Homō Hominī Lupus

We are often the most irrational, Mumford Lewis pointed out, when we are being the most objective and scientific. Christianity, for example, which proclaims that everyone has free will, thinks such "free will" must be operated with all the mechanical obedience of a computer in order to avoid eternal damnation. And why, you might ask? Because our "original sin" is that our endless quest for perfection only serves to addict us to any religion or "belief" that promises to turn all our our fears and suffering into love and salvation.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the most devout political and economic Conservative almost always believes in God and Christianity, for both belief systems foster dreams of rewards for their patriots, martyrs, and saints, in this life or the next.

The patriot does this by proclaiming their faith in the greatness of their nation, or more importantly for the economic religion that nation claims to practice, even unto death on a foreign battlefield somewhere if need be. And this despite the fact that that economic religion is a merely a system of social control, which has always been ruthlessly imposed upon the poor by a wealthy aristocracy who practice it in name only.

What's more, the Conservative Christian in America is a truly paradoxical character, for he declares the supremacy of his individual freedom from government tyranny on the one hand, while preaching the need for a person to enslave themselves to a divine tyrant on the other, even though both systems of God and governments were dreamt up to serve the very same purpose.

In this sense, Adam Smith is simply the Abraham of the world's three major economic religions - Socialism, Communism, and Capitalism -  and politics is simply "public relations" for these secular religions. After all, all nations use their media and advertising as systems for augmenting the crowd controlling power of politics, economics, and whatever brand of "theistic" religion that serves as the icing. 

Most importantly of all, of course, is how the three "theistic" religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - are used as a sheep skin beneath which the wolf of greed masquerades before its victims with the smiling innocence of a cherub. It's also why, despite people claiming to all believe in these "religions of peace," such belief systems - which all equally foster deep emotional dependence upon the human need for narrative, while exploiting this need to claim a divine authority to conflate their "beliefs" for an infallible truth - have all been used to lead man to behave like a wolf to man.  

If machines ever develop "intelligence" or even consciousness, as such, economics will be their religions. And they will treat humanity as a species no better than slaves or livestock, defining morality by the bottom line. After all, machines have lead us to rely on the bottom line to define our morality already, creating a nation of Lazarus's who gladly grovel for the crumbs that trickle-down from the rich man's table, and worship the Goldman Sachs' of the world like a Golden Calf. 

In Western Europe for example, as Mumford Lewis explained in his book Technics and Civilization, "the machine had been developing steadily for at least seven centuries before the dramatic changes that accompanied the "industrial revolution" took place. Men had become mechanical before they perfected complicated machines to express their new bent and interest: and the will-to-order had appeared ... in the monastery and the army and the counting-house before it finally manifested itself in the factory."

Theistic religions primed the human psyche for believing that 2 + 2 = 5 for no other reason than that "the Bible tells me so," by shamelessly pilfering the philosophies of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Muslims, and others - thanks to the doorway to knowledge that was unwittingly kicked in by the Crusades - and bent the scientific truths those philosophers so imperfectly sought in the pursuit of human liberty to support the infallibility of their mythologies in the pursuit of human control. "Our Catholic and Protestant theologians" as Bakunin once wrote, work so hard to convince us that such political and economic systems are so "very profound and very just, precisely because" they are so "monstrously iniquitous and absurd."

No wonder Voltaire said, "if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him," and so we do, each and everyone of us, each and every day. Work is prayer, after all, but none of us is praying to who we think.