There might be a recession coming — but shhhh, don’t say it out loud.

Like actors and Macbeth, or the subject of divorce at a fractious dinner party, economists are wary of the word “recession,” as if simply uttering it could bring the world’s monetary systems to a grinding halt. How ridiculous.

Not half as ridiculous, though, as the fact that it’s fairly close to the truth. For the hopes and livelihoods of the world’s citizens are indeed tied to the fortunes of a flibbertigibbet system, driven by hearsay and gossip, managed by people who’ve made a career out of spending other people’s money, underwritten by the ethics of hardened roulette addicts, and sustained by a level self-confidence that makes Britney Spears shine as a beacon of stolid integrity.

Worst of all, while it’s one thing to see perfectly mature, respectable citizens of, say, London tumble into despair at the news that their house has lost 2.5 percent in value (hardly the same as losing 2.5 percent of your actual house), it’s quite another that the same London citizens are sent into a tizzy by brokers in New York losing faith in Pacific

Rim car manufacturing and fearing the worst for the banana harvest in Madagascar. Double worst of all is the fact that the said tizzy can wipe out the profits of Madagascar banana growers, making the success or otherwise of the harvest completely immaterial.

One reads explanations of all this, of course, as one has read accounts that explain why it was once cheaper to fly British apples to South Africa for polishing before flying them back to be sold and consumed, or why stable mid-sized businesses get closed down because their healthy profits are merely static. I’m no economist (that much will at least be clear) but I can certainly see that the explanations are rational. Rational, as in “Jim shot himself in the foot because he was pointing a loaded gun at his foot and happened to pull the trigger”.

Free-market capitalism is normally defended along one of the following three lines: (i) that it is better than communism, (ii) that it works pretty well and we don’t see what all the fuss is about, (iii) that both the shareholder system and the principle of capital growth are benevolent expressions of the self-interest and greed found in human nature.

The first two — (i) et alors?; (ii) try wearing glasses — don’t count for much. What about (iii)?

Growth of the kind which investors require, even when they’re hedging, is indeed related to a lack of equilibrium in human nature. The ultimately indeterminate nature of human desire means that we, unlike members of the animal and plant kingdoms, will not settle for desiring the things we need purely in order to remain ourselves; rather, in contradistinction to the natural equilibrium that governs everything else, it is in the nature of humanity’s unnatural desires to continually outstrip themselves. We are addicted, in other words, to growth.

Nor would you want to change this fact. Growth in this sense is what makes us human. This basic imbalance, observed by philosophers since Aristotle and psychologists since Freud, is what gives human intelligence its dynamic quality, and the ability to mistrust our received responses to the world is originally what allowed perception to lead to cognition, value to judgment, material need to spiritual desire. It is what provides the human sense of goodness with its nobility, and evil with its baseness. Ultimately it is why, in Rousseau’s great words, man is born free.

Self-interest lies at the bottom of this, just as it lies at the bottom of everything else we do. But self-interest only becomes truly selfish when our sense of our individual good is alienated from our interest in the good of those with whom we identify.

The bond of sympathy between members of the same family, community, species, and the common understanding that this fosters, guarantees that the experience of self-interest extends outward no less surely than it drives us onward.

So no problem there. No problem, that is, so long as our (self) interest in growth is tied to a system of values capable of sustaining it. But, in literally capitalizing on the baser, individuated experience of self-interest as the driving principle behind market growth, the shareholder economy simply radicalizes these basic elements of our nature, dehumanizes the sphere in which they operate, and ties our experience of value to something which in itself is without value, being only a principle of exchange.

The system is not only naturally inflationary; it is actively morally perverse.

Everyone has to make a living, of course, but do we have to make it at the expense of everything else? Not that there’s anything irrational about that.