An essay from Matthew on how MAGA religiosity obscures the religious nature of liberalism, and how both obscure the underlying religion of capitalism.
Inspired by Walter Benjamin, who in 1921 wrote:
One can behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say, capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish, and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion. Capitalism is a pure religious cult, perhaps the most extreme there ever was. Within it everything only has meaning in direct relation to the cult: it knows no special dogma, no theology.
Show Notes
Mutual Aid Hub
Martin Luther King Jr: Dialectics, Materialism, and the Black Radical Critique of Racial Capitalism with Andrew J. Douglas and Jared A. Loggins
230: How Did We Get Here?
Walter Benjamin, "Capitalism as Religion [Fragment 74],"
Max Weber and Walter Benjamin
Without Dream or Mercy
Has Capitalism Become Our Religion?
On the Concept of History - Walter Benjamin
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Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just the bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
We really appreciate your support.
Today's bonus is called Deep State Religion.
It's about an idea that I have about how MAGA religion obscures the religious nature of liberalism and how both obscure the underlying religion of capitalism.
As our tagline says, we look at spiritual influence, cults, and authoritarian extremism.
That's been our beat for four and a half years.
And the vast majority of that time has been taken up in examining the bizarre and ecumenical religiosity that swirls around and elevates Donald Trump.
For instance, many of you will remember the Renaissance tableau style photos of Trump surrounded by evangelical mega pastors laying their hands on him to bless him and call down the Spirit of the Lord to help him bring about their theocratic ideals.
But then in other corners of the internet, the Anon movement also conceived of him, or at least memed about him, as though he was a muscular, avenging messiah.
And in December of 2020, we started tracking the incredible surge of New Age influencers sharing their sudden revelation that Trump was a lightworker, a shaman-type figure with the capacity to transform social and political chaos into opportunities for enlightenment.
And we tracked that New Age theme all the way through to this summer when it reached maybe its intellectual high mark or low mark.
It's hard to know.
But this is when New Age guru Charles Eisenstein in thinking aloud about how to rationalize RFK Jr.'s endorsement of Trump.
Trump described Trump in the same quantum terms he used to describe Bobby himself before he went to work for him as messaging director.
So that would be Trump as a mysterious, non-local, empty of form and meaning, blank screen for the projections of the masses.
Trump is the savior who can reflect our own saviorship.
Now, in going through all of this material, we ran all the psychosocial angles.
Trump the racist is a perfect fit for replacement theory Christians.
Trump the huckster is gold for the prosperity gospel preachers.
Trump the strongman is an avenging patriarch, a man's man who will restore the order of the genders, who will surround himself with sex assaulters to normalize his own behaviors and own the feminists.
He'll stand by Israel until the firestorm in the Middle East brings Jesus himself back to earth, and his absolute reliance on charisma shows he is not beholden to any human order.
We explored also the strange bonds of his followers and how they intersect with those we find in spiritual cults.
We examine the spell of disorganized attachment, by which the push and pull of love and fear encourages followers to anxiously hold him close.
And two weeks before the election, I studied his musical rally moment as characteristic of how a charismatic guru at the end of his energy and talents will outsource the duties of spellcasting to pop singers.
So yes, Trump is a religious figure, adorned by the power of fantasy and conspiracy theory, speaking to a deep need for authoritarian, atavistic dominance.
And I'm going to argue that it worked for him in part because it fed his followers' need to break the monotony of the administrative state.
So, we did a solid job unpacking all of that.
And at this point, I have two rear-view mirror thoughts.
One is that this was all pretty obvious.
Trump is very low-hanging fruit for the analyst.
But secondly, the deeper you get into the insanity of Trump, a growing assumption starts to throw a longer shadow.
For Trump and his followers to be insane, you and your compatriots must be the alternative, the rational ones.
When heterodox assholes use the phrase Trump derangement syndrome, they are right about one thing.
Overwhelming focus on Trump can hide other things or unintentionally function to run cover for other things.
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