the way we look at medieval Europe's obsession with God, or the Egyptian's belief in the afterlife. It is, like both those cultural dominants, laughably false. But that makes it no less effective at shaping our world. The principle of the "free market" and its system of "efficiency" is a load of nonsense, like the divine right of kings. It will be laughed at and considered primitive, probably sooner than we think. But for now we live under it. That the divine right of kings was a ridiculous nonsense in 1280 didn't make it any less effective at securing the social order. Just like our stupidities about the market, it seemed obvious that this was the only correct way to order society for humans. Generations lived and died under the delusional beliefs about the divine right of kings. Many more generations will live and die under the current market system, but it is a piddling nonsense, and only the utterly deluded believe that it is obvious, tied to human nature, or better than any other way of organizing humans.
Future humans will laugh at capitalism the way we laugh at the stupidity of the medieval church. That is, unless capitalism destroys humans as a whole, which is utterly possible.
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