Politics implies governance—to govern, to limit, to constrain, restrict absolute impulse-driven animalic instinctual behavior of, and over, the polity—the whole body politic, everybody, every body: to restrict by law everyone according to
Capitalism benefits best via atheism—for a time, anyhow. The orientation of capital toward god and the conflation of the two is as old as man. God is a transaction, every transaction between humans, one that keeps the peace, balances accounts fairly, and whereby neither party seeks, nor feels the impulse to seek, a rebalancing, an atonement, a realignment of their account. Rationality has been served by the market function of implicit fairness: economy and pro rata, per his portion allotment of each party’s respective interest. I got what I wanted and you got what you wanted, thus no fight is provoked in our estimations of the balance between us, no fight for our fellows to join in memetic violence and brotherhood, no need to return sin for sin, for taking of life and limb for mortal gratification in gratuitous instinctual expression, for I have the apple of your eye—the abstracted capital product of your mind at tension, your attention in service to your knowledge of the future and its implication and burden upon you to labor for the day coming, for the resources that labor implies, for the apple that represents those resources: that I have your attention means I have your apple, your resources, and the conscious attention and sacrificial labor you’ll willingly pay me—for we do pay attention— the mana, the bread of life that is more than bread, that you project onto me, the mana that is mimetic and will be copied by others, promoting me consequentially into a greater and greater having of resources—collective attention, hierarchical placement like the eye that pays attention to all, atop the pyramid, the symbols we stamp on our very representation of value, the currency (this explaining how attention is money to advertisers); any eye is ‘traded’ for an eye—a settlement amongst gentleman or the animals inside them.
This, the peacemaking, transactional balancing mechanism of our collective consciousness —surfacing after long moral drilling into our skulls via oto da fé, hot oil bathing, and worse informs the basis of our trust in law: trust that if you break the ratio, the balance, you will burn or boil— tuned internalized conscience, and turned further into internalized guilt, the yet another into resentment, and a final turn toward rebellion; death to the rule-maker, nay, the rules themselves, nay, the spirit of the rules, constraint upon instinct itself. This mechanism builds, layer by layer, cognition via taboo-turned-law (once Rome meets Judea and every ‘rome’ after her), enforced by the threat of increasingly monopolistic violence, whether by church or state or some “unholy” alliance (now perhaps you understand the term more truly) of the two. Law and its violence-potential provide for ‘surety of the bond’ between men who would like to profit in fair turn from one and other.
At some juncture, the mechanism’s —the government’s— laws, having been inferred and merged with the original laws of nature’s god, derived by man’s understanding of the fundaments and pitfalls of consciousness, his own emergent patterns of conflict and their resolution amongst and between they and nature; these laws, tend to migrate leftward, toward liberation of man’s constraints upon himself—his former self whom he no longer understands in his infinite abstraction— along with his constant totemic cognitive representation of his god —god being the body of laws themselves, and their telling— toward the misplacement of morals; the repression of Oughts —this repression contrived by the desire for animalia— into the business of Is’, the facts about the matter of life; this is where science begins to materialize meaning, its perversion of conventional morals a necessity in the furtherance of its inquiry into the animal and environment of man. This is Nietzsche’s point about justice leading to its own death in the weakened, shifting meaning of ‘justice’ to a people increasingly forgetful of the shoulders —those saddened giants of men that bore the beatings and burnings of understanding, or who traumatically witnessed them— they stand. This injustice is the transmutation of masculine, goodly, spiritual morality, the morality of the tribal culture into amorality: scientific-materialism, Judaism, over consciousness respecting (god fearing) legalism, Judaism—both forgetting the now two thousand and twenty one year old lesson of Christianity: the spirit of the law, brotherly love, forgiveness in advance of penance, the capital market destroying, table flipping of the perversion of the balancing of man’s accounts of sin, with the abstraction of banking and taxing, Capitalism’s key components.
Once god’s -the tribes’- morals are swapped fully for the amoral grease of the ever fly-wheeling, market-making financialism of modernity, every person, ungrounded, unbound, unconstrained by their binding tribal religion’s taboos any longer, capitalism may sell back morality to its mooreless (unanchored) and thereby blank slated commodity: the religious communal instinct for binding transfixed upon the shiny dollar, permissive of every indulgence, including that of contrived morality and moral whipping of both self and other; man once bound to god vis a vis his fellows, uprooted and bound by the perverted law of the perverted god-men, in collective and unholy worship of the golden calf it has recursively (and cursedly) sworn off since time immemorial. Yes, capitalism thrives when god is dead—for a time. But as the old name, Israel reminds us: God Prevails, and by spirit—the rock, not by stone—the law.
Capitalism funds politics, by donation, by corruption, and by tax payment. Thus politics serves capital. That politics has captured law, and that law, as we have thoroughly described above, has been transmuted from god’s, man’s, natural, law into governmental law, means that, leftward drifting moral sentiments and permissiveness of warped individual sinfulness aside, capital owns the law via government. This is akin to capitalism’s’ own, new morality. And if it permits the stripping of old morality, only to sell its consumers (not any longer technically ‘a people,’ as defined as a racial tribe bound by natural law) remnants and tokens of both amorality and randomized morals based on emergent environmental phenomena.
As humans —stripped of religious binding and seduced by the ease and neuvo-morality of modernity’s engine, capitalism— lose their former embodied, encoded, and rites-conferred ritual access to and grip upon religions’ oldest functions, taboo and the ritualized and sanctioned intermittent breaking of it, and as they still have this culturally and biologically inherited orientation toward communal existence, and as these morals of old have been enculturated for far longer spans of time than any new, market (instead of man)-centric mechanism has been, this special animal instinctually projects his old religious notions, his instinct for binding instinct, but now twisted into Omni-instinct and Omni-guilt, into the new meta-mechanism that is the re-emerged unholy and technically fascist alliance of not ‘church’ but the church’s domain, management —repression and affordance— of the religious instinct, the power of the law backed by violence, and the administrative state: an unholy trinity in replacement of the holiest of them. Thus, in its rebinding of man’s collective preservational instincts around the whipping post of its new, don’t judge me bro’ morals, begetting its optimal strip mining and commodified nutritional re-enrichment of the his soul, to man, today, Politics IS Religion.