In the passage above, everything is correct. True, only within certain narrow confines of a formula that describes itself. The trouble is that in our country, everyone professionally obligated to think will think within these confines. This is the reason for my despair—that is, if someone decides to worry about changing the situation with “improving domestic demand,” they will think, for example, about what on earth to do about “weak credit activity.” And will end up in a dead end, or, worse yet, will start proposing to “stimulate” this activity.
Mainstream economics, a brief course of which any housewife can explain to you, surprisingly coincides with mass beliefs and superstitions in the sense that it tries to describe equilibrium. From one pipe it flows in, from the other it flows out. If somewhere something has increased, then somewhere it has decreased. We are so poor because the oligarchs stole everything from us. And so on. In other places, mainstream economics says the same thing and people’s beliefs are the same, only people there have long since gotten used to acting contrary to their beliefs and the science of economics, because that yields results. They often do so without even being aware of it and continue to believe that equilibrium actually exists. We, however, live in a place where, for seventy years and more, Sonderkommandos diligently worked to promote instincts and beliefs—units that not only brainwashed us but also physically destroyed those who wondered where things came from.