ABSTRACT
One of the essential differences between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberalism, laissez-faire capitalism, and neoliberalism is the understanding of the natural basis of exchange and the market. J. Lacan points out that the modern discourse of individual freedom and autonomy, which, of course, generates the idea of the meme in the first place, has the same delusional structure as psychosis. In the film A Beautiful Mind directed by Ron Howard, John F. Nash Jr, played by Russell Crowe, and is shown struggling to come up with the original idea that would form the basis of his PhD and future reputation. By the early 1990s, international recognition for the utility of Nash’s equilibrium resulted in the Nobel Prize. The practical example Nash used to formulate his equilibrium in his PhD thesis was poker, but in A Beautiful Mind, the film that was made of his life in the wake of his Nobel Prize, strangely cinematic and anti-cinematic at the same time.
