Out Of The Ashes
Conservatism and its self-immolation.
Capitalism has become a religion, insofar as it meets many of the necessary conditions of one. Anthropological: the human being — the selfish animal — , laying the foundation for doctrines of salvation. Soteriological: socioeconomic salvation by following the creeds and mythos of meritocracy, and the many prophets who proselytize the virtue of selfishness. Theological: the invisible hand, the Great Father to whom we offer up our greed in the hope of being blessed with collective benefit. Ethical: nihilism — the invisible hand, a vacuous deity, whose logos — the free market — is the arbiter of value by virtue of fiat. Epistemological: decadent pragmatism — knowledge by virtue of practical use and success within markets; business schools as seminaries; the anti-intellectualism of devaluing the anti-dexterous forms of knowledge. Cultic practice: communal hierarchy by virtue of the god’s will; ritualistic consumerism; the great cathedrals of the stock market; conservative and neo-liberal politicians as theocrats.
The Western ethos has become so imbued with capitalist religiosity it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. “I am in blood stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er” (Macbeth, 3.4). We cannot count on economic reform to create cultural or environmental progress. Though we on the left denounce reactionary movements of all kinds, metaphysically we are the reactionaries; capitalism has become the most active force on Earth — the active force which exploits, corrupts, and appropriates. The reactionary forces within the left, if we consider the global scale of which capitalism has evangelized, have at best managed to sever a single head of a hydra; the hydra then grows back two heads to replace the one lost, and one of its these is a bastardized copy of the very reactionary forces which beheaded it.
Perhaps the left may embody active forces only once Gaia, the Great Mother, enacts her centuries-old plan to bring about the end of the Great Father — a plan which conservatives, the self-professed oracles of the invisible hand, have almost entirely ignored. Climate change, in our century, will challenge the expansion and self-preservation of capitalism. The creeds and mythos of the invisible hand will birth their negation: “self-interest with a byproduct of collective good!”— self-destructive instinct and collective suffering!
To expect the self-professed oracles to abandon their evangelism after their god has died would be naive. Once that great, all-consuming fire of becoming is impossible to ignore, these oracles will turn to self-immolation in order to reorient the public’s attention. Self-immolation: desperation and panic, an attempt to preserve power. Out of the ashes of the the immolated, the left will have its opportunity to rise — becoming the dominant, active force to which any remaining strands of the capitalist religion will be feeble, reactive forces.
We must prepare for the coming self-immolation of the right. We must prepare for collapse — to assert ourselves as active forces thereafter.
“I will sing of well-founded Earth, mother of all, eldest of all beings. She feeds all creatures that are in the world, all that go upon the goodly land, and all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly: all these are fed of her store. Through you, O queen, men are blessed in their children and blessed in their harvests, and to you it belongs to give means of life to mortal men and to take it away” (Homeric Hymn to Gaia).
