we as a nation ready to lose our religion? Are we ready for some serious regulation? Ready for a new course of laws and enforcement based on better lives over bottom dollars?
Are enough of us ready to accept that charge of heresy? Not me. I’ve got bills to pay.
