not disturbed today even when such investments produce nothing at all, or even if their profits are sequestered to bank accounts outside the society whose �public interest� is assumed to be served. In these ways, then, the market�s �invisible hand� operates as a covert law of magic � necessitating wondrous effects of the common interest of a society, even when its operations result, in fact, in opposite material consequences. By this pangloss theodicy of the market, the actual effects of unlimited investor self-seeking are assumed to be necessarily the opposite of what they increasingly in fact are. Life-destructive commodities, or an exploited worker majority of society, or increasingly degraded and collapsing conditions of planetary life, or the bonds of society itself, are all blinkered out from view.

This systematic decoupling from the actual world is a defining characteristic of fanatical religious metaphysics. But this theoretical delinkage from destructive material effects is not seen. It is, instead, formalized out in neo-classical theory under the sweeping category of �externalities� � a theoretical correlative of �the fallen material world.� Only postulated �equilibriums� and �optimums� remain within the self-referential paradigm to sustain the illusion of the invisible hand�s unfailing benevolence for the economy, and for the public good.

The system-deciding principle that the commercial self-seeking of competing individuals in the micro produces in the macro what is in �the public interest� resembles Mandeville�s Fable of the Bees in its inner logic. It is teasingly defensible in a select range of cases, but could only be a �necessary� cause-effect relationship to a pangloss metaphysic. But neo-classical theory protects the regulating magical assumption by an armour of prop assumptions which are systematically false in the real world � for example, competing atomic producers with no influence on supply, demand or government regulations. In this way, its paradigm conceals the underpinning structure of divine design by diversionary theoretical devices.

Yet, in truth, the market doctrine�s religious metaphysic exceeds traditional theologies in its magical thinking. The �invisible hand� does not operate by the ad hoc magical interventions to which previous religions have been typically confined. Now the world is ruled by a magical system, �the invisible hand,� which infallibly alchemizes out of private money-greed the necessary results of the collective economic and social good. In �the global market era,� this necessarily benevolent outcome of the boundless and state promoted acquisitiveness of investors is universalized as necessary and inevitable everywhere and for all � across all societies of vastly different histories and cultures and with no time horizon, whatever the opposition of publics and whatever the ill consequences in fact. If in reality civil and ecological degradation and collapse systemically increase, the �optimum� or �equilibrium� of market supply and demand is still assumed as inexorably regulated by and for fulfilment of the invisible hand�s design, and the common welfare necessarily achieved by its infallible instruments of competing prices and monetary self-seeking � with peoples across the world ordered not �to interfere� in the operations of this preordained order of the Market.

The Neo-Liberal Rapture

Adam Smith�s postulate of this system-magic has, without notice, deepened and extended in its dogmatic assumption since the �neo-liberal� rapture began. Underneath the proliferating econometric equations and technical jargon purporting strict scientific method, the same logos of magical thinking has persisted in market orthodoxy for over two hundred years. Now �rationality� itself is axiomaticized as monetary self-maximization and is assumed to propel ever more benevolent results for society; increasingly vast inherited private money hoards are naturalized as �original endowments�; and worldly outcomes of universalizing insecurity and depredated global ecosystems are, in theoretical circles, deliriously idealized as �the harmony of each with all by the natural liberty of the market.� The regulating religious idea of �the invisible hand,� originally revealed en phrase in the Wealth of Nations, has in this way been built over generations into the pre-conscious theodicy of an organizing world religion. Unlike avowedly religious frames of mind, however, the underpinning religio-moral metaphysic is repressed from view, and hypostacized as the final higher purpose by scientistic axioms.

Manna and cargo cults of diverse kinds have long bewitched our kind, but none with more systematic schemes of superstitious thinking than �the invisible hand� that necessarily produces �the public interest� of a society from purely selfish motives without human purpose or co-operative plan having any role in the necessarily serendipitous economic and social outcomes by the market�s inviolable design. If this description seems overarched, then identify a single mainstream market axiom, principle or theorist�s work which states or entails a negation or rejection of any part of it. Yet all along this magical frame of thought