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Feral Finster's avatar

Start liking it. As the middle class in the West is picked clean and tossed away, Moloch will need something else to eat.

If Marx teaches us nothing else, he teaches us that everything id downstream of technology and economics. The state of technology determines what choices are possible; economics determines what choices are feasible. If technology makes a restaurant possible, a rich man can have anything on the menu. A poor man must budget. A housecat can plump out on "Tender Vittles". A feral cat must hunt or find a trash can.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this instrumentalist worldview is sociopathic. Thing is, Marx is wrong about a lot of things, but this time he is right, and on a larger scale even than Machiavelli. What both had in common is that sought to describe accurately *how* *the* *real* *world* *actually* *works*, how the princes really act, regardless of their fine-sounding justifications and the glib propaganda produced by their smirking courtiers.

This is the real reason that Marx, or at least his worldview, is opposed to the worldview of Christ. Not because the Frankfurt School tried to offer cultural (as opposed to economic) explanations as to why The Revolution hadn't happened yet, but because Christ saw people as something other than instrumental, as tools to be judged by their usefulness, as props in a play or greyhounds to be killed if they can't make the cut.

You get no earthly rewards for treating humans and cats as you would wish to be treated. Quite the contrary. In fact, the people of wealth, power and influence are but glorified sociopaths and behave accordingly (or they would soon lose their high places), but even so, many will die peacefully in their beds, loved and celebrated by many. They got their rewards. They got The Goodies up front.

Rathe, Christ teaches us to follow Him, even though our earthly goals are furthered by treating others as means for us to achieve our ends, even though the earthly consequences of following Christ (whether you use that specific term or not) are temptation, mockery and suffering.

If you think about it, if the Real World really is all there is, to follow Christ is insane. No wonder The Way is narrow, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.....

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Debra's avatar

Interesting essay, as always.

One phrase comes to my mind as the most pertinent one about sacrifice ; it comes from Allegri's "Miserere" which I listen to often. The text must be very old, and I don't know who is speaking, but it is not essential. The speaker says at one point that the sacrifice that (the Christian) God wants is a repentant heart. That speaks to me radically. The repentant heart was meant to blot out a great deal of those smoking, bloody animal sacrifices in various temples all over the world, including in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The sacrifice of a repentant heart, coupled with Jesus's sacrifice in his bloody physical death by crucifixion, and Mary's trial at seeing her child suffer and die before her are the sacrifices that the Christian world offers in replacement of the old ways. The institution of the Catholic Church constantly reactualized Christ's sacrifice in the ceremony of the Mass. Very important.

That said... it seems to me that we are witnessing the birth of a new religion that is emerging from scientific scepticism. This has been coalescing maybe since the 19th century, the century that gave us the word "ecology", a modern construction from Greek etymons/roots. I don't like this religion at all, but what is emerging seems religious to me in its goals, and in its attempt at universal ? colonisation. Will it constitute... a transcendance ? Is it already attempting to constitute a transcendance ? It's funny how fast ideas can flip-flop in the Internet age.

Colonisation goes way back. The ancient Greeks were colonising, and the spread of their culture, their language is deeply responsible for where we are right now.

Speaking of the Greeks, and the Athenians... maybe some people here know that the cynicism, the hopelessness about corruption in democracy can be seen in Aristophanes, so there is nothing new about it, even if we would like to think that technology is radically changing us.

And on democracy : years ago, Konrad Lorenz wrote a book called the ten ? capital sins of capitalism, and he speculated briefly about democracy, comparing it to the phenomenon of schools of fish where identical individuals were grouped together in masses/schools, and maintained an identical distance between each other. In the school of fish there are no couples, no sexual reproduction between two partners, and no "child rearing" because there is no.. individual identity among the.. individuals.

Is the god who is tormenting us Moloch or... Dionysos ?

Probably Moloch is more straightforward than Dionysos. Dionysos is the god of the theatre, of wine... spirits, we could say. When he gets hold of people, they go berserk.

"All the world's a stage"... that is Dionysos' world. God help us when the theatre is everywhere BUT on the stage.

...

For sure, the slavery issue is sending us berserk right now. Trying to figure out who is a slave and who isn't, and hoping that WE aren't secretly slaves...

I am watching my kids raising their little ones, and it is hard sometimes. I have tried telling them that there is a world between saying "thank you" to a child who does something that you have asked him to do, or something that pleases you, and saying "bravo". There is a world of difference between the two responses, and the slavery issue is a big part of it, in ways that we have a hard time seeing.

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