Nick Routledge@nick_routledge
Reply to @SandyMount18

@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.

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This sentence, in a 2021 US Federal Reserve document: “The primary role of mainstream economics in our society is to provide an apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable, and unjust social order." - Hildenbrand, 1994. Image: World Inequality Report 2022

Image: “In 2021, after three decades of trade and financial globalization, global inequalities remain extremely pronounced: they are about as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.”

QT
The Alston report is the most serious challenge yet to poverty triumphalism, to the political apologias that it has supported, and to the fiction that economies of massive inequality are destroying poverty rather than destroying the poor. @unitethepoor
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Copy of tweet and quote tweet beginning here: This sentence, in a 2021 US Federal Reserve document: “The primary role of mainstream economics in our society is to provide an apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable, and unjust social order." - Hildenbrand, 1994. Image: World Inequality Report 2022 Image: “In 2021, after three decades of trade and financial globalization, global inequalities remain extremely pronounced: they are about as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.” QT The Alston report is the most serious challenge yet to poverty triumphalism, to the political apologias that it has supported, and to the fiction that economies of massive inequality are destroying poverty rather than destroying the poor. @unitethepoor

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Nick Routledge@nick_routledge · 28 Jul 2025

@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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Quoted byNotes in @NWirzba’s 'This Sacred Life', distilling McCarraher’s account of capitalism as an ontological reconstitution of the world, whereby intrinsic meaning and value are displaced by a regime in which life becomes intelligible primarily through exchange, accumulation, and use.