Money Wisdom #445

"Reason will not help. The ethical system implanted in each of us by our upbringing (even a rebel is influenced by what he rebels against) was not derived from any reasonable principles; those who conveyed it to us were rarely able to give any rational account of it, or indeed to formulate it explicitly at all. They handed on to us what society had taught them, in the same way as they handed on to us the language that they had learned to speak."

Joan Robinson Economic Philosophy (1962) p. 17

Money Wisdom #444

"...since Freud exposed to us our propensity to rationalization and Marx showed how our ideas spring from ideologies we have begun to ask: Why do I believe what I believe?
[...]
In the general mass of notions and sentiments that make up an ideology, those concerned with economic life play a large part and economics itself... ...has always been partly a vehicle for the ruling ideology of each period as well as partly a method of scientific investigation."

Joan Robinson Economic Philosophy (1962) p.1