The Priesthood of Poverty: A Polemic Against Neoliberal Economics

I have walked the villages of Lanka with Farmer Mudiyanse Tennekoon and Manik Sandrasagra. I have sat in homes where people live their entire lives within a few square miles, where a woman in Matara had never seen the sea though it thundered just beyond her horizon. I have been received with hospitality, kindness, and cultural education by those who had almost nothing, yet gave everything.

- by Feisal Mansoor

And I have seen, in the urban wastelands, the opposite: the atomized, embittered, suspicious poor. Stripped of their cultural safety nets, forced into a market that recognizes no human bonds, they are kept in permanent precarity permanently off balance, permanently enslaved.

This is no accident. This is the dispensation of neoliberal economics, the theology taught in universities under the name of “science.” It is not science. It is doctrine, and like all priesthoods, its function is control.

Scarcity as Gospel

Neoliberal economics begins with a lie: that scarcity is eternal and natural. That human beings, driven by “unlimited wants,” must be disciplined into obedience by markets. This lie is the cornerstone. For as long as scarcity is taught as law, there will never be leisure, never time to reflect, never the possibility of redemption. Reflection belongs to the few; the masses are kept in survival mode.

Technology as Shackles

Technology, we are told, is neutral, progressive, liberating. Yet everywhere it has been deployed, it has been shackled to oppression: the factory clock, the plantation railway, the surveillance algorithm. The poor do not experience technology as emancipation, but as weapon used to extract more work, more data, more submission.

Crises as Ritual