The Socioeconomic Function of Evil

Abstract

This article challenges various theories that depict the capitalist epoch as a process of civilization to posit a new theoretical framework built around the concept of pseudo-pacification. Principal indicators of civilizing momentum, such as the decline in homicide and brutal punishment, are relocated in a new perspective that juxtaposes them with the concomitant proliferation of non-violent crimes and the types of aggressive sociosymbolic competition that energize and structure consumer culture. What seems to have occurred is not the repression or dissipation of aggressive libidinal energy but its conversion into a dynamic yet largely pacified form that performs the dual function of protecting property and expanding production and trade by intensifying and democratizing sociosymbolic competition. The pseudo-pacification process does not counteract but stimulates and reproduces aggressive drives in sublimated forms to create a fragile social peace whose potential disintegrative forces are manufactured at the very core of its own socioeconomic and cultural systems.