This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm and other platforms.
At this point, it does not seem at all hyperbolic to say that the coronavirus pandemic will be one of the more severe catastrophes in human history, and I think it’s very likely that, once we finally reach a stage at which we can look back at the course of the pandemic, we’ll see that much of that severity came from our lack of preparedness.
Epidemics, being based on mutations in bacteria and viruses which are essentially random, are unpredictable on an individual level—no one can predict exactly when or where the next epidemic is going to occur, or what it’s going to be. But epidemics in general are stochastically predictable; even last year, before the virus had begun to spread, we would have been able to say that some pandemic hitting us eventually was a near-certainty. We’ve faced epidemics thousands or even tens of thousands of times over the course of human history, including many pandemics, and there’s nothing that would indicate to us that the forces that generate epidemics and pandemics are no longer in play, so we had every reason to expect that something like this would occur at some point in our future.
And yet we were entirely unprepared for such an inevitability.
A coronavirus pandemic was anticipated specifically by a simulation, called Event 201, conducted in October of last year by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The result of the simulation was an assessment that, despite the near-certainty of a pandemic of some sort occurring in our future, the world was largely unprepared. As the website for the simulation says, “Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global—a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences,” and the Center for Health Security made seven recommendations for governments, businesses, international organizations, and society in general (Event 201, a Pandemic Exercise to Illustrate Preparedness Efforts, n.d.), none of which have been implemented to any degree that I can tell. Of course, this simulation occurred only a few months before the real coronavirus pandemic hit, and I can’t say whether their recommendations would have been followed had there been more time to implement them, but given current global political leadership, it seems very unlikely. We were, in any case, unprepared for something for which we should have been very well-prepared, and as it passes over us, the pall of COVID-19 casts a shadow that shields us from the glare of the exponentially-growing wealth provided to us by advanced global capitalism, affording us a clearer look at the flaws in our economic systems than we have had in a long while.
Adam Smith’s 1776 book Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the first work to systematically codify the capitalist economic structure, noted that a paradox exists between the value of something in terms of its use and the value for which it can be exchanged. Water, as he pointed out, is of great use but carries an almost non-existent exchange-value, whereas diamonds, which had almost no practical applications in his day, were exchanged for exorbitant prices (Smith & Campbell, 2009). Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, the term “essential worker” has entered the common lexicon, and here we can see this paradox manifest. The source of this paradox, in Smith’s analysis, is that exchange-value is not based on use-value but rather on the labor required to produce the commodity in question. Well, labor is a commodity as well—or, at the least, it’s treated as such by advanced global capitalism—and the labor required to “produce” a grocery store cashier, for example, is quite minimal: one really need only to survive to adulthood and be able to nominally function in a work environment. We might compare this to becoming a medical doctor, which requires, just to start, many years of expensive school—that money representing a substantial quantity of labor in itself. We’d be in much worse shape right now if not for the medical doctors of the world, but we’d also be in much worse shape without the grocery store cashiers of the world, who are, at best, paid what could reasonably be described as “subsistence wages” (Supermarket Job Salary Information – How Much Do Grocery Store Jobs Pay?, 2011).
This situation is similarly true of essential goods like ventilators, which the supply-demand relation has not produced in sufficient quantities to meet our actual human needs.
None of this is to say that grocery store cashiers should be paid like doctors or that everyone should be making the same wages for all work, but rather only that those on whom society depends for its survival should not be struggling to survive. That just seems bad for everyone. Even if unskilled laborers were no more than commodities, someone who depends on their car for their livelihood, for example, wouldn’t sensibly keep it in poor condition, unmaintained, and ready to collapse at any time. And as I pointed out in my last essay, it seems that what keeps us stuck in the kind of mentality that it’s perfectly acceptable if grocery store cashiers are barely able to survive is a kind of mythology surrounding American capitalism, that it’s natural and inevitable and that there’s simply no way around it. More on that shortly.
Traditionally, capitalist economies, which emphasize private property ownership, have made some commodities public, such as roads, in order to facilitate a functioning society. It’s hard to imagine a functional modern society in which roads were privately owned; the layout would be extremely chaotic, and most roads would be toll roads, with tolls and road quality varying widely from one stretch to the next. Well-maintained, organized roads promote commerce and are good for everyone, so it makes sense that they be centrally organized and not constructed for the purpose of direct profit. But, in keeping with capitalist philosophy, the prevailing tendency in the United States at least has been to keep as much as possible private, and healthcare has long been considered a private rather than public good in this country. We can now clearly see the problems with that thinking: as others may be infected by those with no recourse to treatment, it seems that personal health is, at least to some degree, a public matter. There’s no reason to expect that there ever would have been an effective private response based on market forces to an occurrence such as the one we’re now facing. We would likely only see a great deal of price gouging. And not to minimize the human cost of unnecessary death, but there’s an economic cost as well to a substantial portion of the population dying off.
In my last essay, I took a general survey of the history and philosophy of capitalism as formulated by Adam Smith in the aforementioned book, which is usually referred to by the shortened title of The Wealth of Nations. If you haven’t listened to that episode, I highly recommend checking that out before continuing with this one, in which I intend to begin looking at critiques of capitalism. I’m going to say it again, because I never want to be mistaken on this matter: I am not anti-capitalist. Indeed, in terms of my voting record at least, I’m a social democrat: I advocate for strong, substantial public controls of an essentially capitalist free market. I can provide several justifications for this position based on my other beliefs, the most overtly satanic being merely that a peaceable, egalitarian society best supports my interests, which largely concern the pursuit of knowledge and learning. But there is a hegemony and dogmatic mythology behind advanced global capitalism, and American capitalism in particular, that sorely need to be dispelled, as well as critiques of capitalism that I believe need to be taken more seriously.
Chronologically, the best place to start would be with Karl Marx, who published his critique of capitalism, called Capital, in 1867, but I’d actually like to start with two more recent thinkers, the 20th century French structuralist Roland Barthes and the 20th- and 21st-century Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. From there I’ll be moving on to a discussion of the economic theory of Georges Bataille.
Structuralism is a philosophical movement that emerged in the 20th century, following the work of a Swiss linguist named Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure is the founder of a school of linguistic theory called semiotics, which is the study of signs, and signs, in semiotics, are anything that is used to stand in for something else. The words you’re reading are the archetypical example—not these words in particular but words in general, which I’m using to stand in for things and concepts. For example, I used the word “road” a bit earlier, and that (hopefully) conveyed to you the thing I was talking about without me having to track you down and—observing proper social distancing practices, of course—lead you outside so that I could point to a road and say “that thing there” so that you would know what I’m talking about.
Saussure analyzed signs as having three components: the signifier is the stand-in (the word “road,” for example); the signified is the thing for which the signifier is a stand-in (an actual road or the concept of a road); and the sign is the unification of the signifier and signified, which would, in this case, best be described as road-the-word-as-road-the-thing. And as Saussure pointed out, the relationship between the word “road” and an actual road is entirely arbitrary. If you learned English as a second language, you wouldn’t have come to the word “road” and think to yourself, “Ah, that must mean what [whatever word for road] means in my language.” There’s nothing about that sound or arrangement of letters that necessarily and unavoidably points to the concept of a road. What’s more, just the word “road” by itself doesn’t really mean anything at all. A road—some sort of path made for vehicular traversal—is probably the first thing that comes to mind, but what if I put the word “rocky” in front of it? Now I’m talking about an ice cream flavor. Or, if we’re sticking purely to the spoken language, what happens if I put it in the sentence, “I rode a horse.” I was sick a few weeks ago, I think probably with a mild case of COVID-19, but now I’m on the road to recovery, and when you heard me say that, you probably didn’t think of me walking on a wide strip of asphalt next to a sign with an arrow that reads “This way to Recovery.” And if you’re not clear on how I’m using the word and ask what definition I’m using, I can give you one, and that’s just going to be a big pile of signs in itself, and if you want definitions on each of those, you’re going to get even more signs, and it becomes clear that what a word means is its relationship to—over several degrees of separation—every other word in the language in which that word exists. These are the structures for which structuralism is named, and if you want to learn more about that, there’s an excellent episode by the podcast Philosophize This! which summarizes semiotics, structuralism, and the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (West, 2018). I’ve borrowed the structure of that episode in formulating my own summary, and can’t recommend it—and Stephen West’s podcast in general—highly enough.
Saussure’s realizations about language had a profound effect on the course of philosophy in the 20th century. After philosophers saw that they could view language as being essentially structural, they realized that a lot of other things are essentially structural as well: cultures, societies, governments, economic systems, religions, our individual identities, and even philosophy itself. One thinker who picked up on that was the French philosopher Roland Barthes, whose book Mythologies appeared in 1957. Barthes’ objective in Mythologies was twofold: first, to explicate his system for examining mythology in terms of semiotics, and second, to examine and reveal how mythology manifests in the modern world in which he lived. His work is primarily what led me to call this series “American Mythology.” The last third of his book is an essay, “Mythology Today,” which accomplishes the first of these aims, and the first two-thirds is a collection of short essays with names like “The World of Wrestling,” “Toys,” and “Ornamental Cookery,” where he applies this method to these various aspects of popular culture from the world of mid-20th-century France, in which he saw contemporary mythology manifested.
Myth, Barthes says, is a second-order semiological system in which the first-order sign becomes the second-order signifier. To understand what that means, remember the triune nature of the sign from earlier: the sign is the unified aspect of the signifier, that which means something, and the signified, that which is meant. What Barthes is saying is that a sign can itself be another signifier associated with another signified, making a second-order sign. And what I mean by second-order is this: if I’m thinking about a road, for example, that’s first-order thinking. If I’m thinking about thinking about a road, that’s second-order thinking, and that series continues on in that fashion. So one might say that a second-order sign is a sign about another sign, a meta-sign. The classic example of this appears in Barthes’ essay “Myth Today” itself, and let me note first that the following quote will contain some outdated racial language which was more acceptable in Barthes’ day than it is in ours, and that I’ll be inserting some explanations of the terms where I thought that they might be unclear.
I am at the barber’s and a copy of Paris-Match [a French news magazine] is offered to me. On the cover, a young Negro in French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour [the French flag]. All this is the meaning of the picture [the signified of the first-order semiological system]. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. I am therefore… faced with a greater semiological system: there is a signifier, itself already formed with a previous system (a black soldier is giving the French salute); there is a signified (it is here a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness); finally, there is a presence of the signified through the signifier.
2006
So there is, on one hand, the literal meaning of the picture, and on the other, its underlying implications, which is what Barthes calls the mythology. To be clear, Barthes (who often leaned towards Marxism) is describing this implicit message but does not at all endorse it; indeed, it seems that he finds it quite contemptible—essentially a kind of propaganda—because the purpose of myth, as he puts it, is to “transform history into nature,” to take what has arisen through historical processes—processes which might have turned out some other way—as being natural, inevitable, just the way of things.
We’ll turn from here to the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, a popular survey of the history of humankind. I’m not sure whether Harari is familiar with Barthes (Sapiens doesn’t mention him or cite his work), but he seems to have some similar ideas and talks about the concept of myth in similar ways. Harari discusses what he calls imagined orders, socially-constructed systems of social organization that are not based on objective or natural realities. Any social order that can’t be seen as having arisen naturally and inevitably from objective reality—which is most of them—is an imagined order. As examples, Harari contrasts the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi with the United States Declaration of Independence, both of which describe a social order that they claim is rooted in divinely-inspired “universal and eternal principles of justice.” But these two texts, which claim the same origin, strongly conflict: The Declaration of Independence describes all people as equal, and the Code of Hammurabi describes people as being fundamentally unequal, and it does not seem that either of them is actually rooted in objective nature, as humans are clearly unequal but also do not objectively fall into the class structure dictated by Hammurabi’s Code. Thus, the social order described by both texts are, in Harari’s terms, imagined orders.
Capitalism is undoubtedly an imagined order: while rooted in natural principles such as human self-interest, there’s nothing about the objective human world that says that capitalism is the natural and inevitable way of things. And it’s not that imagined orders are necessarily bad; in Harari’s words, “Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively. Bear in mind, though,” he continues, “that Hammurabi might have defended his principle of hierarchy using the same logic: ‘I know that superiors, commoners and slaves are not inherently different kinds of people. But if we believe that they are, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society’” (2015, p. 110).
Part of the mythology of capitalism is that it essentially runs itself, that an invisible hand will guide the market towards an optimal state and that peace and prosperity will prevail as a result, but imagined orders are, by their very nature, unstable. “A natural order is a stable order,” Harari says. “There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them” (2015, p. 111). This is exactly what we see with advanced global capitalism, which is presently collapsing under the strain imposed on it by the COVID-19 pandemic. As I mentioned in my last essay, capitalism requires a belief in progress and a trust in the future in order to function (“American Mythology,” 2020), but while our long-term prospects are likely as good as they’ve ever been, our short-term trust in the future is on much shakier ground. I’ll point out as well that the beliefs that sustain an imagined order need not reflect said order’s actual nature. This is certainly true of much of realist religion—religion that states that its claims, including claims regarding the supernatural, are true facts and not symbolic, metaphorical, abstract, or matters of personal experience without jurisdiction as blanket statements regarding reality. Many Christians in America, for example, are young Earth creationists who believe that the age of the planet is less than 10,000 years, and being that this is completely false, we can see that beliefs don’t have to be true in order to support their respective imagined orders. This is true of capitalism as well: the belief that capitalism will provide, as Adam Smith put it, “universal opulence,” does not have to be true in order for people to believe in capitalism.
So what is it that sustains our belief in these imagined orders? Often, as Harari points out, the answer is violence and threats of violence, and examples of this with regards to capitalism are not hard to come by. As I mentioned in the last essay, if certain theories about capitalism and global peace are true, then many of the peoples of the world are implicitly being asked to choose between joining global capitalism—on the capitalists’ terms—and being obliterated through bombings and drone warfare, against which they are entirely unable to fight back due to the technological asymmetry. In the United States, state militias were upgraded and expanded to their current status as the National Guard in the wake of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and were used from that point forward, through at least the First World War, primarily to suppress labor revolts, such as the Homestead Strike, the Pullman Strike of 1894, and the Colorado Labor Wars (Stoler, 2012).
But people are not generally inclined to commit acts of violence for any reason whatsoever, so what is it that sustains the violence that sustains belief in the imagined order? Harari answers this by returning to belief:
Why should the soldiers, jailors, judges, and police maintain an imagined order in which they do not believe? Of all human collective activities, the one most difficult to organise is violence. To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be it God, honour, motherland, manhood, or money.
2015, p. 111-112
These people—and not just the soldiers of the imagined order but those at the top of the pyramid who have the most power to control it—are what Harari calls true believers, and this entire system of belief and violent coercion is rooted in structures that turn these imagined orders into something natural:
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christian democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature. People are unequal, not because Hammurabi said so, but because Enlil and Marduk decreed it. People are equal, not because Thomas Jefferson said so, but because God created them that way. Free markets are the best economic system, not because Adam Smith said so, but because these are the immutable laws of nature.
You also educate people thoroughly. From the moment they are born, you constantly remind them of the principles of the imagined order, which are incorporated into anything and everything. They are incorporated into fairy tales, dramas, paintings, songs, etiquette, political propaganda, architecture, recipes and fashions.
2015, p. 112-113
This sounds a great deal like Barthes’ mythologies. Once again, Harari and Barthes are not advocating that we extract ourselves from these imagined orders and mythologies; that would be impossible and not necessarily desirable in the first place, as imagined orders can be beneficial. Satanism is an imagined order too, after all; there’s nothing about objective, natural reality that would necessarily lead one to this particular religious structure, and while I’d argue that Satanism is strongly rooted in objective, natural principles, the same can be said of capitalism; both are extrapolated from natural reality rather than being entirely constrained to it; both are possibilities rather than inevitabilities. Harari and Barthes just want us to be aware that these imagined orders and mythologies exist and to understand that they are misleading whenever they suggest that they are indeed natural and inevitable. And that’s what I want as well.
Often we are not only asked or coerced to accept or deceived into accepting some imagined order or another, but actually asked—or forced—to sacrifice ourselves to it. This matter becomes especially relevant as we begin to discuss how and when to end the quarantines and stay-at-home orders. At this time, I have not seen any health agencies advise that ending or drawing down our pandemic countermeasures would be safe, but much of the rhetoric in the American political sphere suggests that we should do so regardless for the sake of the economy. But human life, at the most fundamental level, is not an imagined order: we indeed exist, naturally and objectively, as a society of a particular kind of living organism. You might counter that words like “society” and “life” are part of the imagined order of human language, and you’d be correct, but these are things that are real and inevitable regardless of whatever words we use to describe them and how those words fit into the grander structures of language and culture. This is not to say that these things aren’t components of imagined orders as well, but there’s simply no way around the reality of human social existence any more than there’s a way around gravity.
I imagine that if one of my frequent listeners were to be asked who my favorite philosopher is, they would quickly answer that it’s Friedrich Nietzsche, and with good reason: Nietzsche is easily the philosopher whom I’ve discussed the most. And Nietzsche is indeed one of my favorites and a huge influence on me, but actually my favorite philosopher is a lesser-known 20th century philosopher of the French Nietzschean school named Georges Bataille. Bataille’s Theory of Religion (1973) was the first book of philosophy I purchased of my own initiative (not for a school class, in other words). He had been mentioned as an influence on the black metal band Deathspell Omega, one of the most significant influences on the development of my satanic religion, and much of the subsequent exploration into philosophy that led to this project was undertaken by way of learning to understand his often-enigmatic work.
Likely Bataille’s most famous idea is called the accursed share (la part maudite, in the French), which ties together economic philosophy, ethics, and religion, and which, as a result of his influence on my own religious ideas, also ties together economic philosophy and Satanism. Bataille’s take on economics is not so much a critique of capitalism as a complete rethinking of the nature of economic systems. He opens the book with a question: “Shouldn’t productive activity as a whole be considered in terms of the modifications it receives from its surroundings or brings about in its surroundings? In other words, isn’t there a need to study the system of human production and consumption within a much larger framework?” (1988, p. 20). And in the preface he states that his book takes a point of view “from which a human sacrifice, the construction of a church or the gift of a jewel [are] no less interesting than the sale of wheat” and in which “the ‘expenditure’ (the ‘consumption’) of wealth, rather than production, [is] the primary object” (1988, p. 9). So The Accursed Share aims to focus on economic consumption rather than production, and to do so in terms of the broader natural systems in which an economic system exists, in contrast to the analyses of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, which focused primarily on production within economic systems seen largely as isolated from the universe. As the starting point for his analysis, Bataille notes that these natural systems provide life with a surplus of energy above what is required for simple maintenance. This surplus, the accursed share for which Bataille’s book is named, is directed towards growth and reproduction to the maximum extent possible, but when this extent is reached, the surplus remains, exerting a fluctuating and uneven pressure on all life, and must be violently expended.
One of the ways that life expends this surplus is by taking on forms that are, in Bataille’s words, “increasingly burdensome,” in other words, forms that use more energy. One example of this is the bowerbird of Australia and New Guinea, whose males spend hours every day collecting things and more hours still arranging them in an elaborate nest in order to attract a mate. More relevant examples would include the human brain, or the remarkable expenditure of contemporary human society.
An example explored in detail by Bataille—one of his favorite subjects overall, in fact, and one of mine as well—was sacrifice, human sacrifice in particular, which he covers in this book in the context of the Aztecs. Human sacrifice, in Bataille’s view, accomplishes a dual purpose. The first is the expenditure of the accursed share of surplus energy. The second is to remove the victim from the real order of the world, in which the victim is a slave and, to those sacrificing him, no more than a thing; and to return the victim to the “mythic order” of religion, uniting him with the lost intimacy experienced by our animal ancestors.
…the victim is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth. And he can only be withdrawn from it in order to be consumed profitlessly, and therefore utterly destroyed. Once chosen, he is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things; it gives him a recognizable figure, which now radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings….
Being a thing, he cannot truly be withdrawn from the real order, which binds him, unless destruction rids him of his “thinghood,” eliminating his usefulness once and for all….
The only valid excess was one that went beyond the bounds, and one whose consumption appeared worthy of the gods. This was the price men paid to escape their downfall and remove the weight introduced in them by the avarice and cold calculation of the real order.
1988, p. 59-61
This is a subject he takes up in more detail in his Theory of Religion, in which he describes further what he means by intimacy. Animals, as Bataille details, experience a profound intimacy with the world. They are in the world “like water in water,” as opposed to how humans see the world, as a collection of things apart from us which we subjugate. Bataille describes how the mythic order—the imagined order—of religion arises from our separation from this lost intimacy, and how sacrifice is the aspect of religion which returns us to it. “…The unreal world of sovereign spirits or gods establishes reality, which it is not, as its contrary. The reality of a profane world, of a world of things and bodies, is established opposite a holy and mythical world” (1989, p. 37). Further on he states that “…killing in the literal sense is not necessary. But the greatest negation of the real order is the one most favorable to the appearance of the mythical order” (1989, p. 45). We most strongly affirm our imagined orders, in other words, by the strongest possible negation of the real order, which, for humans, is the killing of other humans.
Keep that in mind as we look at the rhetoric of the return to economic normalcy during the ongoing pandemic. I’ve seen numerous examples of politicians and other pundits stating explicitly that we need to allow old people (who, just as a reminder, exist as an objective reality) to die from this disease—sacrificing them, in effect, although the coronavirus can be deadly to more than just the old—in order to save the economy, which only exists in our collective imagination. The California lawyer Scott McMillan, responding to a Tweet by President Trump which said that we can’t let the cure be worse than the disease, stated that “The fundamental problem is whether we are going to tank the entire economy to save 2.5% of the population which is (1) generally expensive to maintain, and (2) not productive” (Fischer, 2020). To put this in other terms, McMillan is suggesting here that we allow approximately eight million people to die in order to serve the interests of the imagined orders of the state and its economy. There is a significant moral distinction here between allowing people to die and actually putting them to death, but in my view, this distinction is not enough to save McMillan from a profound moral destitution. I doubt anyone will find it surprising that I’ve seen this kind of rhetoric come exclusively from the American Republican party and the political Right, which is particularly ironic given that, in 2009, certain Republicans—most iconically Alaska governor Sarah Palin—campaigned against President Obama’s health care reforms on the patently false basis that the reforms would require the institution of “death panels” which would assess whether the care of the elderly was economically warranted. Speaking on the matter, Republican Senator Chuck Grassly famously stated, “We should not have a government program that determines you’re going to pull the plug on Grandma” (Holan, 2009).
Hypocrisy is something I simply have no patience for.
I’ve mentioned many times on this show that Satanism is a religion of opposition, and that one of the things I’m primarily opposed to is dogma, which Oxford defines as “A principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true” (Dogma | Definition of Dogma by Lexico, n.d.). Imagined orders are not necessarily dogmatic in and of themselves, but rather become dogma whenever they are claimed as being natural and inevitable. I’d even go so far as to say that dogma and the naturalization of imagined orders through mythology are equivalent. Even Christianity is not necessarily dogmatic, but although Christianity is just one among an infinite number of possible religious structures and even as Christianity it could have taken on a multitude of different forms, such as one of the forms in which it existed early on, instead of the one that it ultimately did, it is often claimed that contemporary Christianity is the inevitable Christianity. Capitalism is the same way; nothing about nature necessarily requires capitalism, and nothing about capitalism necessarily requires that it be this particular form of capitalism.
The Satanist, in my view, should be listening to the politician or political pundit speaking of capitalism the same way they listen to the preacher on the pulpit speaking of God: with a deep, well-informed skepticism. They’re after much the same thing, after all: the sustenance of an imagined order that empowers and enriches them.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited and Referenced
American Mythology: Capitalism. (2020, May 2). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/american-mythology-capitalism/
Barthes, R. (2006). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.; 47. [print.]). Hill and Wang.
Bataille, G. (1988). The accursed share: An essay on general economy. Zone Books.
Bataille, G. (1989). Theory of religion. Zone Books.
Dogma | Definition of Dogma by Lexico. (n.d.). Lexico Dictionaries | English. Retrieved May 3, 2020, from https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/dogma
Event 201, a pandemic exercise to illustrate preparedness efforts. (n.d.). Even 201. Retrieved March 17, 2020, from http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/
Fischer, M. (2020, March 25). He urged saving the economy over protecting those who are ‘not productive’ from the coronavirus. Then he faced America’s wrath. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/coronavirus-tweet-economy-elderly/2020/03/25/25a3581e-6e11-11ea-b148-e4ce3fbd85b5_story.html
Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind (First U.S. edition). Harper.
Holan, A. D. (2009, December 18). PolitiFact – PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: “Death panels.” @politifact. https://www.politifact.com/article/2009/dec/18/politifact-lie-year-death-panels/
Marx, K., Fowkes, B., & Fernbach, D. (1981). Capital: A critique of political economy. Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.
Saussure, F. de. (2013). Course in General Linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.; Reprint edition). Bloomsbury Academic.
Smith, A., & Campbell, R. H. (2009). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (11. print). Liberty Fund.
Stoler, M. (2012). The Skeptic’s Guide to American History. https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/the-skeptics-guide-to-american-history
Supermarket Job Salary Information—How Much Do Grocery Store Jobs Pay? (2011, September 21). Job-Applications.Com. https://www.job-applications.com/grocery-store-jobs/grocery-store-salaries/
West, S. (2018, January 28). Episode #115 – Structuralism and Context. Philosophize This! http://philosophizethis.org/structuralism-and-context/