Wokewashing the money cult: ideological coping mechanisms in the end-times
End of days-type periods are hardly unknown throughout history; the fact that empires rise and fall is a truism, a statement of the banal. We live in one such period today, as the cultural, political and military power of the global hegemon progresses further along its long downward spiral into deep decline and eventual collapse.
The state of global ecology feeds the end-of-days condition even further, reflecting a generalised crisis of the 21st century, in which the dominating influence of ever more totalitarian transnational corporate power (or, to be more precise, what Sheldon Wolin calls ‘inverted totalitarianism’) precipitates economic, political, social and ecological crises:
(1) Economic, through the destabilising effects of monopoly power and corruption, particularly where the failure of conventional interest rate controls to contain boom and bust cycles, and overaccumulation crises, are concerned;
(2) Political, as corporate capture reduces national governments to wholly owned corporate subsidiaries that conflate the vested interests of corporate power with the interests of humanity, and govern accordingly;
(3) Social, as ever-deepening wealth inequality and the lack of responsiveness of corporate-captured governments leads to impoverishment and neglect of the needs of the mass of the population; and
(4) Ecological, as corporations govern through their political subsidiaries in service to their own bottom lines at the expense of ecological sustainability and life for the generations in line to inherit a dead planet.
As one group associated with transnational corporate power and the dynamics that have quite arguably given rise to this generalised crisis, neoliberal proponents of Rational Choice Theory allege the world to be comprised of rational actors looking to maximise their own utility or happiness; very roughly, such actors are rational insofar as they make choices based on the best available information that lead to such outcomes.
One might argue that individualism of this kind is not least of the root causes of end-of-days conditions, especially if allegedly rational choice excludes the needs, rights and freedoms of others from moral calculations—including those of the unborn generations to come.
For the sake of present concerns, this is neither here nor there—one might argue that, in the context of a world rapidly disappearing up its own rectum as a result of being as toxic ethically, spiritually, psychologically and politically as it is environmentally, such observations are statements of the obvious.
Of perhaps more concern for present purposes is the general dire lack of rationality apparent in public life, the conspicuously irrational actor as a feature of public life. From a historical point of view, the increasing role of the irrational actor in public life is not really so much of a surprise; past crises have typically produced demagogues from amongst the affluent classes with the most to lose from the consequences of prolonged crisis.
The primary function of irrational actors in the form of demagogues and the willing useful idiots ready and willing to deepthroat the whole jackboot generally seems to be the cooking up of a big batch of ideological crack to push on the immiserated, who are then invited to work against their own class interests and thereby seal their fate. Put the First Triumvate of Rome on top of Torquemada on top of Hitler on top of Cheeto Hitler on top of Qanon woo and you start to get the idea. History is nothing if not a broken record.
Singing along to a broken record
In the face of this situation, what to do? Come to terms with that history and the thinking associated with it so as to be able to keep in line with Einstein’s supremely adroit observation that we can’t solve problems using the thinking that created them? Find new ways of thinking, acting and relating to one another so as to create new facts of a better future in the present and become the change we want to see in the world? Maybe that would be too easy.
For relatively affluent westerners, maybe it might involve having to abandon any remaining thoughts of class mobility and joining the already-decimated middle classes, or whatever social status can still be had by avoiding becoming outspoken in the counter-hegemonic struggle against capitalist supremacy and climbing social hierarchies instead.
If you can’t be wealthy, you can still have Instagram followers and social influence, if you’re talented and/or mercenary enough. Ways of forming little bubbles to hide from the horrible realities of the global present are anything but few and far between; the western culture industry mostly caters to distracting from the joyless and mechanical end-of-days humping of the American dream (Hunter S. Thompson).
Ideology is a great way of hiding from the tired rag end days of late empire; closed systems of thought and the binary logic on which they are built are the seeds of empires after all. The anarchist revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin conceptualised ideology as a closed system of thought build on a core abstraction conflated with vested interests and invoked for purposes of domination, control and exploitation—such as, by way of example, free-market libertarians conflating individual liberty, abstracted from any social context, with class privilege, and the special interests of privileged classes with the national interest.
In one of the more remarkable passages of his oeuvre, Bakunin characterises the value systems born of closed belief systems rooted in an ideological abstraction as a ‘transcendent morality.’
We call it transcendent morality because it usually goes beyond the level of human morality and justice, either of the community or of the private individual, and by the same token finds itself in contradistinction with these. Thus, to offend, to oppress, to despoil, to plunder, to assassinate or enslave one’s fellow man is ordinarily regarded as a crime. In public life, on the other hand, from the standpoint of patriotism, when these things are done for the greater glory of the state, for the preservation or extension of its power, all is transformed into duty and virtue (Dolgoff, Bakunin on Anarchism, 1980, 133-4).
Insofar as the modern state was brought into being through acts of class-based violence to, in the words of ‘Father of the US Constitution’ James Madison (1865), defend ‘the minority of the opulent from the majority’, the transcendent morality of patriotism came also to include the defence of the minority from the majority.
The driving ideological abstraction from which the transcendent morality of ‘free’ market capitalism derives is of course money, raised in the present moment to the level of a cult idol—a false idol that prosperity gospel evangelicals for one have no problem reconciling with their alleged lord and saviour.
That free market capitalists use the transcendent morality of money as a coping mechanism for the consequences of class hierarchies for the common enslavement of humanity—the poor and working class to the production of wealth, and the affluent to their collective addiction to money and endless accumulation of material possessions—is a no brainer. They can be taken as the model of idiots living in private fantasy worlds generally divorced from the consequences of their own actions; they can certainly afford to.
The fantasy of the money cult is not hard to decipher; its ideological courtiers and enablers in politics, the corporate media, academia and the culture industry reflexively conflate the class privileges of transnational corporate and finance capital with individual rights and freedoms and the political democracy predicated on them.
To question or challenge the hegemonic supremacy of capital—indeed, to even acknowledge that it exists—is, to this torturous logic and the magical thinking divorced from empirical reality, to attack democracy and a social order concerned with respecting and protecting the rights and freedoms of the individual.
The playing of the victim and victim-blaming embodied in this mentality, along with the complete abortion of ethics and blame-shifting so transparently associated with it, is clearly of supreme value to the money cult insofar as it serves as a coping mechanism for the increasingly glaring and terminal consequences of its own existence. One imagines that throwing an endless torrent of material goods into the bottomless pit of their alienation as slaves to accumulation addiction also has a positive short term effect, as does any form of addiction.
The management stage of addiction does of course have less to do with initial euphoria and more to do with feeding the statis monkey, and avoiding the withdrawal one. One could certainly be forgiven for wondering if the fear of the withdrawal meatgrinder isn’t what drives the money cultists to much or all of the blaming of the victims for the consequences of their money addiction. The disease of addiction manifests in innumerable ways; the behaviours are commonly understood, if perhaps not equally the contexts.
Old crutches in new bottles
Perhaps it could be said that we live then in a culture of addiction management; wildly erratic behaviour chasing the accumulation dragon, trying to keep the euphoria of accumulating and upward class mobility alive amidst a disintegrating social and world order, while victimising others in our addiction-feeding rampage and inventing increasingly wilder and wilder tall stories to try to rationalise an increasingly unstable and brittle status quo.
As long as the ingroup, the powerful people who matter, still believe the tall stories and can repeat them without bursting into laughter or tears, or both, that’s what matters. The money cult is a money cult, after all, because absolute power insists on one story, its own story, and insists that it be self-serving. Money power is absolute, and the absolute power of capital is reflected in its absolute corruption; indeed, so corrupted by and sick with money fever is the oligarchy that its property owns it.
Addiction means that the crutch you use owns you; this is as true of heroin and meth as it is of organised religion and, of course, money. The culture around this addiction, which again brooks no contradiction on the grounds that extreme class privilege and democracy are the exact same thing, infects the rest of society—at times through concerted campaigns to reassert ideological dominance and enforce conformity by gaslighting the rest of us ideologically. If you think for yourself, the terrorists win.
This is true except of course if we benefit from the terrorism—either because it makes the world safe for the extractivism of transnational corporations, or because it demonises dissent as disloyalty and heresy. In this case the transcendent morality of capital, the demonised Other and the conspiratorial paranoia to which the addiction-ridden culture of the money cult gives rise, provides a means for flight from reality and a coping mechanism for the consequences globally, again, of the glaring abortion it has made of human civilisation.
One must pity centrists and liberals in this situation; under such conditions, attempting either to sit on the fence, or to game the cesspool in order to win concessions from it, becomes ever more of a challenge. Endemic corruption hardly gives up without a fight, and indeed looks to reinvent itself to adapt as much as it can to changing conditions.
This would appear to account in no small part for the increasing prevalence of woke capitalists; liberalism as a puppet of finance capital and transnational corporations can reduce staff turnover though gender and cultural diversity programmes designed to counter discriminatory mentalities and belief systems rooted in the racial and gender supremacisms associated with the money cult.
I went to an interview at a share house in inner Melbourne once where the guy who took me through was working for a major Australian bank. He described to me in detail the incredibly concerted diversity culture they had implemented, expressing great surprise and interest as a former teacher that they were so liberal.
Naturally this diversity campaign had nothing to say about the systemic roots of things like misogyny and racism, but rather seemed to function primarily as a way for the corporate executives to virtue signal their progressive, enlightened, liberal values while (1) perpetrating the money cult, (2) feeding their accumulation addictions, (3) inventing tall stories to blame the victims for the consequences of their actions, and (4) otherwise cope with the hellish reality of a world enslaved, in one way or another, to the false idol of money as much as possible.
The virtue signalling seemed a little, I don’t know, limited, though this has not stopped the apparent limitations of woke virtue signalling to paper over an addiction-driven money cult from being taken up as Serious Business™ by centrists, liberals and the radical left.
It is hardly as though any of them needed to be crippled by their own limitations any more than they had been already; the narrowing and rightward shifting of the Overton Window by the corporate-media driven manufacture of consent has been disastrous for centrists, needing to navigate the middle ground between right wing neoliberals and oligarchical, neo-aristocratic fascists.
Similarly, liberals under neoliberalism are reduced to the Quixotic task of trying to socialise Wall St within conditions where the democratic burden of power to justify itself to the individual is reversed in the name of defending the money cult from democracy. Woke virtue signalling is useful in this case insofar as liberals can conspire with their loyal capitalist opposition to wokewash the money cult.
Further to the left, ghettoised but well-meaning radicals take on alienated roles of permanent protest that tend to achieve little besides reproducing failed hierarchical party structures, vanguardist strategies, and the tinpot revolutionaries whose silver lining on defeat is to be big fishes in small ponds.
Too much hard work to do
The lessons of socialist reconstruction in reflecting on the failure in the past to maintain a basic consistency between means and ends on the grounds that actions speak louder than words? No thanks, working your way clear of historical baggage is just too much hard work. The ancillary benefits of the same kind of woke, got-all-the-answers-even-if-I-don’t-know-what-the-question-is virtue signalling of the big fishes in the big ponds is good enough.
Socially, our community and interpersonal relations seem to be dominated by similarly comprehensive breakdowns of higher order emotions like compassion, empathy and solidarity; subject ourselves to the temptations of the money cult, we invest our identities in the things we possess as they again increasingly possess us in turn.
In being faced with the consequences of our own addiction-culture addled misadventures socially and interpersonally, we play the victim to try to wriggle out of having to be held accountable for them. It’s almost as though it’s in the DNA of a social culture built historically on violence, as settler colonial states such as Australia are. Get in a tight corner, muscle your way out.
This mentality is reflected in particular in the way tough cunts poisoned by money cult negativity feel entitled to try to shove their way out of the fact that, next to demonstrating the capacity compassion and empathy, being an opinionated, narcissistic nutsack is pitifully weak and out of touch. Compassion takes strength and insight, while hatefulness and negativity demands neither intelligence, understanding and insight; as coping mechanisms and crutches devoid of any desire or capacity to learn and grow, on the other hand, they work wonders.
Within the vicious cycles to which toxic masculinity in particular give rise, it seems almost like the chaos, hostility and conflict outside mirrors the same within, and vice versa—a perfect prison of a feedback loop. And then you have accumulation addiction culture and the money cult to which it gives rise to contend with. Not quite the healthy interpersonal and social dynamics one might hope for as a sound basis for collective longevity and prosperity on the whole.
Nevertheless, and despite being saddled with unconscious self-loathing either as wage slaves, or addiction slaves, or both, the money cult society does have dosing alienation and misery with status, wealth and power down to a fine art; this art and science is maintained as such because it also represents coping strategies amidst our collective downward spiral.
For evangelical prosperity gospel slaves of the false idol in particular, and for slaves to consumerism in general otherwise, class stratification is a consolation prize for a life in a vacant, barren abortion of a civilisation. The Life Plan from Birth, Growing Up™ and Adulting™ provide performative scripts for the coping strategies associated with chasing the American Dream—and as George Carlin pointed out, there’s a reason they call it that: because you have to be asleep to believe it. Asleep, or just inculcated with addiction culture and the impossible dream of ever having enough stuff to be whole within yourself.
Amidst our innumerable pecking-order stratifications of class, gender, race, sexuality, ability—and any other way you can think of to stereotype people arbitrarily—we look lastly to informal hierarchies, the social pecking order. Even at the interpersonal level, woke virtue signalling offers us a way of appearing to care, without potentially messy or inconvenient complications like having to actually care; this seems its supreme value to self-interested, narcissistic sociopaths and their hangers-on in the innumerable contexts where it shows up.
In cases where we’re denied other forms of privilege, being shat on from a great height by transnational finance capital, acting in the name of democracy, these informal alpha hierarchies are a last resort for status on which to fall back on. The more austere society gets as economic and political corruption feeds its decline and decay, the more important becomes the social pecking order; the phenomenon of Instagram influencers and their vacant hangers-on shows the tawdry reality of this fact alone. The wellness industry comes in a close second.
The practise of cutting down tall poppies—especially prevalent in Australia, which enjoys an equality of mediocrity—seems almost like the entry point into the kind of anti-intellectualism that discourages critical thinking towards things like money cults. The mentality that thinking for yourself gives aid to the enemies of society does inevitably invite degeneration into the kind of reactionary paranoia that suggests an underlying addiction to accumulating. A lack of tall poppies does also means a lack of bold thinkers, which surely suits money cultists just fine.
In any event, and all cases, it does seem a bit like the energy expended in maintaining a benign façade on a rotten underlying structure—much less to say the endemic injustice and immiseration to which it gives rise—is more than what would be required to change. The same also appears to be true of the failed responses which refuse to concede defeat and end up approximating everything they claim to oppose in the process.
The joy of cocooning
Radical left ghettos are beset with their inability to come to terms with historical defeats, and deal with this by resorting to the woke virtue-signalling culture of the neo-aristocratic corporate oligarchy. This is a fact, one that begs the question as to the ability of the nominal left to differentiate itself from the reactionary and authoritarian culture we were born into, are conditioned by, and understand as a problem insofar as worshipping money is a great way to bring a civilisation to its knees.
The anarchist revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin once said Christianity was fortunate in that it was born into a world of slaves; it was and is surely a marvel of a coping mechanism and crutch that promises salvation and delivers alienation from oneself and others, social control through denying human fallibility, and slavery. The allegation that the universe owes us answers and that they know what they are, heretics and unbelievers be damned, is a textbook example of virtue signalling—the coping mechanism par excellence for the end times.
The same could easily be said about liberalism and its abandonment of the working classes and poor for single-issue politics built into sexy shopping lists of timid, watered-down policy; the need to disguise the anaemia of compromises with the money cult, coupled with abandonment of class politics, helps to account for the endemic negativity of liberal identity politics. Born in the identity politics of white nationalism, identity politics is virtue signalling par excellence; identifying as a victim permanently gives rise to new vicious cycles of blame and retribution.
Virtue signalling as the coping mechanism par excellence for the end times holds true for the left also. Behind the defeat and ongoing failure of unreconstructed socialists is (1) their desire to try to game class hierarchies by harnessing the conditioning of the wage-slaves and turn it to revolutionary purposes—alleged to be revolutionary insofar as their own power grab is the same thing as the abolition of class and the commodity form—and (2) their refusal to acknowledge the failure of words speaking louder than actions in neglecting to maintain a basic harmony between means and ends. This is the legacy of Leninism.
This legacy is however, again, a great coping mechanism for the end times. Society is on last legs and we cannot and will not think of anything better to do than rehash appeals to authority and hierarchical modalities—the very same appeals to authority and hierarchical modalities that have lead the general crisis of the 21st century in the first place in allowing a money cult both of the inherently monopolistic (and, these days, totalitarian) tendencies built into capitalist social relations.
It has been said that it is easier for most of us to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism. This might be construed as an effect of the money cult. One can’t help but wonder if the same doesn’t hold true of what remain of liberalism and socialism. Everything to the left of the left of the money cult struggles against terminal deficiencies to overcome this apparent reality insofar as it reproduces too much of its thinking. This is especially true insofar as it does so with a view to papering over its lack of historical resolution, and making a cosy coping mechanism until the western-dominated world order goes tits up, as it will eventually do when Wall St can no longer dodge the gathering tsunami of unpaid bills from history.
A left that can envision the end of capitalism needs to be able to rise above the negativity produced in poisonous torrent by its vile and ignoble value system, and work on developing ways forward—path of virtue with which to challenge the vicious cycles conjoining and dragging the world down a long spiral into decline and collapse. The problems faced in resisting this outcome present not least in reasserting individual and social boundaries as the basis for individual rights and freedoms.
After all, other people’s boundaries that get in the way of capital accumulation do seem to be the primary target of the endless class war waged on the world by a global class of predatory, neo-aristocratic corporate oligarchs who look to objectify, conquer, enclose, dominate and exploit all life, in the destructive manner of locusts. As Warren Buffett once said, of course there’s class war, but it’s our class that’s waging the war, and we’re winning—until it breaks the planet and the souls of everyone on it at least.
We must know what we are dealing with to be able to rise above the thinking, culture and norms that created the problem of the end-times in the first place, and not simply to lean on crutches that keep us ambulant from day to day until the end times end, Wall St goes tits up as it will do sooner or later, and everyone is consumed in the ensuing violence and chaos.
Having all the answers when you don’t know the question
The insanity that this whole state affairs very conspicuously rests on in these end of days times is reminiscent of the old riddle, which came first, the chicken or the egg? If we think about it, the reason it’s a riddle, with no apparent answer, is because it’s a stupid fucking question. You might as well ask which came first, the baby or the human. There’s no meaningful answer to a question based on a false premise; the question is false because it’s based on a meaningless, black and white binary, a false opposite—the chicken and the egg, the baby and the human.
Money cults are built on false opposites, like arguably all ideologies constructed around closed systems of thought identifying the known Self with the chicken or baby, and the unknown Other with the egg or human. If understanding a problem means understanding the dimensions of the insanity informing it, maybe this gives us some insight into the crutch for those of us looking for the most painless way to live out the end of days until the ecological and economic Armageddon arrives, and takes our crutches along with ourselves.
As the basis for a cult mentality as a cocoon within which to hide from inconvenient reality, the claim to having all the answers without knowing how to tell meaningful from meaningless questions reflects the pathological entitlement of the cult of money and its culture of addiction.
Furthermore, the claim to having all the answers without knowing what question is supported by the cultish assumption that the truth of an idea is determined by the number of people who believe it; thus do the useful idiots of decline and collapse protect themselves from having to know about the world they’ve made, and the world they’ve left behind. This seems quite the characteristic feature of the boomer generation, pulling the ladder of affluence up behind the and riding the boom wave all the way to ecocide.
If there was a dollar for everyone who thinks they have all the answers and doesn’t know what the question is, avoiding having to deal with the world as it is by regressing into one or another teleological fantasy land of magical thinking where virtue signalling replaces engaging with reality, we could probably mitigate some of the problems associated with this fairly terminal phase of the modern world. The problem would still remain however of the ideological coping mechanisms for the end times—those that do little more to feed pretences to having values, principles, ethics, convictions, priorities, managed expectations and a conscience, while to one degree or another comprehensively lacking any or all in practise.
Perhaps the final abuse for privileged ingroups within class and social hierarchies within the money cult in the end of days is to be able to regress emotionally and psychologically into ideological flights of fantasy, into dissociative, cocoon-like imaginariums—predicated in binary assumptions as generally pointless and stupid as those of the chicken and egg riddle.
Conclusion
If karma has any role to play, causality dictates that proverbial deals with the devil of the order of trying to overcome problems using the thinking that created them can only end with the eventual destruction of all concerned. Pretending that things can be otherwise is to attempt to game causality and reality in the interests of our false pride; the only worthwhile thing we can achieve from the sheer arrogance, vanity and entitlement of doing so is to provide unintentional humour for others.
Otherwise, to borrow some local vernacular, in resorting to crutches based on ingroup virtue signalling, groupthink, traditionalism, tribalism and ideological conformity, we are setting ourselves up for a mischief. In that respect, play-acting for the tribe can only function to maintain the pretence that things can end other than badly without dealing with historical root causes for civilisational decline and eventual collapse.
Failing to treat root causes instead of symptoms, and hiding behind freedom like a coward, instead of standing and front of it and defending it for all, achieves nothing besides giving us an ideological crutch to lean on until the rot from the money cult cuts out enough of the social fabric that the system keels over completely. Insofar as that follows, demonstrating a practical knowledge of the difference between coping mechanisms for the end times, and adaptiveness to meaningful change, might ultimately make all the difference.
