ABSTRACT
Economics is the only social science in which Nobel prizes are offered, since decades, and economic theory fancies itself as being based on pure rationality. Yet, this chapter will argue that the economy never existed anywhere before the 17th century, while economics, at its core, embodies pure trickster logic, built on infinite substitutability, and it is this trickster logic which it spreads now on the entire world, threatening with extinction nature, tradition, society, but even individual personality. The affinity between economic theory and trickster logic is most clearly visible in the idea of creative destruction, main engine of economic development and justification of capitalism, according to Joseph Schumpeter, one of the most important economists of the 20th century, but it can be captured in almost any of the major modern economic concepts, like opportunity cost – in which the value of any activity is to be measured by what is not performed instead; or the theory of marginal utility – where ‘utility’ really means pleasure, while ‘marginal’ is not a term describing the real world, but a normative perspective that implies pushing any activity to its limits, and thus is one of the underlying reasons of contemporary permanent liminality. Economic theory is identical with the teaching of tricks, by which a radically corrupt mode of behaving and way of seeing the world – in which everything is seen to be valorised in terms of how it can be exchanged or substituted, thereby its integrity taken away or corrupted – is spread around the planet, generating unprecedented destruction and suffering.
