NitN 16 – Death (Unintentional Mutual Gaslighting)
We have so much fun talking about the Multiverse, the Illuminati and the Procession of the Equinoxes that it isn’t until the last couple minutes we draw Tarot, leaving ominous Death and uplifting rebirth on our minds for the rest of the day.
Intro!
I
I’m an aneconomist. I don’t believe the economy exists.
Supposedly, if you time-traveled to the Middle Ages, tapped the shoulder of the nearest peasant and announced you were an atheist, they wouldn’t have been outraged; they’d have only been confused.
It’s not that they weren’t ubiquitously devout, either. Every single person believed in God. Actually, that’s exactly what the issue is. The concept of not believing in God just didn’t occur to them. They were like the fish who don’t know what water is. God is everywhere. God is everything. It was apparent.
Either you think those villagers were silly or maybe onto something, but what you probably aren’t thinking is that we’re exactly the same way. Our God is just The Dollar.
We sacrifice a lot on the altar of the dollar. It was explicit no less recently than early 2020 when we chose to cut short potentially life-saving lockdowns to protect “the economy.”
I bet even your sense of self-esteem is bound up in whether you are meeting your goals. Are you growing? Are you being productive? Are you contributing to society?
That’s all internalized capitalism!
What does it mean to be productive anyway? To produce. To have a product. And what three-letter G word do we worship? GDP. Gross Domestic Product. That’s what we’re told is only healthy if it is constantly growing. That’s what we feel compelled to contribute to. Could the concept of goals for self-improvement be an “as above, so below” manifestation of goals for increased corporate revenue?
I bet it’s completely unimaginable to you to not have goals. I bet that if you weren’t economically productive, you’d start to feel depressed pretty quick. It’s seen as undignified. As lazy.
But what if none of it exists? What if we’re actually just as closed minded and ignorant as Medieval peasants? What if “the economy” is just a story that we tell that does a pretty good job—but undeniably, an incomplete job—explaining how my actions benefit others and how I’m dependent on others’ actions for my own comfort? What if credit scores, account balances, stock portfolios and all the other ones and zeros stored in the ephemeral cloud are just pure fiction?
I’m not an atheist. I think God is making a comeback.