Economic Man needs no heart, because love and God are dead

By David McElroy · October 2, 2019

In the modern era, Economic Man has had his heart ripped out. He doesn’t need it anymore.

Economic Man is supposed to be a perfectly rational creature. The culture has declared God to be dead. It’s ridiculed sacrificial love and religion and faith. Devotion to family is frowned upon. Economic Man has nothing left to believe in other than production and efficiency and acquisition.

Economic Man isn’t supposed to have feelings. He certainly has no soul. He can deal only in the emotions his brain can process without having to feel. He can be angry. He can be jealous. He can covet what someone else has. He can hate.

But Economic Man is not supposed to feel deeply. He’s not supposed to feel the painful joy of true love. He’s not supposed to feel the prick of a heart that has been pierced by joyful feelings which can make him cry.

Did you even notice when the culture ripped out your heart and taught you not to feel? Did you notice when you were stripped of your humanity and turned you into a rational robot focused on production and efficiency?

Is it any wonder that life seems more and more empty to Economic Man?

We’ve torn down God and religion. Even family is a shadow of what it used to be. Family is just people who live in the same house, passing one another on their separate paths toward their own goals. There’s little striving together toward the common good.

Your value to the family is measured by the money you bring home. Nothing more.

Anybody who cares for anything beyond money and success is a sucker. Economic Man knows better. He doesn’t believe in anything other than Federal Reserve Notes. His faith is in the Almighty Dollar, that god from which all true worth flows.

The culture is increasingly nihilistic and empty and cold. We are people who are searching for meaning — or who have given up that search entirely and turned life into a hedonistic search for ever-more pleasure.

There’s nothing wrong with money or success or pleasure, but if those are your preeminent values, you will live an empty life and teach your children the same emptiness that afflicts you.

Life doesn’t have to be this way, but modern culture has taught you that there is no other way to success. There is no way to be loved and accepted other than producing more, achieving more, and accumulating more.

When is the last time you cried tears of joy which flowed from the still-beating heart which your culture doesn’t want you to acknowledge? When have you allowed yourself to follow a path which others wouldn’t understand, but which your heart knows is right for you? When is the last time you set aside financial considerations and pursued the love and acceptance which your heart ached to find?

The things which make life worth living don’t come with dollar signs attached.

When I experience the painful joy of the celestial light show known as a sunset, nobody sends me a bill — but my heart swells and hurts with the pain of pure joy.

When my dog or one of my cats is happy with the life I help them experience — when a cat purrs at my touch or when Lucy joyously runs around the back yard with me — there is no price tag attached, but my heart aches with happiness to know these small creatures are happy with what I’ve given them.

Earlier this year, when someone sent me pictures of a little girl whose face I hadn’t seen since she was a baby, it made my heart warm and joyful and it filled my eyes with tears of happiness. There was no value in such an experience to Economic Man, but it was a value which my heart understood.

You and I grew up in a technical culture which values things which humanity never thought to value until the last couple of hundred years. We grew up in a culture which taught us to be skeptical of feeling deeply and joyfully. We grew up in a culture which taught us to be obedient and rational robots obeying the directives of our programming.

I am not Economic Man.

I once thought that way. I once measured myself that way. I once had my values rooted deeply in the ideas of economic calculus. In many ways, I had lost my humanity. I had lost my heart.

I don’t reject money. I don’t reject success. I don’t reject production.

But I do reject the notion that those things are the most important things in life. I reject the idea that those things can take precedence over love, over family, over living life as a decent human being.

You have a choice to make. There is no middle ground. You can either live by the values of an economic culture or you can reclaim the values of historic humanity. You cannot have both.

On the day you’re on your deathbed, you’re not going to beg to look at the printouts of your wealth one more time. You’re not going to ask to be carried to your fancy car to be impressed one more time. You’re not going to ask everybody you know whether you have finally impressed them.

You are going to want to be loved. You are going to want to be with people who share your values. You are going to want to know that you have given every bit of love you were capable of.

Love is what will matter then. Why not throw aside the nihilistic values that your culture has taught you? Why not learn again how to be human? Why not live for love now — while you still can?

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There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

I don’t agree with everything the late Neil Postman wrote, but I would argue that no other recent scholar gives coherent structure to the last few hundred years in the way his books do. I’m currently re-reading his book, “Technopoly,” and I’m comforted to have a scholar give structure and definitions to things which I’ve observed and barely understood. I was enough of a technophile when I first read this book that I bristled at much of what it said. I didn’t want him to be right and it was easier to dismiss him as a Luddite. But as I see technology continue to enable an information glut which is changing society for the worse, I find comfort in his explanations for how we got here. I don’t yet know the solutions, but I finally understand the problems more clearly. I suspect that much of what we need to make life more meaningful can be found in things we accidentally threw away in the past to make room for technologies. I strongly urge you to read the book and think about its implications.

I’d like to write a modern version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — a more cynical one — with a realistic ending for today’s audience. In this new version, the little boy points out on social media that the emperor is naked but nobody listens to him. Instead, everybody keeps posting grander and grander praise for the emperor’s non-existent clothes. The cognitive dissonance makes the people unable to hear the child who tells them the truth, because they’re getting social media praise — likes and so forth — for their lies. The confused child eventually feels so defeated that he shuts up and walks away. He’s so hurt and disappointed by this that he withdraws from the world and spends years in therapy, trying to figure out whether the rest of the world is crazy or if he’s the crazy one. Ever since I was a child, I wanted to be that little boy, but few want to hear the truth today. Either I’m crazy or else our culture has gone insane.

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