Mammon and the Great Bottleneck

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The root of all evil

 

 

Bitcoin hysteria!

 

It’s telling when theological disputes arise among the Mammon theocracy. These factions all remain fully committed to the animism and worship of money and the totalitarian determination to reduce all human-to-human and human-to-nature relations to purely money relations. Yet they squabble like Nicaean Christians over what kind of money should rule.

 

 

The essence of Mammon is those things I just mentioned, not greed which is just one part of it. Contrary to Gordon Gekko, greed is more a tool than a theological fundamental of Mammon.

 

Greed is part of human nature. Mammon, like its capitalist mode, maximizes all the worst elements of human nature: Greed, hate, fear, sadism, power-lust, contempt, disregard, apathy. In these ways it uses humans as a particular kind of puppet. Meanwhile Mammon suppresses all the best elements of humanity. Yeats’s poem, incoherent if applied to individuals and mere politics (by definition “the best” are active toward the good, while by definition those who “lack all conviction” are sheep), becomes true if applied to the way Mammon mobilizes the worst in human nature and crushes the best.

 

Thus Mammon and capitalism work to maximize greed and suppress generosity. This goes heavily against the human grain, since the evidence of history, anthropology, sociology, and everyday life even today strongly suggests that generosity is naturally a far stronger human element than greed.

 

It has to be. Humans are social primates, naturally evolved to cooperate. Only recently in history, and especially under the extreme ahistorical circumstance of fossil-fuel modernity, has it been possible for the greedy, sociopathic impulses to accumulate wealth and power. It started with agriculture, which was the original sin enabling the accumulation and manipulation of surplus wealth and power.

 

But accumulation naturally indicates an ecological bottleneck. Accumulation equals waste. It is pollution. Those who manipulate such wastes are merely using poison as a weapon. The modern agrochemical onslaught is the latest, worst, most literal use of poison to destroy the Earth in order to hoard power.

 

 

Propagate the necessary new ideas.