We see this reflected in the drought of new ideas to address the multitude of issues we – as one species – are facing around the world. Solution to immigration? Build bigger walls to keep them out, like China with the Mongols. Solution to economic crisis? Simple marketing, we’ll apply some superficial policy ‘make-up’ and hope people think we’re doing something about it while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Solution to tensions with Russia? Let’s rattle our sabres and guns at them from this side of the border; it’s a time-honoured tradition, nothing wrong with that. Solution to environmental problems? Strengthen the economy and blame the population for buying the wrong things. Solution to political extortion by the financial sector and the erosion of democracy? Shhhht… don’t talk about it so the media won’t report on it; if I close my eyes and hide under my bedsheets, then it’s not real.

This is stupid, and most of the solutions which have been proposed are ineffective since they pay very little attention to the root causes of the issues at hand. Even though we won’t hear about it in the news (sorry I can’t inform the population right now, I’m too busy paying attention to Johnny Depp’s dogs), most people realise that little has changed and that these solutions will do little to address problems in Europe and the rest of the world. But too many of us are paralysed, silent; conditioned to accept the madness in the world with a resigned, Pavlovian response that ‘people are bad and bad things happen’, hoping that existing governments and institutions – whose policies and practices are the origin of most of the issues – will solve the world’s problems.

Interestingly enough, I think a case can be made that Europe and needs a new enlightenment, a new attempt to remove the shackles of conventional wisdom and reconsider how we do things, and why we do things. But how does this relate to the European Union’s secret negotiation of trade agreements?

The original enlightenment was highly influential; it helped European people redefine how they saw themselves and each other, and re-examined the role of the state and religion and the relationship between the two, looking to intellect and reason rather than mysticism for establishing a system for how society should be. An examination of the EU’s secretive processes concerning trade agreements, most prominently the ongoing negotiations surrounding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), can help us understand how a renewed attempt to highlight mysticism and dispel orthodoxy can help us re-enlighten the European Union.

The European Commission has received much flak from NGOs, activists and concerned citizens about the lack of transparency surrounding the negotiation of this free trade agreement. They argue that, based on previous experience, the trade agreement will result in lower wages, higher inequality, less effective environmental and social regulations and will generally undermine democracy, instead transferring (more) unaccountable power and influence to corporations and private capital. Much of the media, the European Commission, many national governments and businesses reject these arguments and point to assessments and policy analyses which show that much can and will be gained from the agreement in terms of economic growth, competitiveness and prosperity. For what it’s worth, I think the TTIP is an assault on freedom but what I’m more interested in right now is the secrecy surrounding the agreement.

For many, the lack of transparency on the TTIP is shocking and incomprehensible. Why on earth are the politicians and technocrats being so secretive? After all, European Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström has indicated that   “we, from the EU Commission’s side, have made the TTIP negotiations the most transparent bilateral trade negotiations ever.” The assertion is true but measured against a standard so low that the word transparency is robbed of any meaning outside of its Orwellian interpretation (since the other negotiations had less, but equally meaningless transparency). After a series of (embarrassing/timely – delete as appropriate) leaks, the European Commission decided to step up its approach to transparency and lock the thousands of negotiation documents in a sealed reading room  , preventing the taking of any notes by inspecting politicians and denying joint access for those who need expert help in interpreting the documents. America, incredibly enough  , has responded to calls for transparency by opening additional reading rooms in a number of its European embassies to facilitate access for national politicians. Am I a cynic for wondering whether the United States will monitor the activity of those who review the documents? These are, of course, proud moments for democracy and the public interest. But it gets worse.

According to the Corporate Europe Observatory  , the DG Trade negotiators, in the run up to the TTIP discussions, held 597 closed-door meetings with various interest groups: 88 percent of these meetings were with business lobbyists in various forms, shapes and sizes; 9 percent of the meetings were with public interest groups of all stripes. Furthermore, email exchanges between business groups and the TTIP negotiators were friendly and inviting, looking for further cooperation, compared to the standard email receipts sent to the public interest groups. Richard Normington from TheCityUK, a lobby group for the UK’s influential financial sector, noted that   the European Commission’s proposal for cooperation on financial services regulation   “reflected so closely the approach of TheCityUK that a bystander would have thought it came straight out of our brochure on TTIP.”

You may be wondering: How can this be possible? How can ostensibly public-minded officials engage in such obvious malpractices and, this is the craziest part, think that it’s all okay? Pretend nothing’s happening? Not even worth discussing? Do they not see that the public has a right to know?

The easy answer is to point to corruption and blame the negotiators the same way that bankers are demonized. I can understand this response; I actually think it’s rather reasonable given the information at hand. Unfortunately, I am not cynical enough to believe that the whole team of negotiators consists of people who are willing to sell themselves out to the highest bidder. I have no doubt that some higher-ups pushing for the TTIP negotiations care nothing for  the broader public – events in Greece have shown us that – but I believe that most negotiators and people working on the TTIP, like most people in most places, are decent people doing their jobs and doing their best. I would love to sit down for a beer with them and ask what they are actually thinking, especially because the endless stream of marketing messages is rather tiring and uninformative. So if most of them are not corrupt, why the secrecy?

I blame secularism and the enlightenment for TTIP secrecy.

I should probably elaborate. With the spread of enlightenment ideas, the influence of religious orthodoxy was increasingly removed from the actions of government. With these developments, religious values and principles came to play a decreasingly important role in the governance of our societies. The decreasing importance of religious values created a vacuum which was ultimately filled by rational, economics-oriented values such as competition, self-interest and the pursuit of wealth.

But rationality is not an objective or superior internal quality. It’s not even rational, no less than religious or social values and principles are inherently objective or rational. If I see a person being attacked on the other side of the road, I can easily rationalise calling the police. Equally, I can rationalise not getting involved and walking away because it’s too dangerous. Tell me – which option is rational? Picture a cisgender guy who is afraid of approaching women; it’s rational to hold back and not approach many women, because the consistent failure in approaching them can be tremendously painful and demoralising. But equally, it’s rational to keep persisting because, if you ultimately want a relationship with a special someone, you will have to keep trying. So do you focus on short-term or long-term rationality? Collective or individual rationality? What do you do? What is rational? It is a tricky concept, an illusion in terms of absolute predictive functionality. Intuitively we can see that rationality is pragmatic, debatable, contextual, and often mediated by the personality and insecurities of the decision-maker in question.

But many people have been convinced into believing that a form of objective rationality exists, one which we can find in the toolset of mainstream economic theory, representing the best way and one truth to organising our societies. Where once Europe laboured for the glory of God, they now labour for the glory of the European Single Market, may its bounties rain down on us all in equal measure while the rising tide lifts all boats. The all-knowing (no information asymmetries), efficient (free market / invisible hand combo), ever-present, competition-inducing market economy is fierce. It makes demands upon us all; failure and success are our individual responsibility; consumption and productivity are our purposes in this nasty, brutish and short life. Glory to those who succeed in the eternal rat race, and punishment for the unbelievers who fail to compete and enrich themselves.

Even after the enlightenment and the pursuit of rational ideals and progress, we see that our secular societies are still governed according to values which are – and this is important – articles of faith. But we deny this fact and shroud ourselves and government policies in ‘objective’ rationality, oblivious to the irrationality and mystical nature of this belief, blind to the waters in which we swim.

Setting aside all of the different forms of economics (Marxist, classical, ecological, sacred, etc.), the neoliberal economic mainstream in Europe, strongly influenced by the U.S. after the Second World War  , holds strongly to the idea that “Economics is above all a science of measurement” (Freakonomics). “The power of economics lies in its rigor. Economics is scientific; it follows the scientific method of stating a formal refutable theory, testing the theory, and revising the theory based on the evidence” (Lazear  ). This is simply not true; economics is a diverse field whose mainstream, neoliberal expression seizes upon a number of economic assumptions and models and seeks to teleologically explain the world accordingly. Is this not similar to reading a religious text and then explaining the world according to the principles contained therein? Neoliberal economics, like any source claiming the truth, is a single lens through which to view the world. To claim a form of universal ‘objective’ truth on the basis of ‘objective’ economics (focusing only on individual rationality with a plethora of politically-loaded assumptions) is an irrational form of self-delusion, no different in kind to the mysticism which once claimed that it was right and just that kings were descended from God, pre-destined to rule their lands.

Enlightenment reasoning which gave us secularism, the separation of church and state, has now birthed a secular, neoliberal economic faith which makes a quasi-religious claim to objective truth. With proponents of ‘objective’ economic ‘science’ as its priests, its practitioners have donned themselves with the robes and professionalism of a natural scientist. But instead of looking for natural laws, they believe they have already found a set of natural economic principles. The economic doctrine is clear and the truth has been discovered; it is the purpose of the priesthood to apply the rules and achieve the optimal result for the Economy. For we work in His name (the ´Economy´ is certainly a man).

These ‘objective’ principles are written in stone; their essential validity is considered beyond reproach. The faithful in the European Commission DG Trade who are working on the TTIP are doing no more than applying neoliberal objective rationality in their work, like a scientist performing experiments in her lab. In their mind it makes no more sense to democratically discuss the TTIP negotiations than it does for an engineer to democratically debate the precise dimensions of the screw or engine she is working on. They’re the experts, and they have found the truth; the public doesn’t understand and if they do, then they share our faith in neoliberal economics and are on our side. Other practitioners of ‘scientific’ economics (their priest counterparts in the corporations) are called upon for expert advice, a skill set that is not similarly found in the public interest bodies, whose interventions demonstrate a lack of understanding and faith in our economic paradigm. Hence the 88 percent business lobbyists involved in the discussions before the TTIP negotiations, and the 9 percent public interest lobbyists.

This, I think, is a large part of the explanation for why the TTIP negotiations have been kept so secret. For why corporations are on board for the negotiations and for why the public interest has been side-lined. I also think it explains why business-oriented political parties of all stripes and colours – left and right – self-proclaimed fans of democracy, see no problem with leaving the secretive negotiations to the ‘experts’. To them it makes no more sense to open the negotiations of the TTIP to democratic scrutiny than it does for NASA to democratically debate the dimensions of their  (amazing) new fuel-free engines. But the metaphor is inaccurate; a more accurate comparison would be to compare the trade agreement negotiations with the election of a new Pope – it’s a question for the cardinals, not the plebs.

Europe and the world have no need for additional theories which build uncritically on orthodoxy and contemporary mysticism and doctrine. What we need are people who are willing to think critically and question conventional wisdom and why we do what we do. As Einstein said, we cannot solve our problems with the same level of consciousness that created them. We need a re-enlightenment.