I've been throwing around the "religious" signifier fairly loosely, so perhaps we can clear that one up a bit. This is partially a response to our society's own loose and vague designations of what constitutes religious experience, practices, and institutions. So...it is what it is.
To be fair, the realm of religion is indeed expansive and contains a whole world of different landscapes, textures, and subjectivities. For the moment, I just want to distinguish two of the more clearly contrasting religious qualities, hopefully to gain some clarity on previous and future discussions.
The first is a form of religious experience in which individuals have incredibly vivid and profound visions, experiences, or revelations, often in relation to aspects of life that are profound in scope, such as in how to live or structure a society, or how one is to relate to the cosmos and the unseen beings or phenomena within, and with these you can group together the actions and examples of these individuals as they move in the world and act on others.
This kind of thing is plenty interesting in itself, but currently I want to turn to and favor the second quality, largely because it is so often overlooked: the daily, oftentimes mundane experience of collective conventions and practices as eternal and natural and just, which can have great power in their own right.
When I suggest that people are worshipping money with a very specific nature in mind, which prescribes how it appears, how it moves, where it ends up, and all the rest of it, I'm not saying that people are literally getting on their knees in front of an altar and praying to a money deity. I'm trying to describe a quality of thought and practice that can be illuminated in a certain and useful way with the language of religion.
People have a certain complex of feelings when they relate to the money symbol. This complex of feelings could theoretically take all sorts of shapes, but the specific and particular shape that has been hammered into them, when they all carry it out together, results in very particular shared experiences and social outcomes. And when that shape is interrogated the mind naturally surveys everything connected to it, which can lead to profound visions and experiences of their own. Many shrink away from the consequences of this, preferring to leave the convention in place and left alone. Sometimes this attitude is warranted; sometimes not.
Indeed, for the most part these daily practices and conventions can be traced back to those grander, more dramatic visions and experiences that influenced them in the first place, giving rise to their cyclical and regular expression, like echoes, which at the same time reproduce the body that gave rise to them.
So, money is hard and non-negotiable. That dollar is a dollar. A debt is a debt, and needs to be repaid. A household needs to carefully manage its stocks and flows, and the government is the same way. And you don't typically get your money from the government, but from the bank and your job. And when you tinker with any of these links, it can disrupt the whole system, in that it threatens to divert the many flows to all of the different interests and productive systems, effects which can cascade.
All of these relations, and the considerations of these relations, can transport the mind and the sensibility far away from the daily and mundane concerns that they arise from, and outward to a far-reaching survey of total social and cultural life, and possibly everything that exists, which is a quality common to various religious experiences.
Which is what you see in what people are actually calling organized religion, with its collective prescriptions for family structure, family relations, family life, daily and weekly individual and collective rituals, collective morals and systems of ethics, and so on.
Even what we call superstitions can often have a specific social function. We can be quite superstitious about superstition, believing that it just arises from backwards people or some such, seemingly ex nihilo, when it very often arises connected to specific phenomena specific to a social body, which through its very falseness and unreasonableness maintains a specific shape as it is continuously reproduced.
Let's take monetary superstition for example, or the fundamentalist insistence on free markets and economic liberalism, which accompanies government privatization and austerity. To survey the effects of these systems, they appear glaringly self-destructive, and they are. And this in direct and readily-apparent contradiction to the luminary rationalizations of economic prosperity that seek to justify them. But they are emerging from a distinct set of interests and they benefit that set of interests greatly, by virtue of the distortions and asymmetries created by that contradiction, and they are existing in a historical moment that allowed them to take root and live.
And to threaten with transformation any of the many premises and conventions that undergirds such a system, is to threaten the system itself, as kicking any number of small transformations in motion can require the entire systems they are connected to to change, toppling the minority of interest groups poised at the top and benefitting the most.
And while many individuals are quite comfortable with the transformations and changes and remain quite flexible, others would not be and would fight the changes, especially the most powerful who stand to lose the most, eventually bringing about cascading transformations that change the nature of the problem and the solutions that accompany it.
The mundane at first glance appears rather boring and unremarkable, but being what it is, it is everywhere and touches everything, and when you start to group it together at greater and greater scales and move it in certain directions and it picks up energy and speed, well it becomes a lot less boring.
