Point 109. A theoretical freedom

Economic liberalism, or liberal capitalism, is the child of two modern subversions, one against God and the other against kings. It, however, constitutes a third subversion that, this time, is waged against human communities. It is anti-ecological.

1. It is the practice, depicted later as a scientific theory, of a social life without divine positive law to direct, regulate and soften its brutal mechanisms, and without political authority to subject private interests to the major necessities of the common good and so maintain a certain indispensable equilibrium and stability, a superior justice. Thus material, and above all financial, social power develops all its effects without hindrance. The pursuit of the highest profit and yield, the domination of the market, the monopoly of goods, and thereby of power and honours, even to the buying of consciences, prevail over every other consideration.

Such is the materialist civilisation, or rather such is the triumph over Christian civilisation of the old Talmudic concept of existence, become the basis of Anglo-Saxon society, Calvinist and Puritan: wealth is a sign of blessing!

2. Such a theory of life in society would in itself be quite inhuman. To invite millions upon millions of men freed from all constraint and from all moral reserve, to organise and lead their lives as they like, guided only by their immediate material interests, constitutes the most senseless manifesto of social revolution. Such a frenzy for economic freedom implies a radical negation of all the natural factors of ecological equilibrium, for want of which man becomes his own worst enemy! All family, communitarian and corporative prudence will be banished from individual relationships, as will all political order and any fraternal mystical spirit of charity.

3. The practice of this liberalism is even more monstrous still. For it gives rise – above and beyond the billions of individuals freed from every law, or rather deprived of all protection by virtue of the System – to an even more powerful owning class. This class is authorised by the System to enrich itself still more, to dominate the economy, and to consolidate itself in dynasties, coalitions and multinational societies, it alone benefiting from the social cadres, from the ecological prudence and force that it keeps for itself and refuses to others, especially the poor, in order to guarantee its own prosperity! For such is the hidden malice of the liberal capitalist system.

But this prudence of caste that is maintained amid a theory and climate of general imprudence, this dynastic family ecology the strength of which lies in the general dissolution of society, finishes by being contaminated itself by the very anarchy it preaches. Plutocracy, having decomposed society according to the rule of its system, meets its own ruin in this very same system.