Science and Humanity.
Everyone knows at least a little about Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, otherwise known as Darwinism, or sometimes Neo-Darwinism. Much can—and has been—said about Darwinism, but what is important for our purposes is that Darwinism provided a new way of understanding the place of life, including human life, in the cosmos. Rational, materialistic science, was to replace theology as the principal way of seeing the world. For some at least, it meant an absolute justification for atheism and the rejection of God.
Social Darwinism. The man most responsible for this change in perspective was probably not Darwin, but rather Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Spencer was a philosopher, not a scientist, who argued (prior to Darwin, actually) for evolution as a principal of all change. He championed Darwin and applied the idea of natural selection to social processes as well. It was he who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” This philosophy of extreme individualism, although really Spencer's child, is called Social Darwinism. The association with Darwin gave this philosophy an aura of being “scientific” which it really did not deserve. But it suited the mind-set of the rising capitalist class, and fit neatly into the ideas of free economic competition promoted by early economists like Adam Smith.
Economic Man. Social Darwinism is not a term used much these days, since it has become associated with such things as eugenics and the Nazi racial purification program better known as the Holocaust, but it survives in muted form as the caricature of humanity created by certain economists and known as homo economicus. Neo-liberal economists explain that this means “rational man,” tacitly admitting that it is not man as he actually goes about his business. And by “rational” they mean narrowly individualistic and utterly selfish.
Now it should be obvious that selfish is not the same thing as rational, and that while all of us are sometimes selfish, very few are always selfish. So that building what purports to be a scientific theory on the basis of this obviously false premise should be seen as patent nonsense and dismissed accordingly.
But remember that the Just-So stories justifying the power of the powerful now have to be scientific, not religious, and that people have no trouble believing what promotes their comfort and convenience. And economics is science, isn't it?
So starting with “economic man” the powerful have built an power-justifying ideology which they call science. It exists alongside real science; it is taught in the same schools and practiced in the same institutions. At the moment this ideology is regarded as orthodox, mainstream science, while the actual science is heterodox and less than entirely respectable.
Economic Freedom. Ideology does best when it can march under the banners of appealing slogans and catchwords; for neo-liberalism they are “individualism” and “freedom”. Thus, government is assumed to be always oppressive, so the less, the better. Regulation and taxes are bad since the former hamstrings enterprise and the latter is a disincentive to productive labor. Markets and trade must be made as free as possible, without tariffs or barriers of any kind. Unions are bad because they inhibit the free movement of labor and make workers spoiled and lazy. Social programs (welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) are bad for much the same reason: they make people lazy and dependent. But this sort of ecomomic freedom is actually the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak.
Whenever this ideology is put to the test and checked against reality the results are disastrous, but that in no way diminishes the fervor of the true believers. That is because while the results are horrible for the majority, they are generally quite beneficial for the rich and powerful. The scientists, that is, the ones who pay attention to the evidence, are always amazed at this disregard for fact and logic. They shouldn't be. Self-interest shapes belief more strongly than anything else. One example among many: in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, the partisans of slavery were absolutely convinced that abolitionists were not just wrong, but actually evil.
