Nick Routledge@nick_routledge
Reply to @Plough

@Plough The true malaise isn't moneytheism but the ontology beneath it—beingness reduced to conditionality; a deep-seated distortion of relation to the Real; posture, inner and outer, sealing life against love. A metaphysical lie so deep it shapes the soul. Materialism is but its shrine.

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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick, posts1–4 and nested Ursula Le Guin quotation Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1949629817185349812 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. The true malaise isn't moneytheism but the ontology beneath it—beingness reduced to conditionality; a deep-seated distortion of relation to the Real; posture, inner and outer, sealing life against love. A metaphysical lie so deep it shapes the soul. Materialism is but its shrine. 1/ Turning the tables. Perhaps we imagine our primary conundrum as a species relates to the immutability of political economy or whatever name we give a totalizing foreground with its unshakable priorities and demands holding us captive, at a distance from life and each other. @Gestwa “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings” - Ursula La Guin, #NationalBookAwards. 2/ Our world is all about the money, it seems. Quid pro quo priorities, principles and perspectives, I tell ya. But what if, at a deeper, more substantive level, it ultimately concerns a moment-to-moment relationship with a transformational as distinct from transactional reality? 3/ The notion, neither so original nor so modern as we might imagine, even as a vast, interlocking, global matrix of trans-national actors profitably, militantly, commonly and similarly vested in commanding us to be fooled by appearances, heralds a recent twist to our captivity. 4/ Jesus? Murdered by a religious and political cabal precisely because He insisted on the ultimate veracity of a transformational, as distinct from transactional compass with regard to life itself. What, then, does a functional alternative to power politics effect and require? Subtweet: The true crisis is epistemic. When we removed Reality as a category pertaining to God, capitalism filled the void—becoming our theology, our fate. A “monstrously metastasized psychosis,” says Hart, “in its essence, evil.” The Kingdom eclipsed. The eschaton deferred. For now.

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Nick Routledge@nick_routledge · 15 Jul 2025

@Plough The true crisis is epistemic. When we removed Reality as a category pertaining to God, capitalism filled the void—becoming our theology, our fate. A “monstrously metastasized psychosis,” says Hart, “in its essence, evil.” The Kingdom eclipsed. The eschaton deferred. For now.

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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick; unnamed former colleague and Jim Corbett quotations Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1727919136129573108 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @lukeburgis A decade or so since we'd last touched base, an investment banking cohort of old called me, from the other side of the world, 2.00 a.m. his time, drunk as a skunk, miserable. "You were the only one of us who had the fucking balls to get out, Nick," he slurred. "The only one." t.co/n2XwjY4rLa

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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick; unnamed former colleague and Jim Corbett quotations Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1565516774782955520 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @TornadoNate Privileged, I began my working life at the highest levels of global political economy. Soon enough, I grokked it. Within a decade, I was a houseless, wandering mendicant, testing wisdom teachings - a deliberate choice. Now, I'm another 25 years further in. Some insights, then.

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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick; unnamed former colleague and Jim Corbett quotations Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1703866966124179665 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @BrianZahnd @Stu0Miller 3/ Before a report, context. Cultured, cosmopolitian, worldly and, by then, righteously dechurched, my deliberate surrender to life as a penniless, peripatetic mendicant almost 30 years ago, proceeded to expose me to modes of significance and order I could never have anticipated. t.co/fpKT24SNWy

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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick; unnamed former colleague and Jim Corbett quotations Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1581310751498981377 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @nils_gilman As it happens, the 1980's sovereign debt crisis proved a primary factor shaping my trajectory through life. At work, investigating financial fundamentals; at play, hanging with dear pals from business school whose sound business decisions were, as I recognized it, killing people.

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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick; unnamed former colleague and Jim Corbett quotations Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1543969405008171008 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @RichardRohrOFM @CACRadicalGrace 1/ Sometimes, someone will tell me that even as they truly value my example, nonetheless 21st century realpolitik is a cage making it impossible, in practice, to emulate the Jesusy radicalism my life inhabits. I get it. It was easier to leave the nets in Francis’ time, I reckon.

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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick; unnamed former colleague and Jim Corbett quotations Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1543970225892126722 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @RichardRohrOFM @CACRadicalGrace 2/ "You're right," I'll answer. “I have wiggle room where you do not." And I'll also quote the Quaker, Jim Corbett, speaking specifically of Francis' errantry: “To open the way, a cultural breakthrough need not involve masses of people, but must be done decisively by someone."

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Quoted byRT @nick_routledge: @SandyMount18 @jasonwblakely Awkward but empirically obvious. The absolute scripture of world capitalism is less a providential order than a necropolitical death cult—a counterfeit covenant hollowing bodies and spirits alike, peddling this systematic immiseration to its victims as salvation itself.Quoted by@SandyMount18 @jasonwblakely Awkward but empirically obvious. The absolute scripture of world capitalism is less a providential order than a necropolitical death cult—a counterfeit covenant hollowing bodies and spirits alike, peddling this systematic immiseration to its victims as salvation itself.Quoted by@RizomaSchool 5/ It’s the strange physics of grace: not romantic but empirical—when the insulating structures of autonomy collapse, relation becomes primary. It gives what wealth can’t: encounter with the Real beyond transaction, where identity isn't performance and love carries no terms.Quoted by@Plough @joynessthebrave 2/ Omega isn’t a fixed target at the end of time; it’s a living attractor that moves toward us as we move toward it. Paths that didn’t exist become walkable because telos is responsive: it realizes itself where it is completed. Economic logic doesn't work here because it _can't_.Quoted byRT @nick_routledge: @lukeburgis When capitalism's no longer moored to value in any intrinsic or moral sense, it becomes pure instrumental recursion, regardless of substance. Sports, grief, water, attention, illness—all's grist for the yield mill. This isn't a misfire: it’s metaphysical psychosis made normative.Quoted by@lukeburgis When capitalism's no longer moored to value in any intrinsic or moral sense, it becomes pure instrumental recursion, regardless of substance. Sports, grief, water, attention, illness—all's grist for the yield mill. This isn't a misfire: it’s metaphysical psychosis made normative.