Into the abyss of the American soul...

In this superb essay, P.T. Carlos talks about how Americans have no deep roots or tradition, the author mentions a theorist, Dugin, who says there are 3 ways to remedy it, go back to a European identity, grow a new individualist religious American identity, or ....

“Dugin's [third] primary suggestion is to embrace the essence of Americanism: the extreme atomized and lonely individual and take it to its logical conclusion and drinking the poisoned chalice down to its dregs....

This is the existentialist path which constitutes the complete negation of all forms of rooted identity through fully embracing the absurd. It is only in embracing the absurdity of his own being as the Spengalarian "insufferably lonely ego lost in space." 

Form without content, the infinite loneliness of the unhinged will manifesting itself in arbitrary impulses which flash in and out of time and then recede back into the abyss from which they sprang.

The abused orphan, the homeless addict, the victim of unspeakable crimes. Those who have faced the possibility of their own extinction. It is only these few who truly know what it is to be "Amerikwan," those who have been tossed or have tossed themselves, into the abyss. Only these few, the despised, know its secrets. And it is only these few for whom a transfiguration and a salvation are possible. As the great Emilie Cioran, in his seminal The Heights of Despair explained:

The passion for the absurd can grow only in a man who has exhausted everything, yet is still capable of undergoing awesome transfigurations. For one who has lost everything, there is nothing left in life except the passion for the absurd. What else in life could move such a person? What seductions? Some say self-sacrifice for humanity, the public good, the cult of the beautiful, and so forth. I like only those people who have done away with all that--even for a short time. Only they have the right to speak about life. You can recover love or serenity. But you recover it through heroism, not ignorance...Only when you have tasted all the poisoning sweetness of the absurd are you fully purified, because only then will you have pushed negation to its final expression.

It is only these holy fools of American society that are able to transcend its limitations and articulate its bitter truths. Just as, in King Lear it is only Lear's fool who is ever able to speak the truth. As Simone Weil (a holy fool herself) noted:

There is a class of people in this world who have fallen into the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, and who are deprived not only of all social consideration but also, in everybody's opinion, of the specific human dignity, reason itself--and these are the only people who, in fact, are able to tell the truth. All others lie.

And it is only these fools who, in our Amerikwa, are ever able to articulate the truth. Since their social station, which is less than zero and thus relegates them to an essentially sub-human status, provides them with a unique freedom. A freedom which is completely alien to the rest of those residing in the so-called "land of the free."

They can articulate it because their very being is now a testament to it. As they have tasted their own finitude and understand the reality of death. A reality which is everywhere denied in Amerikwa. A place where death is relegated to the dark recesses of the nursing home, the abortion clinic, or the inner city ghetto. Where youth is sold as an eternal reality, which, for the right price, can be had by all. Where, thanks to the proliferation of an ever increasing assortment of banal amusements and fetishes, a man can go through an entire life without once asking the essential questions (Who am I? Why am I here? for what end?) that separate a human consciousness from the animal one.

To be more accurate the Amerikwan consciousness has not become so much animal or sub-human as it has become Post-Human, a Gnostic ghost in the Liberal machine. This is the destiny, the telos, of every Amerikwan.

Thus, in Amerikwa it is only the fool who can retain any sense of authentic humanity, for this authenticity can only be achieved through confrontation with one's own finitude.

http://thermidormag.com/searching-for-identity-in-the-amerikwan-wasteland/ 

Only Voluntary suffering can save us, Burkhardt's call for an ascetic revolution.

Photo : Church bombed in Syria resulting in 200 deaths

Remarkable and prophetic words from Karl Löwith on the 19th century historian Jacob Burckhardt:

"At a time which appears to us as having still enjoyed stability, security, and freedom, Burckhardt considered himself already an uprooted refugee. 'Set thy house in order,' he warns a friend in the prosperous Germany of 1870; that 'is the wisest thing to do for us in all of central Europe,' for everything will radically change. Hence his deep understanding of that classical period of disintegration in which the followers of Christ opposed the pleasures and vices of a decaying society and conquered the souls of men. 

While the world and all worldly powers were corrupt, the Christian church spread charity, discipline, and asceticism, and even men and women of the Roman nobility gave away their possessions for the sake of the poor and resolved to live in the world without being of it.... 

Likewise, Burckhardt's only hope for the future of Europe was in 'ascetic men,' i.e., in austere characters with the courage to abstain and to renounce, instead of getting along and ahead. In the face of Europe's progressive industrialization and vulgarization, it was Burckhardt's fundamental conviction that 'the new, the great, and the liberating' can come forward only in contrast to power, wealth, and business. 'It will need its martyrs. It must be a something which by its nature can keep its head above water in all catastrophes, political, economic, and otherwise. ....Burckhardt thought that no liberal education will be able to save us from the great violation of the human soul which is now going on, but only religion, 'for without a transcendent urge which outweighs all the clamor for power and money, nothing will be of any use.'

To Burckhardt the model case for this prophetic vision was the rise of Christianity. In his view genuine Christianity is essentially 'ascetic' because of being otherworldly, since its hope and expectation are in another world. With regard to the ways of this world, Christianity is a religion of suffering and renunciation. 

....he held that a Christianity reduced to morality and deprived of its supernatural and doctrinal foundations is no longer a religion. Modern man cannot solve this perplexity by a sheer will to believe, for genuine faith is not only a commitment but also an overwhelming power which has to be experienced. Nor can he solve it by reducing the Christian ideal of the saint to that of (Christian) gentleman.' He felt keenly that a Christianity which is watered down to a humanitarianism in which the priest is 'first of all a Gebildeter,' a man of the educated class, then a philosophizing theologian, and eventually a little bit of a timid man.

... he saw no prospects for a genuine revival because the modern spirit of unrestricted worldliness, of labor, business, and acquisitiveness, is unconcerned with personal salvation in a world to come and is decidedly hostile to any form of spiritual practice and pure contemplation. Morality is now emancipated from its religious foundation in a supernatural faith. 'The modern mind aims at solution of the supreme enigma of life independent of Christianity.' A striking instance of this separation of secular morality from religion is modern philanthropy because it is motivated by optimistic and activistic premises. While Christianity taught unconditional charity by depriving one's self of one's possessions, modern philanthropy is far more 'a concomitant of the money-making spirit,' endeavoring to foster activity and to help man along to a better adjustment in his earthly career. 

Mundane life and its interests now outweigh all other considerations.

Primitive and genuine Christianity stands in complete contrast to the standards of the world. ...'The humble surrender of self and the parable of the right and the left cheek are no longer popular.' People want to maintain their social sphere and respectability; they have to work and to make money; hence they cannot but allow the world to interfere in many ways with their traditional religion. 'In short, for all their religiosity, people are not disposed to renounce the advantages and benefits of modern culture.' ...To modern man Christianity is not a stumbling block and foolishness but—if he is not hostile to it—a wholesome element of secular civilization.

Modern Christendom wants to forget that Christianity has always been at its best and most influential when it maintained its divergence from worldly culture..... the Christian religion was and is not a cult consecrating a national culture but a transcendent faith in a future redemption. .... It would be undone if it were to forget that it is a faith in the glory of the Cross, a victorious religion of suffering, a faith for those who suffer. 

[The] achievement of a Christian culture, however, was possible not because the church taught the world what the world knows already more clearly by itself, but because the church impressed on the world the otherworldly distinctness of a transcendent faith.

At a time when liberal optimistic Protestantism was in full sway on the Continent, Burckhardt called the nineteenth-century optimism 'atrocious' and predicted its evaporation, while he insisted on the invincible strength of a genuine faith over against the principalities of the world. 'In the twentieth century those amazing caricatures of so-called reformed pastors will no longer endure, for all this agitation will scatter like dust as soon as people fall into real distress.' On the other hand, persecuting governments 'might meet with a resistance of the strangest sort from Christian minorities who would not fear even martyrdom.'

... Burckhardt discerned in 'modern' Christianity a contradiction in terms, because the evil genius of modern life, its... striving for power and gain, is downright opposed to voluntary suffering and self-surrender.

From Löwith's 'Meaning in History')

Notes on the origins and consequences of the Heresy called "Americanism."

In 1899 Pope Leo XIII condemned an ideology he called "Americanism." The following are pertinent notes I took from Dr. John C. Rao’s AMERICANISM AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES, you can read the entire thing online HERE, he traces the heresy of 'Americanism' through the rise of the atomizing individualism of Puritan thought to strip people of their real differences along with the push to celebrate patriotism as whatever idea's undermine authority, he begins by noting that early America exhibited  :

“....a kind of materialistic “pioneer mentality” that manifested itself in varied forms. It is hard to exaggerate the power exercised by the image of a virgin continent, ready for conquest, upon the minds of excited Americans. An appeal was made to this image in the cause of “integration”. Loyal Americans were told to avoid divisive quibbling over “non-essentials”. 

Americans were assigned a common national purpose: the attainment of a livelihood for themselves and for their families at previously undreamed-of levels. Hard labor and solid material achievement were held up as the true marks of patriotic spirit. Hard labor and solid material achievements, that is, that did not itself somehow disturb or demand too much of one’s neighbors and thereby become divisive; hard labor and material achievement regardless of their object or quality. Thus, in effect, potentially dangerous but sublime concerns were to be sacrificed to assuredly pacifying but mundane projects. The sacrifice was to take place on the altar of American unity, for the sake of the harmony required of “home”.

the attack upon the southern aristocracy in the Civil War, whose defeat removed the one class that was permanently controversial and wedded to principles other than the purely pragmatic and material.

It created the impression of establishing what has become known as a “pluralist” society, where many ways of life are “respected”. In truth, however, the manifold organs of Anglo-Saxon society and the spirit of Anglo-Saxon culture were “moderating” and “integrating” this diversity out of existence, slowly, peacefully, but surely. 

.....native Anglo-Saxon Americans themselves were pressured into a gradual transformation of their own traditions. Anything threatening the adoption of the new groups soon began to be discouraged and renounced as much as immigrant particularities. Unity took precedence over custom, habit and even adherence to what was believed to be the truth. While seeking to integrate, native Americans were being integrated as well. Integrated into what? Into a “pluralist” society which could only survive by missing bits and pieces of the ideas of all of its component parts and by bending the entirety to the construction of a grayish culture serving the least common denominator in human material needs. A process was begun which has ended with the “integration” into American life of groups espousing perversities and determining how their needs and interests might help improve the GNP. 

A process was begun which has ended in the glorification of the computer technician over the saint, media hype over substantive issues, and mass-produced hamburgers over the creations of the great composers.

America has made the “thoughtful”, the “spiritual”, the “committed” appear to be the province of either the “insane” or the “treasonous”. 

How can man be saved according to its precepts? Only by an individual act of faith in God...

A dichotomy between the all-perfect God and totally wicked individuals allows no scope for the work of society in the divine plan. All men are like atoms in the face of their God, fundamentally alone in their approach to Him. “Atomism” is, perhaps, the most basic Puritan by-product. The presumption of communities and authorities like the Church, which claimed to lead men to God, became intolerable. Popes and bishops, seen in this light, must inevitably corrupt whatever functions they perform in this wicked world, and, hence, cannot be part of the divine plan. A “Church”, insofar as one must exist to perform symbolic functions and prayer meetings, thus becomes merely the instrument of a “democratic” congregation of atomistic believers.

Man’s efforts to transform the universe into a “mirror of God” become equally useless. Music, art, architecture, food and dress and everything else attempting to elaborate the beauties of a corrupted cosmos become an abomination. 

Many Puritans drew the conclusion that the only way in which a God-fearing Christian might survive would be by fleeing as far from Babylon as possible, to the other side of the ocean, to ...a New Jerusalem, a City on a Hill living outside of and above the vain attempt to divinize the universe.

Secularization was promoted by Puritan Protestantism in three ways. One was by having supported tenets so inhuman as to drive men away from God in horror. A second was through establishing such a stark dichotomy between God and man as to throw into doubt the rationality of Christ’s whole mission, to deny the reality of the Incarnation and to retire the divine beyond man’s reach. The last was by so disdaining the world and ridiculing the possibility of its transformation as to liberate nature entirely from God’s direction.

1)*

the secular Puritan continues to understand men to be atoms, individuals in whose life society plays no true role. Just as a man was expected to make a private act of faith in God, he is now meant to make a private act of faith in his own “goals”, independently of his fellow creatures. Just as he once privately interpreted the Scriptures, he now must be “self-reliant” in his guidance of his own life. And just as the Church, with its panoply of authorities, was seen to be an unwarranted intruder in the relationship of the individual and God, all secular institutions are now condemned from the same standpoint. The state, the family, authoritative traditions in general and one’s pet enemy organization in particular, are all held to be guilty of a form of breaking and entering. Evil in and of themselves, they explain the persistence of wickedness on this planet and can only be tolerated if they exercise their functions subject to the free acceptance of individuals and through democratic structures analogous to those of the Puritan congregations. The present assault upon every aspect of authority, particularly visible since the 1960’s, is directly related to this attitude and cannot be understood without it. Secularized Puritanism and authority are mortal enemies.

2)

Secondly, Puritanism can still be noted in the secularized American’s discomfort with efforts to transform the world into a “mirror of God”. This discomfort appears in two forms, superficially contradictory but firmly related at their root. Many Americans continue to anathematize “high culture”. 

they develop a new type of “high culture” based upon the mad, individualistic ravings of their tortured puritanical souls. Their “cultural” creations are then guiltily justified by them with reference to deep biological or psychological needs. The one group of secularized Puritans adores the Big Mac as the height of human achievement; the other, a homosexual’s multi-million dollar sculpture of a broken toothpick. In short, the Puritan, after his break with faith as during its full fervor, is unable to grasp the principle of restoring all things in Christ. He manifests his inability in either philistinism or perversion.

Finally, the secularized Puritan cannot shake his conviction that the United States is divinely protected, the New Jerusalem

*We are now at the crux of the problem. If America, even in the mind of the secularized Puritan, is the City on a Hill, it would seem to mean that “home” is something worth protecting. But the “nation”, understood in a traditional sense, must itself be a stumbling block to such a mentality. It is a hindrance because it, too, demands respect for authority, whether in the form of institutions or in that of customs and traditions. The true patriot must put brakes upon his “self-reliance” and his atomistic freedom for the good of the country. He is obliged to recognize his inability to provide for himself and his family, to communicate sensibly with a sizeable community and to blossom as a personality outside of his cradle.

The dilemma may be resolved only by giving a new definition of patriotism in the New World, one that takes secularized Puritanism and its preoccupations to heart. A patriotism demanding sacrifices for the sake of the cradle, and thus placing impositions upon the individual, is seen as a wicked thing. But a patriotism which redefines love of country and makes it into devotion to a set of anti-authoritarian principles is another story entirely. A patriotism reminding man of his dependence upon his city, tongue, and fellow citizens, the dead as well as the living, is seen to be as shameful as it is despotic. But a “patriotism” eliminating all these images could make a magnificent contribution to the liberation of the human race.

*How could such a patriotism be developed? By transforming the prudential and, indeed, illusory phenomenon of pluralism into an iron-clad Pluralist Faith; by insisting that the nurturing of diversity as such is the only real purpose of government; by praising American institutions for working towards this end, despite the fact that, historically, such a goal has played no role in the conservative, Anglo-Saxon program; by then explaining that “God”, or whatever force a secularized man might find operative in the universe, had set up the United States and given it its Constitution and its wealth for the sake of propagating atomistic individualism. And, finally, by indicating that patriotism is also service to this cause. Patriotism no longer means protection of American institutions in the sense of their being the legitimate authoritative bodies ruling over men in this country, but protection of American institutions insofar as they help to crush the very principle of authority. Patriotism no longer means protection of American borders in and of themselves, but only insofar as they are the borders of that New Jerusalem established to destroy community and tradition. Indeed, seen in this light, everyone ought—and, indeed, must—establish American institutions and the “American Way of Life”. But, if, through some terrible apostasy, the City on a Hill were to betray its mission, everyone would then be obliged to be devoted to the humiliation of America, whether living in Moscow or Athens or Washington, D.C. True patriotism would then mean devotion to whatever other country takes up the cause of the Pluralist Doctrine. In this second, long unthinkable situation, the “patriot” must necessarily engage in what men throughout the long course of human history have always rightly called treason. And in whatever they do to promote this new form of “patriotism”, we shall see that they do not ensure freedom but, rather, the reign of pure force; the triumph of the will.

Since the powers-that-be claimed that atomistic democracy and Pluralism were their essential backdrop, the immigrants gave the Americanist Religion their genuine support. They were too tired from trying to “make it” to notice what a sham their supposed freedom really was in the Pluralist scheme of things. The myth of American liberty became their myth as well. Also, the “integrationist” insistence upon work and material achievement, although not intrinsically anti-patriotic in the old sense of the word, aided anti-patriotic secular Puritanism in practice. It forced men to act as atomists, to lower their sights from God to insurance policies, to flee from the centers of community life, regardless of the emotional costs involved, just so long as a dollar was to be earned elsewhere. The constant picking up and leaving that has long been a part of the American way of life had to destroy tradition, authority and a sense of commitment in a way that aided the secularized Puritan cause.

Americanism, however, also means “religious” devotion to the bland consequences of the Anglo-Saxon drive for stability. It entails devoting oneself not only to the cause of atomistic freedom, but to a rejection of the firm ideas and divisive behavior that can come from actually exercising freedom. The result has been that Americanism requires simultaneous commitment to atomistic diversity and integrationist unanimity. While praising individualism, an American is really expected to avoid it like the plague. American protocol insists upon a danse macabre, an insane ritual of exulting in liberty and behaving with herd-like docility, whether in politics, at work or in private behavior. The inherent paradox has been seemingly resolved by insisting upon twisting individual “creativity” to the development of vulgar advertising jingles, unisex clothing and broad, insipid, intellectual formulae for everything from philosophy to foreign policy. 

Americanism promoted an atomism that sneered at true community life with its panoply of authorities and traditions as the worst of plagues. This atomism did not understand just how necessary community was to save men from madness. When this atomism infected country living, where such respect was often great and where it was perhaps most essential, it made rural existence intolerably lonely. It has now created the suburb. It has punished those who fled the structured community of the old city for the “freedom” of the outside world with the misery of lives spent on super highways and in soulless shopping malls. The drive towards individual space has led to the creation of vast tracts of “sameness” across the entire breadth of the land. Similarly, those who wished to remain in cities found themselves forced to apologize for their behavior with reference to “personal needs”, “unique life styles”, and an equally corrupt spirit of self-reliance. This “individualism” has been crowned by an insufferable and repulsive trendiness. If the suburbanite atomist is herd-like in his vulgarity, the city-dwelling atomist is machine-like in his obsession with pseudo-intellectual and cultural fads. Americanism is, to a large degree, responsible for their troubles, and Americanism is a principle of death; of life-long euthanasia.

This Pluralism breaks down commitment to all other ideas, establishing a purely materialistic harmony among pseudo-individualists. It has become one of the most effective means of oppression, repressing, as Marcuse says, by tolerating everything to meaninglessness and, therefore, to death.”

The atomization of man and of human society multiplies factions further and further. The most common and successful of such willful factions are those which the American system was disposed to produce by its history (i.e., sexual, commercial, and lunatic). Reason is itself rejected as a guide since that, too, is considered to be an oppressive authority. All of these factions are thrown back on their irrational wills to justify themselves and their life styles, while the meaning of “common sense” is expanded to permit them do so since their suppression could be “divisive” and disturb the peace. 

The result is that Americanism makes us men without a country, just as it makes us men without an authoritative state, a network of real institutions with traditions and esprit de corps, men without a history. Americanism seeks to replace the nation with an ideology, patriotism with an ideological, fideisitic religion. But ideology cannot take the place of faith, the state, the city, the family and everything else of importance to national life. It cannot take the place of a real nation. And, hence, it leaves the American suspended in a limbo which the Americanist would have us believe is a model for the cosmos as a whole.

....it works ferociously against any faith that contradicts it. It cannot rest until is sucks all substance out of opposing creeds. But operating in the subtle way that it does, it prefers to destroy by reinterpretation; by allowing and even encouraging the survival of its opponents, so long as they redefine their beliefs and goals along Pluralist, Americanist lines. 

She [the Church]  did not disdain the principle of authority, the value of community, the wonder of the arts and the glory of the human body. Hence, she did not hand them over to man’s sinful tendencies to be shaped willfully, but, rather, sought to guide them to their proper fulfillment. 

They discovered the true meaning of Pluralism in doing so. They understood that it did not mean adding their heartfelt convictions to an uplifting national dialogue. Instead, they saw that it signified adoption of sexual, commercial and other democratic obsessions, merged into a dull, drab, shapeless middle position, reflected by the character of their bedroom communities as a whole. Pluralism is the intellectual expression of Wonderbread. Catholics saw this and they grew infatuated with the horrendous reality of it. Soon, their love affair led them to a Wonderbread Liturgy, a Wonderbread Catholic school system and a Wonderbread theology, all dedicated to the glorification of secularized Puritanism. This is what Americanism always offered, and this is what Catholics finally obtained. It was a glorious acquisition.

Democracy, Pluralism and separation of Church and State had, it seemed, really done their job. They had given Catholics and their Church a full share in national affairs. This is true, so long as one underlines a harsh fact: those Catholics and that Catholic Church which were given a full share in national affairs were so defused by the Americanist Religion that they bore little or no relation to the believers and the Faith that the United States had so disliked a century beforehand.

- Dr. John C. Rao

AMERICANISM AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES

http://www.traditionalcatholicpriest.com/2017/01/01/americanism-heresy-dr-john-c-rao/ 

The Orthodox option against Capitalism.

First live under Communism, then try complaining about capitalism ! So they say. But faithful Orthodox Christians have lived both, and, while denouncing Marxism & communism as genuine atrocities, neither have they bright words for Capitalism either.

The great Orthodox theologian Bulgakov says,

“In this civilization for hairdressers, where is there any place for bringing to birth the agonies of reflection, wrestling with the torments of conscience, the struggles ... of love and self- denial, the unremitting battle with self? Where in this universal restaurant can our poor spirit find room for its cosmic questions? 

Spirit is here surrendered without any pretence at a struggle to the claims of sensual gratification; its birthright is sold for a mess of pottage. And to compensate for the absence of ideals, we are offered the prospect of ‘living in the midst of beauty’. The drowning of the spirit in sensuality, life without ideals, spiritual embourgeoisement—this is the inevitable logic of hedonism.”

And the existentialist Orthodox philosopher Berdyaev, also in exile from Stalin’s communism, writes :

The whole economic system of Capitalism is an offshoot of a devouring and overwhelming lust, of a kind that can hold sway only in a society that has deliberately renounced the Christian asceticism and turned away from Heaven to give itself over exclusively to earthly gratifications. 

It is quite obvious that Capitalism is unthinkable as a ‘sacred’ economy. It is the result of a secularization of economic life, and by it the hierarchical subordination of the material to the spiritual is inverted. The autonomy of economics has ended in their dominating the whole life of human societies: the worship of Mammon has become the determining force of the age. 

And the worst of it is that this undisguised ‘mammonism’ is regarded as a very good thing, an attainment to the knowledge of truth and a release from illusions. Economic materialism formulates this to perfection when it brands the whole spiritual life of man as a deception and a dream.”

David Bentley Hart opining on the horrors of Mammon writes, 

“The history of capitalism and the history of secularism are not two accidentally contemporaneous tales, after all; they are the same story told from different vantages. Any dominant material economy is complicit with, and in fact demands, a particular anthropology, ethics, and social vision. 

And a late capitalist culture, being intrinsically a consumerist economy, of necessity promotes a voluntarist under-standing of individual freedom and a purely negative understanding of social and political liberty. 

The entire system depends not merely on supplying needs and satisfying natural longings, but on the ceaseless invention of ever newer desires, ever more choices. It is also a system inevitably corrosive of as many prohibitions of desire and inhibitions of the will as possible, and therefore of all those customs and institutions—religious, cultural, social—that tend to restrain or even forbid so many acquisitive longings and individual choices. 

This is what Marx genuinely admired about capitalism: its power to dissolve all the immemorial associations of family, tradition, faith, and affinity, the irresistible dynamism of its dissolution of ancient values, its (to borrow a loathsome phrase) “gales of creative destruction.” 

The secular world—our world, our age—is one from which as many mediating and subsidiary powers have been purged as possible, precisely to make room for the adventures of the will. It is a reality in which all social, political, and economic associations have been reduced to a bare tension between the individual and the state, each of which secures the other against the intrusions and encroachments of other claims to authority, other demands upon desire, other narratives of the human. Secularization is simply developed capitalism in its ineluctable cultural manifestation. 

And it is a system that inevitably eventuates not only in economic, but cultural, “consumerism,” because it can continue to create wealth sufficient to sustain the investment system only by a social habit of consumption extravagantly in excess of mere natural need or even (arguably) natural want. 

Thus it must dedicate itself not only to fulfilling desire, but to fabricating new desires, prompted by fashion, or by seductive appeals to what 1 John calls “the lust of the eyes”—the high art which we call “advertising.” 

As a cultural reality, late capitalism is not merely a regulatory regime for markets, but also a positive system of values, necessarily at odds with other orders of desire, especially those that seek to limit acquisition or inhibit expressions of the will.

....while our ancestors inhabited a world full of gods or saints, ours is one in which they have all been chased away by advertising, into the hidden world of personal devotion or private fixation. Public life is a realm of pure elective spontaneity, in every sphere, and that power of choice must be ceaselessly directed toward an interminable diversity of consumer goods, and encouraged to expand into ever more regions of fiscal, moral, and spiritual life. 

We are shaped by what we desire, and what we desire is shaped by the material culture that surrounds us, and by the ideologies and imaginative possibilities that it embodies and sustains.”

Animated poem Allen Ginsberg - Moloch

 Catholic Daniel M. Bell Jr. explains, “The struggle against savage capitalism must be waged at the level of ontology, for capitalism advances not merely by economic victory but by ontological capture.”

The Orthodox Nationalist Dr .Matthew Raphael Johnson writes,

Dostoevsky called himself a “Christian socialist” more than once. ..Modern, bourgeois capitalism is not consistent with Orthodoxy at any level. Solzhenitsyn spent quite a bit of time explaining how socialism and capitalism were the same far more than they were different: they both were materialist, obsessed with production and technology and thought that happiness came through money and its power. 

They both create a huge state that oversees production. They both create a wealthy ruling class. They both tolerate no organized opposition. They reject the virtues in favor of “efficiency.” They both see man as a cog in a great wheel of production. They see man really as a bundle of nerve endings, at root, seeking satisfaction in the latest technological inventions or labor saving devices (that never seem to save labor).

He ties it all in to liberalism :

“Liberal rule is more insidious and sophisticated than the USSR because it is not based on state power. Instead, it is based on the rule of private capital. The cosmopolitan and neurotic American capitalist seeks to “liberate the individual” so as to more easily enslave him to his passions. Then, this isolated mass-man — this crippled, malformed cipher of a human being — is offered the satisfaction of his passions for a fee.”

Here Rev. Metropolitan of Nafpaktos and Saint Vlasios, fr. Hierotheos Vlachos, both highly respected Orthodox theologians, make the case for Capitalism to be antithetical to Christianity, based on deformed Western metaphysics reliance on rationality to organize life, by way of Weber of course.

By way of webber they note that there have always been profit making and class differences, but in the West, because of  its unique metaphysics,  

“The difference is that in the Western Middle Ages, Capitalism took on the form of a rational organisation; it was the pursuit of profit, “within the framework of a permanent, rationalistically-organised capitalist business, with efficiency as its criterion...

The centre of man’s life became rational reasoning and with it, man came to regulate all his functions and activities. 

....he rational, business recycling of capital and the rational capitalist organising of labour” were born in the West during the Middle Ages, and an important role to their growth was played by the Protestants with their particular ethics. It is a fact that the growth of the spirit of Capitalism is part of the evolution of rationalism”

They then say, originating in Augustine's predestination, and blooming fully finally in protestantism, came the deep calculations of the “verification and reassurance of God’s Grace in man...Am I chosen, or am I not?”

“It is only natural that such a mentality would lead to a rationalizing of moral behaviour, and in general to a rationalist view of man’s life. And, as we saw elsewhere, this rationalism and rationalist organizing of life had resounding consequences in the social sphere also, since that is where the spirit of Capitalism as we know it today was created...

The fact is that the theory of predestination rationalised life, it systematised social and professional activities and placed man within the framework of the duties he had to carry out. It was precisely these points that contributed towards the development of the so-called spirit of Capitalism...

The degree to which the theory of predestination significantly affected the capitalist mentality of Western man will become evident from the consequences of this theory on private life, on the asceticism of Protestantism and on the sanctity of the profession

God’s transcendence led the puritan to a complete existential isolation, to a negative stance towards all the emotional elements that exist in civilization and religion, and it in fact became the root of the most pessimistic form of individualism. Even the Calvinist communication with God “would take place in profound spiritual isolation”.

This individualism, which became a way of life, significantly contributed to the creation of the spirit of Capitalism, since the Capitalist turns inwardly to himself; he shuts himself up hermetically inside himself and does not pay any attention to the others.

According to Calvin, the world exists only for the glory of God. The chosen Christian exists in the world for no other reason than to contribute to the augmenting of God’s glory. The chosen offers social labour, because this is what God demands for the organizing of social life. 

Consequently, Calvinists work socially, they exercise professional work only for the greatest possible glory of God. It is within this context that we should also regard the love towards our neighbour. This impersonal, utilitarian labour and offer contribute to the glory of God.

It is obvious that the anthropological and practical consequences of the doctrine of predestination cultivate a form of pietistic individualism and they direct man towards a spiritual and social loneliness. Because when a community offer is impersonal, then in reality it is a form of social individualism. We believe that this individualistic way of living constitutes one of the basic factors of the spirit of Capitalism.

Indeed, Orthodoxy differs radically, both Capitalism as well as Socialism, from a philosophical, structural and organisational point of view, since both these systems are offspring of Western metaphysics. The social teaching of Socialism is related to the social teaching of Christianity, but we there are two basic differences. The one difference is that its implementation is achieved through revolutions and laws and not with freedom and love; the other difference is that Socialism, in most of its manifestations, is linked to a specific world theory and is thus an atheistic ideology. 

Most certainly however, while Orthodoxy may relate to Socialism from the aspect of social teaching, it is nevertheless in complete dialectic opposition to the spirit of Capitalism.

Both Capitalism and Socialism are transferred and imported systems. One could add here that the Socialist theories infiltrated the Orthodox East where Orthodoxy prevailed, because the views on justice, equality, love etc. were familiar here, years ago. Even today, the theories of Socialism – Marxism are difficult to prevail in the Western world, because the individual prevails there. And in these individualist perceptions, Capitalism flourishes.

We could preferably say that Orthodoxy is anti-metaphysical. The centre of Orthodox anthropology is not the “orthos logos” (the appropriate word, reasoning). Without abolishing logic, Orthodoxy transcends it through a revelation by God, which is beyond all reasoning and not against reasoning.

The theory of predestination is rejected by the theology of the Fathers of the Church. God does not violate man’s freedom and those who wish can become sons of God. In Orthodoxy there is no “aristocracy of the pious”. When man follows a specific method of therapy, he can even reach the state of theoptia (the ‘sight’ of God). Thus, he comes to know God, he acquires selfless love and loves the entire world. Just as medical science cannot be metaphysical, so Orthodox theology cannot be metaphysical.

We are all deacons (ministers). Job professionalism, and especially the mentality of professionalism, is linked to profit, to the increase in production by any means, to the exploitation of man and so many other terrible things.

The view that the profession of each person is predetermined by divine Providence is inhuman, since it abolishes man’s freedom or makes him even more audacious. Imagine what could happen if the merchant, the manufacturer and in general every businessman thought that their work was a profession determined by God. In this case, every kind of abuse, injustice and exploitation would be justified.  This is why labour does not identify with the profession. After all, the tradition of our land in rural societies and communities and in the Monasteries has proved that one can work and offer much, without exercising a particular profession. But when man is obliged to exercise a specialised profession, he must perceive it as a labour that is performed within the framework of philotheia (love of God) and philanthropy (love of fellow man).

Orthodox ascesis does not aspire to the fulfilment of our duties to God, or to the reassurance that one belongs in the aristocracy of the chosen, but to the liberation of our nous (mind) from its subjugation to creations.

In opposition to rationalism, according to which rational reason (orthos logos) is man’s centre, Orthodoxy accepts that man’s centres are two, nous (mind) and logos (word, reason). The nous relates to God and the divine, while the logos relates to our environment. When the nous is enslaved by creations, man is psychically, psychologically and spiritually ill. The ascetic effort aspires to liberating man’s nous from its subjection to logic, to passions and the world that surrounds him.”