ABSTRACT
On the shoulders of religion, humanism invoked a Promethean concept of man as a secular being whose reason liberated him from dependency on divine revelation, bringing him a huge step closer to the core project of self-generation, ready to rebel against Heaven and Earth, to dominate the planet. The hero is the culture bringer, the rebel against the natural condition, whose mission is to establish the human world. As a form of cultural heroics, science is a quest for ultimate truth and the ultimate constituents of reality—or at least for a satisfying story concerning the natural world. Monumental heroics have been nowhere more ironic than in the "science" of economics. The whole point of economics is prediction and control. Economics aims to manage "natural resources"—which means the planet itself. The disasters of economic prediction should be a lesson for natural science.
