Financialized subjects stay in fictions because fictions order protean reality

Evidence

Even in the neoliberal economics inspired by Hayek’s belief in a “fluid,” spontaneous order, economic subjects are expected to “translate” fictions into “facts” when devising practices of self-governance (Spieker 2013). Faced with the perpetual domino of collapsing promises, from housing and healthcare to work security and family, the translation from fiction to facts is now all but sidestepped. More and more, homo speculans lingers in the space of fictions, not irrationally, but because fictions become the most reliable ordering principle in a protean reality. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 79

Categorization

• SEED: This reframes ‘people living in fantasy’ as rational ordering under volatility — a strong angle for the reader’s financialized-populism assessment.
• XREF: Directly sets up the reader’s question of whether populists vote ‘against interests’ or make rational bets under uncertainty. — connects to: Fictitious capital means finance depends on society’s shared fictions — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 42; Financialization both produce and depend on cultural fictions like precarity and creativity — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 54; Fictions become the most reliable ordering principle amid collapsing social promises — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 119