Homo Oeconomicus
Man reduced solely to his economic function as a consumer and producer.
Whatever its project, egalitarian and humanitarian ideology, in either its liberal or socialist versions, sees men as interchangeable economic atoms. The only thing that counts in this ideology are differences in productive performance or the capacity for consumption — i.e., the only thing that counts is money. Reduced thus to his market or monetary dimension, man loses his personal, cultural, and ethnic value. For both Marxist socialists and liberals, man is preeminently a producer and a consumer. The West is economist, in essence, unlike, say, Islam, whose main ambition is to conquer for the sake of its military and religious aims. The latter ideology is far sounder than the first.
The catastrophic colonising immigration we’ve known since the ‘60s was motivated by economic concerns. The sole thing that mattered was the docility and cheapness of labour. Its ethnic disfigurement of Europe never entered the mind of employers or unions. Such a strictly economic conception, oriented to production and consumption, is one of egalitarianism’s great dogmas.
Today, however, the Homo oeconomicus born of Eighteenth and Nineteenth century utopianism has fallen into crisis at the very moment ‘he’ seemed triumphant. His failing stems from the supposition that man is a ‘citizen of the world’, uniquely motivated by his economic needs. But we are now witnessing a planetary return of the ‘needs of identity’ (culturally, ethnically, religiously), as well as the ‘needs of the will to power’. The economy can never meet or master these needs. The principal aim of contemporary politics is to make man happy through economics, as if his well-being were strictly a matter of wealth.
In a word, the notion of Homo oeconomicus is founded on a totally erroneous interpretation of human motivation. Apart from the historical parenthesis of the last two centuries, the most profound human motivations have never been about economics or consumption. Human nature is more about sentiment than matter; its most profound impulses carry man far beyond economic concerns — toward immaterial satisfactions (feelings, faith, patriotism, etc.).
Homo oeconomicus represents a diminished man, domesticated, and deprived, above all, of his natural traits. Europeans have succumbed to such a domestication. But this won’t last forever; human nature will eventually reclaim its rights. And besides, this type of man is miserable: in the wealthiest, most economically successful market societies of the West, suicide rates are significantly higher than in poor societies, past or present.
Western civilisation has a totally mistaken view of human nature. Man isn’t primarily a Homo oeconomicus, but, more generally, in the larger view of the Greek philosophers, a zôon politikon, a ‘political animal’. The repercussions of such an error will not be long in coming.
(see bourgeoisism; economism; society, market)
