It's a non-optional social convention.

But while the public is coached with a steady chant of stop thinking, the market proceeds on its benevolent way, unhindered by the corrosive disbeliefs of the New Right: It does know what’s good for us. The errant ways of bureaucrats and the hubris of policy are to be excoriated in resentful small-town editorials without number, but the market moves serenely along, now and forever, beyond our earthly powers of reckoning. Its booms and busts are as natural as earth and sky, and our duty is not to engage in insolent schemes by which we might control the market, but to reconcile ourselves to its majestic ways; to make our own culture as “flexible” as Third Wave capitalism demands; to offer up unquestioningly the prosperity of generations when “competitiveness” calls. To appease the market we will surrender every vestige of self-government, abandon the ways and beliefs and tastes and faiths of centuries, turn our cities into warehouses of the “amenities” by which the mobile, transnational yuppie can be served. And history is the baggage needed least of all, the dethroned god whose every trace the zealots of the market seek to efface, rationalize, or enclose conveniently in a glass display case.

It’s a strange species of populism that declares the people’s will to be the destruction of the people’s way of life. But the crowning mind-fuck of this panorama of intellectual obscenity has to be the perversity of the label fancied by the architects of this chaos - they like to call themselves “conservatives.”