It has come to that time of year again, a season of ritualistic humiliation and intellectual posturing known as the Marjorie Deane finance and economics internship application window. The Economist—a publication that views the world through the clinical, unblinking eyes of a debt collector with a subscription to a bespoke shirt service—is once again looking for fresh, uncorrupted minds to feed into its ideological woodchipper. For the uninitiated, the Marjorie Deane scheme is a program designed to take the brightest young minds and teach them how to write about human suffering in the passive voice, ensuring that every global catastrophe is framed as a ‘fascinating structural adjustment’ rather than a tragedy.

The Economist occupies a unique space in the media landscape. It is the only magazine that manages to be simultaneously incredibly arrogant and entirely anonymous. By stripping its writers of bylines, it creates a collective, hive-mind authority that suggests its articles are being beamed down directly from a god who cares very deeply about interest rate hikes and the privatization of water in sub-Saharan Africa. To apply for this internship is to signal one’s desire to become a cog in this machine, to surrender one’s individuality for the privilege of explaining why the middle class is a quaint, 20th-century relic that is currently hindering the efficiency of global markets.

The Marjorie Deane foundation itself is a monument to the recursive nature of financial journalism. It exists to foster excellence in the reporting of finance and economics, which in practice means training a new generation to describe the movements of capital with the same reverence a medieval monk might use to describe the movements of the saints. The scheme isn’t just a job; it’s a secular priesthood. The successful applicant will spend several months in London or New York, surrounded by people who believe that a well-placed graph is more valuable than a soul, learning how to sanitize the messy reality of human greed into a series of ‘rational incentives.’

One must imagine the typical applicant. They likely possess a CV that is a dizzying array of internships at boutique hedge funds and volunteer work that look suspiciously like networking. They are young people who, instead of rebelling against the status quo, have decided to audition for the role of its chief stenographer. They don’t want to change the world; they want to be the ones who explain why it’s impossible to change it without upsetting the bond markets. They are the future architects of austerity, the kind of people who see a breadline and wonder if the queueing system could be improved by a more robust application of game theory.

The task set before them is rigorous. They must demonstrate a grasp of economics that is both deep and narrow. They must prove they can write with the ‘The Economist voice’—that specific blend of condescension and clarity that makes the reader feel like they are being lectured by a very wealthy uncle who is about to cut them out of his will. The goal is to reach a level of intellectual detachment so profound that one can discuss the collapse of an entire nation’s currency with the same emotional engagement one might bring to a discussion about the weather in Brussels.

There is, of course, a profound irony in the existence of such a scheme. At a time when the global economy feels less like a science and more like a series of increasingly desperate gambles by a handful of over-leveraged tech bros, The Economist continues to pretend that there are rules. It continues to act as if the world is a giant spreadsheet that just needs a bit of tidy formatting. The Marjorie Deane interns are the ones tasked with keeping this illusion alive. They are the ones who will write the articles reassuring the Davos set that everything is under control, provided we all just stay calm and accept that the future belongs to the algorithms.

In the end, this internship is a perfect microcosm of our era. It is a competition for the right to defend a system that is increasingly indefensible, run by an institution that is too self-important to realize it is a parody of itself. The successful candidates will emerge with a golden ticket into the world of elite journalism, but they will have paid for it with their ability to see the world as anything other than a series of trade-offs. They will have learned the most important lesson of all: that in the eyes of The Economist, the only thing worse than being wrong is being uninteresting to the people who own the banks. It is a dismal prospect, but then again, that is exactly what they are signing up for.