Saturday, September 23, 2006
(8:49 AM) | Anonymous:
The Infantile Belief in Money
When I was a young paranoid evangelical, terrified of the coming wrath of God for touching myself or some other stupid thing, I devised a plan to ward off the rapture, which was in my own pre-millenarian mind the beginning of the eschaton. The plan was simple, though it required organization on a massive scale and large-scale ideological training. It was my understanding that no one knew the time or the hour of Christ’s return, which, in the beliefs of the church I was raised in, meant that no one knew when the rapture would come. So one would simply have to believe, really believe to the point of absolute knowledge, that this day and this hour were precisely the appointed time of that apocalyptic event. Now I knew that obviously one single person could not believe this every day, because aside from the logical impossibility, the will of a single person is not sufficient to truly believe in the reality of such a fantastic event after its failure to occur. So people would be assigned days to believe this, though of course it would not appear as an assignment but as an imperative of knowledge itself. There were even safe-guards in this scheme as there is a sufficient population of evangelical Christians to assign more than one person, whose will may falter, to each day and hour.Of course this is an embarrassing thing to admit. It’s beyond silly, and one wonders about the kind of culture that would encourage such mentally suspect thoughts in a child. Yet this scheme is the very basis of our socio-political culture, for money is the very basis of our socio-political culture. Every day we stave off the coming wrath of the Market God by believing in money, really believing in it so that we know it is real, though in reality it is no more real than the rapture or the second coming of an evangelical God. The current scheme is a bit more nefarious than my own childish one, for instead of making just a few people a day live in terror we all live in relative peace unaware of the apocalypse around the bend. We believe in our knowledge of money.
This is what troubles me about imperatives to play the stock market or ‘get smart’ about my money that I've heard since my childhood, almost congruently with the imperative to 'get right with God'. It’s obvious to all of us that our position within the economy will determine our direction in life and that, of course, it is wise to deal with that position prudently. It is so obvious as to be boring and beyond the most banal of all academic bourgeois knowledge. But what troubles me is that people who claim to be secular are just as entrenched in a kind of religious belief as those evangelicals we find to be so disturbing in their ‘childish’ beliefs. It troubles me that people who claim to support the autonomy of the State against the intrusion of religious belief have no problem with nation-states being nothing more than another economic actor within the wider economy, its own sovereignty subject to the will of that wider economy with its own hierarchy akin to that of the ecclesial order.
Now the usual response is that we have to participate in this chrematistic system -- to suggest otherwise risks being a beautiful soul or, even worse, being a guilt-monger. But these are only clever ways of disguising a more nefarious beautiful soul behind such an accusation. For those of us who can see the truth of the worse kinds of religiosity behind the capitalistic chrematistics and yet participate piously within it as if such participation granted purity are the ones who believe, who hold a faith, in a grace beyond understanding. Goodchild says, “For money that makes money leads to the acquisition of a power that has no political essence or limits.” The true cost of this religious universalism embraced by the new beautiful souls is a kind of excommunication. If you don’t believe in the power of money by participating in the exchange of the community (liturgy) then you have excluded yourself. There is nothing the community can do about it, as it was your choice and so it is not the fault of the community that you suffer for it.
