American Idols
By: Gerald Gabel
Tags: Self Improvement, Economy, Spirituality, Religion, Politics

The Golden Calf of Capitalism

We all worship, whether we submit to the terminology or not.

Worship, from the original “worth-ship,” is simply to identify those things of greatest value and then to prioritize every element of your life around those central precepts.

We’ve been conditioned to treat worship as a sort of hobby, associating it with colloquial religious language. It’s an act committed on Sunday, a community association, and perhaps an excuse for some eccentric behaviors. This sounds innocuous enough, but to consider what you worship is to question the fundamental aim of life. That’s not a hobby, that is probably the deepest and most personal question we can ever ask. Worship properly understood is the center of your universe.

This question of what we worship, and what we should worship, is absolutely fundamental and entirely personal. It is the most important discussion we can ever have, which we rarely do. Even amongst self-help gurus, teachings linger more on goals and productivity so we can achieve fulfillment and success. Often times this leaves us fractured as we pursue multiple disconnected goals with no true center.

We pursue these ideas of happiness and accomplishment in the context of a society bombarded with messages of material possession, insufficient wealth, and a perpetual appetite for more. We too often believe happiness lies in the next purchase, the next relationship, the next…thing.

Even among those supposedly seeking a higher ideal, huge megachurches process millions of dollars with a gospel of prosperity, where God shows his love by giving you what you want in the form of material possession.

More and more relationships break down as we spend out time on work, perpetually pursuing the almighty dollar. We ignore moral questions in pursuit of wealth while corporations gain the rights of people, and take away the people’s rights.

America worships the market of capitalism, and money is the grace which shows us our divine support. We’re living the prosperity gospel, even when we don’t use the language to label it as such. And we do so with a religious fervor that drives an economic engine beyond our comprehension.

The stock market exists as a sort of celestial ticker driving every cultural and individual decision: who leads us and how we plan our families; where we live and who we associate with; what we encourage our children to learn and where we spend our attention; when we get to retire and what opportunities we leave for the next generation.

So many of these decisions are implicit, outside of our conscious thought but deductively indicated by our actions. We are constantly calculating our next move to determine whether an action is economically viable for us. As we look at the evidence the truth reveals itself: We worship the market which drives every aspect of our lives. That market is the central target of our existence.

There are variations from person to person certainly. When I say that America worships the dollar, I don’t mean that every person in America is guilty, but even as the author of this article, I recognize my own temptations and tendency to turn financial wellness into an idol in my life. It’s constantly lurking. It’s everywhere and is increasingly sown into the fiber of American expression.

This is why I say that as a nation we’ve decided that the object of greatest worth-ship is the market. Capitalism. We essentially declared this in the 20th century with an extended conflict called the Cold War during which we went to actual war to defend Capitalism against Communism.

The terrible irony is that communism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin. Both are essentially Marxist philosophies which place the economy and property at the center of human meaning and history. They diverge radically from there, but the centrality of markets, and who controls them, rests at the heart of both systems. Questions of human value, morality, and purpose are secondary in these systems.

In many cases, America put capitalism to good use as a subordinate framework united under an ideal, an impossible principle expressed so beautifully in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” And so long as that reaching vision of human potential and equality remains the central target, then capitalism is a good and useful tool for economic development and national wealth. However, when the people of the nation begin to look to the economy to determine moral formulas; when truth becomes an expression of efficiency rather than justice; when right and wrong are calculated with dollar signs, then the economy has become god.

In many cases our transition from ideal to economy may have begun with good intentions. A strong economy does provide a bigger pie. Unfortunately, the human race seems always to want more. Throughout history a bigger pie has often meant competition for a bigger piece rather than feeding more people. It is a strange trick of the human spirit, that in comfort we often find our greatest appetite for more. Our desire for more is infinite and can never be satisfied by anything provided by the market.

We aim at our own vices: wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. These four horsemen of human appetite and failing have haunted us throughout existence, in periods of wealth and want. We pursue this god we call capitalism to feed these four addictions. And each time we gain some, like a drug, we savor the hit but soon want more. We do this at the detriment of our lives, our families, our relationships, our future, and even truth and justice themselves so that we can gain more and lose less. Each decision is commoditized in a cost-benefit analysis of “What do I get out of it, and is the benefit worth the expense?”

We need to remember that we are more than economic cogs in a vast machine. We are part of an incredible web of life which connects us to others in patterns beyond vision. We are more than consumers. Each of us has the ability to impact a hundred, a thousand, or even a million others in our connected technological age.

What then should we worship? I call it God. Absolute truth. Absolute love. Absolute beauty. Ideas which exist beyond even my imagination, but if those are what I am aiming at, at least I know I am aiming the proper direction, no matter how badly or how regularly I fall short. Properly understood, this idea of the absolute good is the God of Abraham, the God who sent His only Son so that we might know Him.

This is the God I worth-ship.