Ancient political theorists noted (from Aristotle to Polybius), any form of government degenerates when it ceases to act on behalf of the public (the common-wealth) but for private interests. Monarchy becomes tyranny, where the city/country exists as a private fief for the master (a despotism, where the ruler is despotes, a household master over slaves). Aristocracy becomes oligarchy, as the state is carved up for varying interests. Democracy becomes ochlocracy, where public funds are looted for the short-term benefit of a violent mob. Ancient theorists reflected on how best to manage these different forms and balance the varying classes of a given society. The Polybian strategy was to form a constitution that mixed these various forms, without allowing one to overpower the other. Rome became an ideal for Polybius (who, as a conquered Greek, admired his captors, or atleast tried to maintain patronage to the Scipii through flattery). The reality was that Rome was an incredibly brutal oligarchy, but first let's cover Rome's ancient patronage.
According to the research of economist Michael Hudson (and more here), who spent some time digging into ancient economics, the real problem for civilization was how to balance the public power of the palace-temple complex from clawing oligarchic landlords. The major mainstay in keeping the economy of a polity together was through the creation of money. Contrary to the way classical economic textbooks, money was not a symbolic token for a more primitive barter-exchange. Rather, money was a political invention, linking the city/country center (the temple-palace complex of king-priests) to the various activities of surrounding peoples. The temple-palace's seal is what turned a material (whether gold or lead) int something of value. Money creation was a credit-line, linked to the regulating center of the political community. Regulating this credit line was important not only for royal credibility, but also for stability of the economy. It established standard weights, controlled the mint, and punished counterfeiters, false scales, and coin-clippers. Additionally, the ancient states would check the proliferation of debts. Too much debt would turn free subjects into private slaves, for a growing master class that sought greater share of the polity. If unchecked, oligarchs could enslave the royal center (turning it into an extension of their authority, or topple it for a senatorial republic of masters who share the domination. Royal authorities exercised debt forgiveness, lest the entire land be turned into the equilibrium of masters and slaves.
The Bible reflects this ancient economy, perhaps reflecting the cradle of God's covenantal dealings with the children of Adam. Israel (nor any prior patriarchs) has no inviolable notion of debt or property. Jubilee canceled debts, lest the original equality of the land be obliterated, and redistributed land to ancestral ownership. The central governing figure would carry out Jubilee, whether a charismatic judge or the Davidic kings. While God lamented Israel's choice of a worldly monarch against divine rule, such is not a libertarian rejection of government. Rather, the prophet Samuel warned against mismanagement of the worldly monarchy, one which ruled the people as a private dominion. And even so, the monarchy provides the redemptive path (through the forthcoming son of David) for mankind. In Christ, God's direct monarchy is restored as the Word takes flesh. Scripture has nothing negative to say about monarchy per se, only its devolution into a private domination. The prophets lament how land magnates make their fortune through eating the people like bread. Trapping them in debt and economic trickery, the people are stripped of their land and reduced to literal slavery. Greedy monarchs participate as real-estate developers, climaxing in the wickedness of Ahab who murders Naboth for his God-given vineyard.
It's in this light that one can compare the Ancient Near East (including divine Israel) to Greece and Rome. For a long time, European historians of antiquity promoted the equation of "civilization" with their "Greco-Roman" patronage. Such is, simply, "the West", but it's hardly anything to rejoice in. Abortion, prostitution, and pederasty ran rampant. Look no further than Greece and Rome to see molestation catapulted into an aristocratic tendency of good taste. Life was cheap, as oligarchic landlord dominated a class of slaves to lord over. And this meant that debt was sacred. As Hudson documents, Greece and Rome broke with ancient tradition to sacralize the rights of the creditor. Having decentralized power from a central temple-mint (which operated as a public bank), oligarchs enshrined the privilege to foreclose before forgiveness. Why? Because the power of one clique
or family improved when, unable to pay debts, the creditor could seize
property and family (viz. slavery). This strategy could lead to civil unrest and even stasis, civil war, when inter-family jealousies reached a breaking point. Ancient "tyrants" reflected some aristocrats seizing the reins of government, seeking to balance the looming crisis. Breaking ancient families and redistributing wealth, the plebs lauded "tyrants" as oligarchs burned with rage against them. Such a radical restructuring took place in Athens when, after the popular Peisistratus dictatorship, an oligarch was toppled by the democratic revolution. Obliterating ancient families, Athens instituted the demes, artificial families that reoriented clan loyalties towards the city. But the only way to contain aristocratic jockeying to seize control of assemblies (through manipulation of law-courts and demagoguery in the assembly) was to project this power outwards. Hence, Athens' endless bid for empire, burning out in the Peloponnesian War. Most Greek polities reflected the rights of oligarchs.
Thus, Rome, as the greatest senatorial oligarchy, struggled to balance its public needs with the power of scheming families. Sometimes mutual ambition checked Roman prestige. But mainly it was the forced compromise struck with the urban-working Plebeian class after a threatened revolt. Rome could preserve its aristocratic character at the price of certain legal rights and offices for the plebs. Of course, as the republican empire expanded, the lure of wealth drew turned limited self-restraint into a greedy rush for fortune. The Marian reforms of the army were an attempt to balance the tide, but the popular general was defeated by the aristocratic champion Sulla. The Gracchi brothers offered a similar attempt to restrain oligarch overreach through land redistribution; they ended their days publicly executed. Thus, Caesar was so hated, being an oligarchic patrician to stab his fellows in the back. The plebs of Rome overwhelming mourned Caesar's passing. His "tyranny" was no doubt driven by ambition, but his success was due in major part that he was reining in the wanton greed of his fellow patricians. Greece and Rome saw not a few statesmen and landlord oligarchs try to reform or balance a system that would destroy itself. And such continued into the imperial period as well. Emperors either operated as pawns of fellow oligarchs, or seized power and restructured relations (usually a new dynasty formed through a generalismo progenitor). The empire helped to save Rome from complete oligarchic collapse, as Rome became more equitable and prestige was many times linked to proximity and dependence on the emperor. But nevertheless, debt remained sacred within Rome, even as emperors balanced the aristocratic class from wholly consuming the subjects of the empire.
The eastern Roman empire continued along these lines; the western Roman
empire eventually developed into the patchwork authority structure known
as feudalism. Tribal kings would emerge for times, but their authority
generally depended on being simply a first among fellow land barons. Their kingship was elective, which sounds better until one realizes it is an election among aristocrats. It is a useful strategy for collective unity, like how a corporate board votes in a chair. But it has nothing to do with the common weal, and everything to do with preservation of their property: land, slaves, and wealth. The decayed western empire melded with this Germanic aristocracy, as a mechanism to defend their plantations. The Romano-Germanic arrangement formed the basis of the constellation called feudalism: the multilateral compact among fellows, foederati, united the several lords around a single king. Like antiquity, these compacts formally existed on behalf of a people (as Germanic kingship required public acclamation to be sustained). Thus, kings sometimes reined in their vassals who had put private gains ahead of public good (or, at the very least, encroached on the king's private domain). The conflict sometimes produced broader public goods: Magna Carta of 1215 was a concession extracted from the Norman king on behalf of the Anglo-Norman baroncy (with liberties trickling down to subjects of the realm). Feudalism giving way to the early modern monarchy reflected a coalescence: where the central authority took on a larger monopolistic power. The War of the Roses decimated the barons and gave rise to the Tudor central state. The commonwealth here (and England as a "republic") became more of a reality: the Elizabethan state has been called a "republic
of offices" because of the mutual compact between local elites and the monarch. Sometimes this benefited the gentry (local landowners) and other times the aristocracy (regional land magnates). But for Elizabeth to rule well, it took a balancing act to preserve the state.
But while the sacred inviolability of debt continued through serfdom and aristocratic feudalism, its power broke as it became competing domains. The strength of this brutal debtor regime requires the mask of public authority. Oligarchs in the
city-states of Italy learned to become mercantile empires through trade and finance. Ruling in their senates, and managing a monarchical figure head (like the
Venetian Doge), elites gave a public veneer to private interests and threw bread to the plebs. It's in this way that
oligarchy is the worst of all governments: an increasingly unstable cauldron of forces that decentralize, and destroy public authority, with a government that assumes power to enrich the few and control (if not enslave the many. Venice, Florence, and Genoa surged into power, eating the
entrails of suffering Constantinople as the Capital became victim to
both Norman/Frankish and Turkish raiders. The struggle is to maintain dominance of the people to harness them, warlocks feeding upon their soul for the sake of wealth
The balancing act is complex. Some oligarchs are wise enough to know the
need to play the long-game: your short-term interests must be curtailed
to maintain the public stability to use state mechanisms to achieve
long-term power and wealth. However, some are impatient. Additionally,
not everyone agrees on the best strategy to preserve this long-term
domination. It's from these internal factions that oligarchies are
weakened, truth is exposed in its own time, and sometimes these states
collapse. The English Civil Wars represent a struggle between public interests (though no less self-interested for public accrual of power) and private feudal forces. The feudal aristocracy (which had metamorphosed into a global capitalist class through connection with the new merchants of the American colonies) waged war in parliament against the king. Charles I was no saint, he took bad political advice to be devious and scheming, but he was not wrong to fear being made into the doge of Venice. The new merchant community, not linked to monarchical public monopoly, joined forces with presbyterian-puritan land magnates to reduce the authority of the king. While Charles I (probably the godliest king England ever had) perished, Cromwell's regime fared little to balance his own army authority with the needs of land magnates (presbyterian-conservatives) and needs of London merchants and bourgeois shopkeeps and boat owners (independent-radicals). Charles II's return represented a staid monarchy balanced between royalist forces and the revolutionaries. This divide catalyzed in the Glorious Revolution and the growth of Parliament as a more stately authority. The oligarchs became more properly aristocrats, but under George I the Whig government of Robert Walpole made a vile pigpen of graft and enrichment schemes. Through the Septennial Act, the Whig Junto cut
out the Tories who had
become more volatile and radically popular through the reign of the
Later Stuarts. The result was a dominant aristocratic network of
magnates and mercantile financiers. Debt became sacrosanct through the Parliamentary guarantee of the Bank of England, which serviced England's rentier class of landlords and London based merchants. The compact that was clear in the Civil War continued on in increasingly brutal form.
The rule of a Parliamentary aristocracy brought stability to England in the same way Athenian democracy. The engines of instability were turned outwards to preserve private lucre and public involvement. The corruption of colonial elites, who participated in this same business, butted heads against George III's "patriot king" regime of greater regulation. While there were certainly depredations, American elites resented not having their way in Parliament. It was for this reason that a patriot such as John Adams feared the new American aristocracy. In contrast to Jefferson, Adams loathed "the few" more than "the one". Adams wrote:
"It would be an improvement in the affairs of society, probably, if the hereditary legal descent could be avoided; and this experiment the Americans have tried. But in this case a nobility must and will exist, though without the name, as really as in countries where it is hereditary; for the people, by their elections, will continue the government generally in the same families from generation to generation.
Descent from certain parents, and inheritance of certain houses, lands, and other visible objects, will eternally have such an influence over the affections and imaginations of the people, as no arts or institutions of policy will control. Time will come, if it is now or ever was otherwise, that these circumstances will have more influence over great numbers of minds than any consideration of virtues or talents; and whatever influences numbers is of great moment in popular governments, and in all elections." (John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions, 124-125)
Adams'
point is quite clear: aristocracy is inevitable. Either the US
government harnesses it or it will be controlled by it. If it's controlled by it, government becomes a pawn of private interest. The state is on its way to a feudal compact between oligarchs who pool their powers for mutual benefit. It's a regime of masters and slaves. The Constitution mixed the Polybian concern to protect the common weal with an enshrinement of property and debt (which was a decisive rejection of Shays' rebellion and its quest to aid the common soldier against foreign holders of Continentals). The Constitution was multivalent: Adams' Polybian republicanism existed in contradiction to a nascent liberalism. It's this new turn, where feudalism synthesizes into the reign of the "individual" that liberalism represents a distinctly modern turn in private power. The Polybian formula requires a democratic element, but liberalism is inherently undemocratic. It becomes a kind of show, a lamented play-acting to get public acclamation in order to justify the regime. Hence, John C. Calhoun was not only a consummate liberal but a slaveocrat. Rightly termed the most evil man in antebellum American
history, the Romanized liberal defendeded slavery as the sine qua non
of the American experiment. Slaves could not simply be freed because
the rights of property (which is what a slave was) were sacred. For the hydra of South Carolina, Samuel Johnson wrote correctly that the greatest yelps for liberty were from the drivers of negros. As a devoted Calhounite, George Fitzhugh defended a kind of demented liberal plutocracy: civilization depended upon the aristocracy of master and slave.
American industrial capitalism continued similarly after the Civil War. Workers were brutalized, reduced to functional slavery through company towns and the lash of the over seer converted into a Pinkerton Colt .45. Share-cropping was slavery by another name: the debt became inescapable and reduced life into a slave existence. The American experience of industrial slavery followed from the British case. Richard Oastler, and other radical-tories like hime, crusaded against the liberal regime (whether Peelite tories or whigs, or their coalescence in the Liberal party) which turned Englishmen into slaves. And thus American capitalism rumbled on, an institutional aristocracy ruled by the Rockefeller octopus. While FDR may represent a kind of tempering or taming of these forces, preventing the US from becoming the banana republic it made other nations into, it was a compromise. FDR's victory curbed Cox's Army, Huey Long, and other critics from the left who demanded America have a public government of and for the people, and not a plutocratic rule by the few for the few.
But the experiences of World War Two only entrenched the loose compact between public and private authority in FDR. US finances had no concern about who they bankrolled. Ford and the Koch patriarch funded Lenin's USSR. Similarly, Ford and a countless number of US corporations bankrolled Hitler's Germany. The
corporate law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell (for whom the Dulles
brothers, among other nefarious figures worked) were knee deep in Nazi shit. The goal of Wall Street in this period, increasingly uncoupled from even the value of production, would back any regime good for business. And they will turn on them just as quickly. Hitler became a pain as he wanted too much too quickly. Similarly, Stalin became a nuisance. Whatever one thinks of Stalin, he had the virtue of trying to prevent the "revolutionary" USSR from becoming a western investment depot. He purged the party oligarchy and made it serve him (and, indirectly, the people). While an egomaniac, Stalin as the "red tsar" was trying to save the revolution. Against the crack brained ramblings of Trotskyists (most of whom go on to become neoliberals), socialism in one country was not cynical but an attempt to save the goods of socialism for the Russian people. National sovereignty came at a steep cost: massacring the Ukraine through famine and the body count of turning the Soviet Union into an industrial nation in the span of 12 years. Stalin's death (as brutal a tyrant as he was) only brought about the corrupt forces of the nomenklatura, the Soviet oligarchy of party bureaucrats who helped themselves as they claimed the public weal. The collapse of the USSR only metastasized the oligarchy into Yeltsin's drunk regime of vultures. As for the US, FDR's compromise was chipped away. Neoliberalism was born in the coup against Nixon and the success of Jimmy Carter. The end was nigh and the public compromises were tossed into the waste bin. We live in the age of vulture capitalism, as the parasite (to use Hudson's phrase) devours the host.
However, privatizing government doesn't happen all out in the open. It requires ideological mystification and obfuscation. Feudalism wasn't simply property rights, but a divine order of three estates. The old aristocratic feudal claim for blue-blood grounded itself in artifice and history. They were the divinely chosen victors who established the polity (like ancient law-givers). Their descendants possessed legal privileges flowing from the original deed (just as God intended!) and any who opposed this arrangement was in sin. The liberal shift represented a new aristocracy, but from nature not chronicle and legend. Legal equality was both a hiccup and a boon: the new aristocrats didn't paint a target on their back through legal recognition, but it also put them on par with the plebs. Liberalism is schizophrenic in this regard: equality established upon fundamental inequality. Hence the slave-regime of the US South is quite liberal in the same that social darwinism was the same. Original liberalism was willing to roll the dice with the inequities. Later liberals (mixing humanitarian mythos with the need for greater social control) required government management. Old liberals professed laissez-faire which justified private interests brutalizing plebs with government eternally asleep. New liberals (neo-liberals) realized that to defend the rights of property and debt required government to intervene, lest civil unrest jeopardize investments. But it's a shell game, a give and take away, trying to calculate precisely how little the plebs need and how much the patricians can get. It's in this way that I depart from Hudson: I don't think industrial capitalism naturally evolves into socialism (as factory owners realize government security benefits them). Rather, it breeds its own financial parasites who try to min-max the system.
Now, how do you create an ideology to obfuscate? I've already mentioned the natural aristocracy, racialist slavery, and social darwinism. But religion is a great aid too. J. Neville Figgis (historian and Anglican monk-priest) saw an element of this in the presbyterian-puritans of the 17th c. Figgis is too harsh on "Calvinists" (per his Anglo-Catholicism), but he's not wrong to detect a kind of aristocratic ethos that justifies a particularly brutal regime of private "godly" landlords. I quote a substantial section:
Few, I suppose, today would share the Calvinist doctrine that God has created the world in order that, through Adam's sin predestined, the masses of men might suffer eternal torture, thereby to increase the bliss of the elect. Its injustice is what strikes us most. What I wish, however, here to notice is its purely oligarchic character. Historically Puritanism always was oligarchic ; history has never suffered a deeper perversion than in the popular notion that Puritans were democrats. Calvin certainly never professed to be one. The root-idea of Calvinism is the faith that Christ did not die for all, and that Christianity is a coterie of religious aristocrats ; and even in the last century M'Cleod Campbell was condemned for asserting the contrary. Oligarchy in religion takes many forms ; but in one way or another it is at the bottom of nearly all the Protestant systems. Luther went through a devastating experience, and came finally to something real. This he tried to universalise into his doctrine of justification by faith. From the days of Luther it has been the aim of every " believer -in the Protestant sense - to go through an experience at least analogous.
Those who have it not, and are without this feeling of assurance, are not to be treated as true Christians. All forms of Christian teaching which lay very great stress on conversion are guilty of this error. They try to universalise a religious phenomenon which, though not rare, is not, and is never intended to be, the experience of all Christians. They tend to deny the title of Christian to the baptized and confirmed Churchman of phlegmatic temper, who just goes straight on. They make a particular form of temperament the norm for every man, and condemn many true servants of Christ to a place outside the pale. Although they may declaim against sacerdotalism as setting up barriers between man and God, they themselves set up a worse barrier ; for they make God's " grace " conditional on a peculiar feeling, and, if they could, would confine the Church to persons of one kind of temperament. Incidentally they must deny all real place in the Church to children, at any rate until they are old enough to experience, or try to experience, this nerve-storm. In a book by a well known literary man, which outweighs in value all his other contributions, Mr. Gosse's Father and Son, we can see something of the ravages wrought by this unnatural system. In his case it was connected with a very narrow form of creed — "Plymouth Brethrenism " ; but the phenomenon is not confined to these doctrines.
What we condemn is the attempt to make the child at about ten years old go through all the spiritual agonies which accompany the conversion of the "notorious evil liver," and the effort to treat him as an adult. Puritanism, although in its inculcation of an austere sense of duty it has added much to the moral fibre of the race, has yet never found any adequate place for the child in the Church. For in its creed it is not baptism, but conversion, that marks the entrance ; and the child is outside until he copies the experience of the adult. Thus, in its exclusion (a) of children, {b) of all who do not go through a special form of conversion — which, in one view, should even be definitely dated — the doctrine of conversion, if preached exclusively, means a denial of the universality of the Gospel. How different is the method of the Catholic Church.
The membership begins with baptism, and is thus treated as independent of feeling and temperament. With its conception of the Christian life as a growth, nourished by the sacraments, it can find a place for the child and for every kind of character, while in no way denying the need, in the case of some, for those cataclysms of the spirit that are called conversion. For we are not to jump from one extreme to the other. To deny the need of the preaching of conversion is just as much to narrow the Gospel as to over-emphasise it is.
The Church, if it uses not merely the sacrament of the Lord's Body and Blood, but also the methods of penitence and the power of absolution, has a means of recalling every wanderer and of assuring the most hardened sinner of this hope. Many men and women, nourished in the comfortable purlieus of Anglican decorum, when they find them- selves faced either with their earlier life or with some deep fall, are without the knowledge how to obtain pardon. Deeming the Church the home of respectable people, they feel she is not for them, and forego altogether the practice of religion ; but for such (and there are many) the preaching of evangelical conversion and the value of confession is the one hope. But it all needs to be done within the circle of the whole ; and the fact must be allowed for, that what is good for one type is not needed for another.
Figgis contrasts "Protestants" (he is one) with a denial of a certain Catholicity (the idea that the common wealth is truly common). His description of Luther is perhaps stretching the bounds, but he's right. By coming up with a myth of the elect through a common experience, the plight of the many is fundamentally denied. This religious aristocracy is more open (and thus reflects the increasing plasticity of neoliberalism), but it is government by the few for the few. In this case, it's the godly few (who, in 17th c. England, happened to generally be land magnates and merchants) who rule for their own benefit. The rest be damned (quite literally). It's in this sense that Weber's thesis makes some sense. I think he gets his typology wrong, but he's right to see a kind of elitism develop from within Protestantism. But it's only because certain strands of Protestantism, as is similar with Catholicism (or any religion), can host a xenomorphic theology: the worship of Mammon.
If the Reformation is to be blamed for all the problems of modernity (a common idiot trope), it's because the Reformation carried on paradigms from late Medieval Rome. Feudalism developed into liberalism (and then neo-liberalism) to defend the oligarchic regime of property and debt. It was in the bosom of Mother Rome that capitalist alchemcy developed. Fugger and Medici are Roman Catholic names. The great banking cities of the 16th c. were Augsburg, Antwerp, and Florence (all of whom remained solidly in Rome's orbit). In contrast, it was Reformers who challenged and revolted against these paradigms. Edwardian England looks "socialist" under Somerset, theorized by the great bishops Latimer and Ridley. Martin Bucer's de Regno Christi was a schematic for what England could become under the great "Josiah" Edward VI. Protestantism will become a vehicle for oligarchic forces (particularly as Genevan influences fused with the barons of England who want a greater slice of the state pie). But it's not inherently in Protestantism, let alone Calvinism. Any religion can become a vehicle for Mammon worship.
Walter Benjamin (20th c. Jewish-Marxist theorist and theologian) rightly analyzes the contours of Mamon religion (you can read the whole thing here):
Nevertheless, even at the present moment it is possible to distinguish three aspects of this religious structure of capitalism. In the first place, capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. In capitalism, things have no meaning only in their relationship to the cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology. It is from this point of view that utilitarianism acquires its religious overtones. This concretization of cult is connected with a second feature of capitalism: the permanence of the cult. Capitalism is the celebration of the cult sans reve et sans merci [without dream or mercy]. There are no “weekdays.” There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper. And third, the cult makes guilt pervasive. Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt [schuld, also meaning 'debt' -- cal], not atonement. In this respect, this religious system is caught up in the headlong rush of a larger movement. A vast sense guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in Him an interest in the process of atonement. This atonement cannot then be expected from the cult itself, or from the reformation of this religion (which would need to be able to have recourse to some stable element in it), or even from the complete renouncement of this religion. The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope.
Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. God’s transcendence is at an end. But he is not dead; he has been incorporated into human existence. This passage of the planet “Human” through the house of despair in the absolute loneliness of his trajectory is the ethos that Nietzsche defined. This man is the superman, the first to recognize the religion of capitalism and begin to bring it to fulfillment. Its fourth feature is that its God must be hidden from it and may be addressed only when his guilt is at its zenith. The cult is celebrated before an unmatured deity; every idea, every conception of it offends against the secret of this immaturity.
Debt literally becomes a cult. All offenders are those who seek to prevent the further indebting of others on behalf of the fattening creditor class. It is pure action, pure cult. Dogmas are obscured, not only because they get in the way, but because the true dogma (the inviolability of debt and property) cannot be said lest it is opened to assault. Christian doctrines are easily morphed into this regime. Medieval Catholicism treated sin as divine debt that one worked to pay off (foreclosed into purgatory if one is not successful in this life). The pope is literally a chief banker, possessing the key to the treasury of merit. Theoretically, as Luther noted, this position could be a great boon: why won't the pope empty the treasury for the sake of all? It's the ancient priest-king again (usurping Christ's role in the process), but now servicing not the commonwealth but the "saints" (the few for the few). The regime of indulgences is like welfare state capitalism: a trickle down to lubricate the public machine to keep operating. Nowadays, people are so brainwashed with ideological fiction (culture wars! antifa! white supremacy!) that vultures can reap without the slightest attention to sowing.
Similarly, Protestants turned penal substitutionary atonement into a perverse debt economy. Pardon and forgiveness become a loan (one that, as Weber examined with Richard Baxter, required a modicum of payment). Christ's death initiates a divine IMF, one that operates in a more dispersed fashion than the megabank of Rome. Instead, various pastors can terrorize your soul through threats of defaulting on your loan. It's why, perhaps, much of Calvinism became discredited by the modern period. The shrieks of condemnation did little when it wasn't backed up with a demonic inquisitor regime that could literally put the screws on you. New ideologies were needed, as this was weak and found increasingly few adherents. In contrast, the truth is that Christ is the divine pardoner: He is the priest-king who waves debts to drive away the snakes and crush the flies. Theologically, Christians are removed from this ideological fixture of oppressive regime. All of heaven and earth belongs to Christ and Christ is just.
But this truth is to be hidden at all costs. If the pope was who he said he was, Luther knew he could pump out the infinite merits into the divine economy. Per the CARES act and the Corona virus crisis, the Federal Reserve admitted it could create "infinite money". The only reason to tip your hand is to shore up investors. It doesn't mean this economic factor will come into play (and it increasingly can't as the US real economy shrinks in relation to its financial wealth). The only hope, here and ever more, is to pursue Jubilee. Public power must throttle the private snakes, lest they devour the whole commonwealth. The US seems doomed, an oligarchy welded to the ship, but the truth still is the truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment