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After I got out of the Army, I went back to school at a university with an extensive religious studies program. I took a few classes, which was how I got introduced to philosophy of religion in the first place. The religious studies program at this university focused primarily on eastern religions and had an extensive collection of Buddhist literature in Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan, so Tibetan monasteries would often send monks there to study, as much of that information was no longer available in their home country due to the Chinese occupation. One of these monks, named Daji, became my friend.
Daji was living in the dorms with some American roommates, which must have been an interesting experience for a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and for the Americans as well. I, being an older student, was allowed to live off campus. As Daji didn’t have any transportation of his own besides a bicycle, I would, on occasion, pick him up from the dorms so that we could attend various university or theater events.
On one such occasion, as we were driving to whatever event, he asked if he could get my opinion on a conflict he was having with his roommates. This was likewise a frequent occurrence. The cultural differences between a Tibetan monk and an American teenager are rather substantial.
I asked what had happened, and he said he had eaten some food from the refrigerator.
“Was it your food?” I asked him.
Entirely bewildered, he said, “The purpose of food… is to feed hunger. Not my hunger or your hunger. Any hunger.”
I tried to explain why his roommates might not see it that way, but it was hard to get across. He had a stipend and would frequently buy food that he would eat himself, but he also expected that it would be perfectly natural if his roommates were to help themselves to it. It’s not that he didn’t understand concepts like money or ownership, but his take on them—which was so deeply embedded that he thought that it was perfectly obvious and natural—was very different than mine, which I likewise thought was so natural as to be completely obvious to everyone.
I’m continuing this week with my American Mythology series, which explores the myths present in contemporary American philosophical and political thought. My objective in my explorations of religious texts has been to demonstrate that what is said of the texts and what they actually contain are often two very different things, and my objective in these essays is essentially the same, only addressing political theory instead of sacred texts, but as I’ve described in the previous two essays in this series, political theory and religion are themselves not very distant from each other and often there’s considerable overlap. I’ve looked at the myths surrounding the way in which the Americas were first conquered and colonized and the myths about American freedom as related to the philosophical influence of John Locke on the American political sphere, and now I’m turning to the myths embedded in American capitalism.
This is relevant to Satanism because I define Satanism, in part, as a dialectical opposition to cultural hegemonies—Christianity primarily, but also other religions, as well as cultural institutions such as Western civilization and (being that I’m an American myself) American civilization in particular, and capitalism is not only a cultural hegemony in itself, but is also deeply integrated into all of the hegemonies already mentioned. For an understanding of what I mean by “dialectical opposition,” check out my episode “Dialectics,” and I’ll just mention here that a dialectic is a process between a concept and something that contradicts that concept. This is rooted primarily in my symbolic reliance on the archetype of Satan the Accuser—the Satan of the Old Testament, who was God’s opposition but not God’s enemy. For more on that, you can check out my episode “Satan the Accuser,” although that was a fairly early essay and I’ll be the first to admit that my writing at the time was a bit rough around the edges.
I’ve said it before and it bears repeating: none of this means that I am anti-Christian, anti-American, or anti-capitalist. To the contrary, I am simply opposed to the dogma and hegemony associated with these concepts, and believe that these institutions require strong dialectical opposition in order to be healthy. I’ve often said that religion isn’t a problem in itself, but rather that there are problems with religion. I believe the same is true of capitalism.
This is a particularly contentious topic and often the public discourse is hopelessly muddy and vague, so let’s begin by defining our terms: for capitalism, I’ll go with the Oxford definition: “An economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.” (The citations for these definitions have been omitted to reduce clutter but are all included in the references). This is associated with and often inextricable from, but not the same as, a free market economic system, “in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses.” Capitalism is often presented in opposition to socialism, “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” The Oxford definition of communism has a bit of a loaded connotation so I’ll go with the (surprisingly) more neutral one on Investopedia: “a classless system in which the means of production are owned communally and private property is nonexistent or severely curtailed.” Both socialism and communism are, in part, derived from, but nevertheless distinct from Marxism, which Wikipedia defines as “a method of socioeconomic analysis that views class relations and social conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development and takes a dialectical view of social transformation.” And I’ll explore all of that in further detail further on and in other essays. And lastly, there’s social democracy, “a political, social and economic philosophy that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented mixed economy.”
It’s important to remember that these are dictionary definitions for these words, and that’s not exactly the same thing as what a given word actually means in practice. These are complex topics that mean many different things to different people, and there’s no fact of the matter as to what the “real capitalism” or communism or socialism really is. Having those definitions in place is just a means of framing and limiting the discussion. What’s more, these definitions do not represent the only possibilities for economic structures; the notion that they do is itself is a myth that I’ll aim to address elsewhere. But this essay is primarily about capitalism, and these are the terms that most often appear in the discourse surrounding capitalism. They’re not the only ones, certainly, but at least the primary ones, and with this foundation established, we can move forward with some degree of clarity and address any others as they arise.
Next is historical context.
It’s difficult to say when and how exactly capitalism arose. The actual term “capitalism” wasn’t used until the system to which it refers was critiqued by Karl Marx in his book Capital, but the system predates the name, and forms of it predate its earliest clear formation in Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which was published in 1776. Like most things, capitalism isn’t something that arose all at once but rather something that unfolded—and continues to unfold—over time as the result of a confluence of a variety of forces. In Europe prior to the Black Death pandemic of the 14th century, the dominant political and economic system was agrarian feudalism, in which peasants labored for nobles who pledged fealty to higher nobles and so on and so forth up to the monarchs. Social mobility was extremely limited, though a merchant class had begun to emerge over the prior few centuries. In the population vacuum left by the Black Death, this merchant class was able to expand, and new possibilities for social mobility opened up for peasants (Armstrong, 2016). The economic philosophy that eventually arose in the wake of the Black Death is called mercantilism, which united a given nation-state’s national, imperial, military, and economic interests, making it essentially an economic nationalism. Under mercantilism, the total quantity of global wealth was seen as fixed, and a given nation-state would seek to enrich itself at the expense of other nations in order to gain the upper hand in the global political sphere. This was a time of unprecedented military conflict, of which commerce and trade were extensions. Additionally, government intervention in commerce through protectionist trade policies (such as tariffs) was seen as desirable and beneficial (Mercantilism, n.d.). Mercantilism itself was influential in the establishment of the British colonies; as I mentioned in my essay on the European conquest and colonization of the Americas, some of the British colonies in what is now New England were established to facilitate privateering against the Spanish, and the British crown had chartered joint-stock companies for this purpose and for the purpose of establishing profitable agriculture, both of which were mercantile policies (“American Mythology: Conquest and Colonization,” 2020).
At the same time, the religious landscape of Europe was changing in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. The late 19th-/early 20th-century German sociologist Max Weber famously argued that the Reformation had a major influence on the development of capitalism, and on American capitalism in particular. Protestantism, by its very nature, is more individualistic than Catholicism, and less trusting of authority, which would include the kind of authority that the mercantile states had vested in commerce and trade. Additionally, the Puritan settlers who fled religious persecution in England were radical Calvinists who believed in predestination: God’s elect had already been chosen and were predestined for salvation, and a sign that a given person was one of the elect was their earthly prosperity. According to Weber, this encouraged a particularly strong work ethic among the Puritan settlers (Weber, 2002). Weber’s actual claim was that Protestantism created capitalism, and while that claim has been strongly contested and indeed seems highly dubious, I agree that, at a minimum, the Protestant Reformation had a strong influence on the development of capitalism. This influence can certainly be seen in the writings of John Locke, whose beliefs about private property, which were explicitly tied to his Protestant religion, had a major influence on American capitalism (Locke & Laslett, 1988).
But the major turning point in the development of capitalism was the publication of the aforementioned Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith. In this mercantile environment of interest in national wealth, Smith sought to examine what it is, exactly, that makes nations wealthy, and to attack mercantilism, which he saw as being inefficient and ineffective, and he had very good reasons for believing this. The mercantile policies enacted in France during the prior century by French Minister of Finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert had consistently failed, whereas the Dutch had found considerable economic success in their comparatively free markets (Harreld, 2016).
His conclusions were a radical departure from mercantile philosophy: it’s not the wealth of the state itself that makes a nation wealthy, but rather that of the general population. Smith also made two key observations about human nature: one, that humans have a natural tendency to “truck, barter, and exchange” (as he put it), and two, that humans are motivated primarily by self-interest. The combination of these two ideas led to his development of the theory of the invisible hand. You may already be familiar with this theory, as it is often brought up in contemporary political and economic discourse.
As every individual… endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestick industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value, every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestick to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.
WN IV.ii.9, Smith & Campbell, 2009
In other words, the collective of individuals acting in their own self-interest will, absent any intention toward this end on their part, direct the market towards that which is best for the individual, for the market, for the nation, and for society as a whole, and will do so more effectively and more efficiently than if those were the ends that they had intended, and keep those second order effects in mind, because those will become more relevant shortly. Smith believed that, should his ideas be implemented, the end result would be “universal opulence” (WN I.i.10, Smith & Campbell, 2009). This notion that beneficial order could arise spontaneously from a chaotic system was revolutionary for its time, and (by way of the economist Thomas Malthus) inspired the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin (Cahoone, 2014).
Smith believed that productivity could be improved through division of labor. A more specialized worker can perform better and faster at a single, atomized task than at multiple tasks that the worker must switch between. For example, a shoemaker who makes each shoe by hand from start to finish must switch between several operations—tracing, cutting the leather, punching it, stitching it, and so forth—that require different tools and different skills, but a worker who only cuts the leather need not switch between tools, tasks, and skills, and can perfect that one skill to a greater degree. And you might agree that that’s true, but you might also think that this system would make the work considerably more boring and tedious for the worker. You’d be in good company; Smith thought the same thing. Noting first that Smith believed that a “martial spirit” among citizens was an important part of life in a society, we can read in The Wealth of Nations that
The uniformity of [the worker’s] stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.
WN V.i.f.50, Smith & Campbell, 2009, emphasis mine
So even the father of capitalism recognized the need for and advocated for government regulation of industry.
Another realization regarding markets and wealth came from a paradox, now called the Paradox of Value, that he observed in the prices of certain goods. “Nothing is more useful than water,” he noted, “But it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it” (WN I.iv.13, Smith & Campbell, 2009). This led him to conclude that
The value of any commodity… to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.
WN I.v.1-2, Smith & Campbell, 2009
The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.
But if it’s labor that creates value, then the wealth of the world is not fixed, as the mercantilists had supposed. Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari cites this realization as the central turning point of capitalism because it allowed for the possibility of credit. “Credit,” he says, “enables us to build the present at the expense of the future. It’s founded on the assumption that our future resources are sure to be far more abundant than our present resources. A host of new and wonderful opportunities open up if we can build things in the present using future income” (2015). Of course, this requires as well a belief that things in general will improve over time, that the future will be better than the past. This is a notion that might not have been as clearly evident to the peoples of the pre-Enlightenment world, whose lives were likely to be very much like the lives of their immediate ancestors, but post-Enlightenment, with the associated advances in science and philosophy, that sort of optimism became much more natural. It was certainly present in Smith’s own thought. He describes civilization as progressing in stages: hunting, pasture, agriculture, and finally commerce. Notably, he states that a “nation of hunters… such as we find it among the native tribes of North America” is “the lowest and rudest state of society” (WN V.i.a.2, Smith & Campbell, 2009).
As the codifier of modern capitalism, Smith’s influence on the modern world is difficult to overestimate, and while the success of capitalism itself—at least in the nominal sense in which it achieves its aims of increasing global wealth—is difficult to measure, words like “astronomical” seem entirely appropriate. As one example—though I’ll note that this is based on rough estimates—the per capita gross domestic product in Western Europe measured in 1700 was $997, as measured in 1990 international dollars, a metric which accounts for both inflation and population growth. In 2008, it was $21,672, representing a growth of almost 2200%. By way of comparison, the growth in the same region over the period from year 1 to 1700 was only about 100% (“List of Regions by Past GDP (PPP) per Capita,” 2020). Of course, we can’t say whether that growth wouldn’t have happened had we adopted some other system instead of capitalism, but this at least demonstrates capitalism’s nominal success in an absolute sense, if not a relative one. This is also not a direct measure of whether capitalism increases general human prosperity by any given amount or at all, which is a much more difficult matter to quantify, although I think it’s obvious enough that, all other things being equal, greater global wealth is a good thing for human prosperity.
Capitalism is linked to and largely inextricable from modernity, the modern era being that historical period which followed the Renaissance, which included the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, and which may have ended with World War II or with the advent of the Information Age or not yet ended at all, depending on whom you ask. Capitalism arose during and had a significant role in shaping the course of the modern era, and as the Wikipedia page on “Modernity” says, “The modern era is closely associated with the development of individualism, capitalism, urbanization and a belief in the possibilities of technological and political progress” (“Modernity,” 2020), with individualism, urbanization, and the belief in progress being strongly associated with capitalism as well.
Following the catastrophic world wars of the 20th century and the rise of socialist totalitarianism, numerous theories took up the task of analyzing modernity—and its associated economic systems along with it—in order to figure out how and why it had gone so horribly wrong. Among these theorists was Hannah Arendt, who took up the matter most notably in two books, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958). Arendt was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime in the 1930’s, and I’ve discussed her work on the show before, specifically Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), a report on the trial of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann for war crimes which offered a brilliant—though controversial—insight into the nature of evil. The discussion here will focus on The Human Condition, in which she critiques both capitalism and Marxist socialism as having contributed to the catastrophes of modernity.
The French writer Voltaire—a contemporary of Adam Smith’s—believed that capitalism wouldn’t just bring prosperity, but also peace (Cahoone, 2014). Whether Smith would have agreed with that or not himself is questionable (Aspromourgos, 2007), but he did note that capitalist nations, due to their relative opulence, would be better able to defend themselves militarily (WN V.i.a.44, Smith & Campbell, 2009). This notion that capitalist market economies act as a pacifying force in the world has become so popular that it even has its own name: capitalist peace theory, and the theory and its variations have been argued by numerous thinkers over the centuries, including Immanuel Kant, Benjamin Constant, Peter Drucker, Norman Angell, and Thomas Friedman. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree (originally published in 1999), Friedman—a political commentator—sets out his own version of the capitalist peace theory, which he calls the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, which states that “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s” (2012). This is demonstrably false and was false at the time it was written, and in response to criticism, Friedman updated the theory in his 2005 book The World Is Flat to what he calls the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention, which states that “No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain” (2007). That one’s a little more difficult to assess, but the point is not so much the validity of the statement itself so much as the popular existence of a belief in the pacifying power of economic systems.
While I can’t make this the focus of this particular essay, I can’t resist pointing out how insidious capitalist peace under a theory like Friedman’s actually is. If Friedman is correct, then it’s true that no countries that are presently being bombed and droned and whatnot by the American government are or will ever be countries that are part of the same global supply chain as America, and that would mean that being part of the same global supply chain as America is sufficient for a country not to be bombed (etc.) by the American government. So here’s a question: first of all, with whom is the United States presently at war? We tend to think of that question in terms of states but we’re not really at war against Afghanistan, for example, but rather in Afghanistan against various military organizations that have various relationships to various governments. And second: how does that network map to our global supply chain and threats against it? I honestly don’t know the complete answer to either of those, but Friedman’s theory does suggest that the various peoples of the world are being asked to choose between global capitalism—perhaps in an exploitative form, as we see in many developing nations—and getting bombed.
Getting back to The Human Condition, Arendt identifies three aspects of what she calls the vita activa, the active life of a human (as opposed to the contemplative life). Labor is what humans do as biological organisms, such as eating and the activities associated with it, like growing food and cooking. Work is what humans do as makers of things; for example, a carpenter making a desk is doing what Arendt would call work. And finally, action is what humans do in relationship to each other as a species living on the planet collectively. This includes speech and political activity, so what I’m doing right now, writing this essay, is what Arendt would call action.
The Human Condition is a brilliant, complex, and nuanced book, highly relevant to the Satanist, and I suspect that my summation here is doing it little justice. I hope to explore it in more detail in the near future. As best as I can sum it up, Arendt claims that one of the problems with modernity is that modern human societies have subsumed action into work and work into labor. The ancient Greeks and Romans labored to eat so that they might do work and create durable goods that would support their action in the public sphere, which they saw as an end unto itself. We in the modern world, in contrast, act primarily through and in relation to our work, which we do as labor so that we can eat. That summary is an almost painful oversimplification of the nuanced pictures of Greek, Roman, and modern life that Arendt presents, but I don’t see a way around it within the constraints of this essay.
The United States of America is nominally a liberal republic—a government in which power flows from the people and which places a high value on individual liberty—structured as a representative democracy, in which people vote for politicians who are elected to serve the voters’ interests in the political sphere. Within this political structure, how much of the average person’s life is taken up by action? Even including local ballots, there are only a few opportunities to vote per year, and in the last presidential election only 55.7% of the voting age population participated (“Voter Turnout in the United States Presidential Elections,” 2020), so it seems that at least a preliminary answer is “not very much at all,” especially when we consider that in relationship to the amount of time we spend doing work, which, again, is typically done not for its own sake or as a means of supporting action but rather as something that one needs to do in order to eat and pay rent. And looking back to my public school education, it didn’t seem at all that its purpose was for me to be a better-informed and better-educated citizen who might be a better participant in the public sphere, but rather so that I would acquire the skills which would allow me to get a job that would, in turn, allow me to eat and pay rent. Additionally, I was told that if I did well and consequently got a job that paid well, I might be able to transcend mere subsistence and buy luxurious goods for myself, goods which were largely made not for their own sake but because they could be sold, which would allow the makers to eat and pay rent and perhaps afford luxurious goods of their own.
This, Arendt claims, is where modernity and capitalism have gone wrong (and as I mentioned, she takes aim at Marxist socialism as well, but I’ll address those critiques another time)—not so much as a matter of what we’re doing as why and how we’re doing it. Arendt states her purpose clearly in her book: while she offers some recommendations for change, she’s not necessarily advocating that we rise up and once more devote ourselves to a public life of action, but rather that we just “think what we are doing” (Arendt et al., 2018, p. 5). And the argument for capitalist peace is precisely that we needn’t and perhaps even shouldn’t think what we are doing; we need only to labor and consume, and that, we are told, will take care of the rest. As Arendt herself puts it, “Thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ which have become trivial and empty—seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time” (Arendt et al., 2018, p. 5). This actually relates directly to her work on the nature of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she says of the accused:
The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality itself as such.
2006, p. 49
And in Arendt’s postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem she says that Eichmann “merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing,” and she continues by saying that “[Eichmann] was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period” (2006, p. 287-88).
I had originally intended this essay to include, in addition to an overview of capitalism, a survey of several of its most prominent critics: Marx, of course, but also Georges Bataille, Herbert Marcuse, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard, as well as more of Yuval Noah Harari’s thoughts on the subject, but due to time limitations I’ll have to save those for another episode. Bataille in particular ties economics to religion in a really interesting way and Barthes has been one of my main inspirations in general in talking about American political philosophy in terms of mythology. Much of the mythology surrounding capitalism and the relevance of this topic to Satanism will arise in those discussions, but there is one capitalist mythology that I’ll discuss in closing, that being the myth of the perfectibility of human nature.
Adam Smith likely didn’t think of himself as an economist; economics—which was called political economy at the time—wasn’t a discipline distinct from political philosophy in the 18th century. Adam Smith was, rather, a philosopher first and foremost, specifically a philosopher of ethics. His 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments was a seminal work of moral philosophy, one which remains highly relevant and influential and which also lays out many of the philosophical foundations on which The Wealth of Nations would be grounded. Indeed, economics is essentially a matter of ethics, the branch of philosophy which concerns human action and conduct. The fundamental question of economics, structured as a question of ethics, might be stated: “How should societies structure their systems of production and wealth?”
Looking at The Wealth of Nations and capitalist peace theory, and more broadly at moral philosophy in general, there’s an implication that human behavior is perfectable, that we could perfectly optimize human happiness and prosperity if we only had the right economic (or ethical) system in place. American capitalism not only takes this implication as a given but goes further by saying that this particular instantiation of capitalism is the system that accomplishes human perfectibility.
There are several problems with this.
One is that thoughtless subservience to an external system was exactly the problem with Adolf Eichmann. According to Arendt, Eichmann’s highest aspiration was to be a part of something greater—greater even if only in terms of extent—than himself, and this was the justification he gave for his his role in designing the Holocaust. One might counter that the Nazi regime doesn’t meet the requirement of being the right system to perfect human behavior, but that’s not what the Nazis thought, and if we’re in a position to question the system, then human will is still a part of the picture, which defeats the system’s theoretical role of doing our thinking for us.
What’s more, I think the notion of human perfectibility via some external system is self-refuting, because part of what it means to be human in the first place is our will and our ability to act on it rather than having our actions decided for us by something non-human. According to philosopher Gwen Bradford’s paper “The Value of Achievements” (2013), which I’ve mentioned on the show before, the will is a characteristic human capacity—something unique, essential, or fundamental to humans—the excellent exercise of which is intrinsically valuable, meaning, valuable in and of itself rather than valuable because it accomplishes some other end. Human nature cannot be perfected or optimized by replacing one of its essential characteristics.
None of this is to say that we should try to do without economic systems or other kinds of systems. That would be impossible anyway. Rather, we shouldn’t let them dictate our lives for us and we shouldn’t allow them to be used as justifications in themselves. There is a pervasive mode of thought in American political rhetoric in which things like stagnant wages and growing wealth inequality are excused by capitalism without recourse to any other underlying justification. “Sure Jeff Bezos makes more money every minute than what most workers make in three years, but hey, that’s capitalism, right? What are you going to do?” That’s an example of the kind of thoughtlessness that Arendt is talking about. We’ve given ourselves over to this system to such a degree that its outcomes are simply accepted as natural, inevitable, and immutable. That’s what I was getting at with my story about Daji at the beginning of the episode. There are ways of thinking about the world that Americans have come to accept as “just the way things are,” while others often have very different ideas about the way things are, and when, in reality, capitalism is just one among uncountable possibilities for human economic structures.I remember when I was very young, my father said to me, likely by way of critiquing the amount of time I spent watching television, “Learn to make something, otherwise you’re just a consumer,” and he said the word consumer with a contempt that I still remember now, over three decades later. For a Satanist, for whom personal strength of will is paramount (as it is by strength of will that Satan overcame the despair and defeat of having been cast into Hell), giving one’s will over to an external system and allowing it to both dictate and serve one’s needs and do one’s thinking for them without creating anything for oneself seem entirely antithetical. The Satanist as the thoughtless consumer is just as nonsensical as the Satanist as politically passive or the Satanist as the passive recipient of religious dogma, each allowing something—be it the economy, the state, or the church—to do their thinking for them. And if religion should be, on the basis of principle, questioned and confronted rather than taken at face value, then the same principle must apply as well to how we relate to our economic systems. Religion, after all, often attempts to be another system imposed on us in order to perfect our behavior—and to control it.
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.
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Bradford, G. (2013). The Value of Achievements: The Value of Achievements. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94(2), 204–224. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0114.2012.01452.x
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