Blind Plutus
Manifesto
With this declaration, we unveil the monotheistic character of capitalism and organize a movement toward the overcoming of modernity. What we proclaim is an alternative—not merely an interpretation of the world, but a declaration of transformation.
Introduction
I.
II.
III.
CONTENTS
Proceed to signature
SECULAR ECONOMY
The age traces back to the nineteenth century. Upon the horizon of feudalism—veiled in the radiance of God’s authority—stood the king and his vassals, wielding power; and on the periphery lived the people, devoted to salvation and faith. What we call “modernity,” which marked and divided entire epochs, was decisively inaugurated by two events: the death of God and Capitalism. Every community receives its form from the father—politics—and its life from the mother—economy. Order and circulation, bound together, compose what we call society. In earlier ages, society was woven together by myth and religion, whose threads stitched the people together and gave society its very skeleton, while gift and redistribution flowed like blood through its body, moistening a sparse and fragile existence. Yet within scarcely a century, the twin pillars that upheld human societies for millennia—politics and economy—fell from their sovereign heights. The economy, once dwelling in the warmth of human life, turned pale; in its place emerged the impersonal, inorganic logic of exchange, stripped of all personhood. Deprived of its skeleton, society could no longer hold a center, and human beings, like knots undone, were unravelled into isolated strands. Thus arrived an individualistic, rationalistic, and mechanical secular economy. The death of God and the rise of capitalism together constitute the historical rupture that first and fully separates modernity from everything before it—a transformation unprecedented in the history of humankind.
These two epoch-making events are often misunderstood. Their superficial differences distract from the deeper identity they share. As Malinowski, Mauss, and many anthropologists have shown, politics and economy have never existed as independent spheres. Form and life have been intertwined since the beginning, nourishing one another and weaving a single structure. Modernity—God’s death and capitalism—is likewise a collaboration. And the force that completes their collusion is the commodification of everything. In modernity, economic value becomes the very paradigm of secular value. Commodification reduces objects to economic value—represented most typically in utility—and capitalism adapts all things to this principle. Religious, artistic, literary, and other rich and manifold qualities are stripped away and converted into economic value, dispatched to the market. Only when shipped off, labeled with a price, and placed on display do we first come to recognize the object. As Marx writes, “Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities.” Through this process of commodification, all objects that once surrounded human beings are desacralized.
Mark Fisher observes that once there were temples where ritual, prayer, and daily life coexisted. Incense rose, bells chimed with the wind, children’s laughter filled the corridors. People prayed, ate, conversed, sang, and died there. Cultural objects originally existed within such social, political, and religious entanglements. But capitalism excises only the altarpiece and transports it to the museum. The Buddha statue sealed in a white cube, the Louvre’s conquered Venus de Milo, the British Museum’s Tutankhamun—these are severed heads, detached shoulders, eyes torn from their sockets. What remains of culture’s corpse is not the warmth of life but the cold air of preservation—the stench of civilization’s specimen cabinets. Separated from their contexts, deprived of cultural dimension, such objects hold no relation to the viewer beyond intellectual or aesthetic appreciation. Like glass separating artwork from its beholder, this severance annihilates continuity. The spectator’s objective stance stands in stark contrast to the participatory, engaged attitude with which people once confronted objects. At this point, the object exceeds its frame and lets its death spill over into us. Of course, it would be hasty to claim that every thread of this process is the direct product of God’s death and capitalism. Yet the structural simultaneity is too beautiful—and too revelatory—to be dismissed as coincidence. As if the world itself staged the end of God as an allegory: an emblem suited to a world secularized under capitalism.
The death of God—propagating at the level of objects and rapidly spreading—now enters even our breath. Just as all things once bore sanctity as God’s creation, and life unfolded under that aura, we now live surrounded daily by un-dimensioned commodities, consuming them as we think, work, eat, sleep. Thus the death of God becomes embodied. Secularization is complete. Under the axiom of capitalism, commodification continually and ceaselessly invades every object, reenacting and reproducing the death of God within everyday life. This is the condition of humanity today. Commodification carries within itself the force of God’s death. By reducing every cultural, social, political, and religious object to a mere economic one, it strips humanity of every dimension, rendering us spectators—objective consumers—and making all objects comparable, flattening all values, secularizing the world, and thereby completing modernity.
Plutus myth — Monotheistic Capitalism
However, Marx—who with singular acuity exposed the collusion between the death of God and the rise of capitalism—also warned us of this: its very principle is a monotheistic one. In order to survive under capitalism, people must transform all things into commodities, slice up the labour and relations allotted to each individual – at times even their feelings and their very time – into measurable units of value, and offer them up to capitalism. Thus the world is transformed into a vast sacrificial altar, and everything is reduced to service for the economy. It was as if it were one of the ancient commandments inscribed in Scripture.: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” These words are no longer maxims of salvation; they have been inverted into the very legislation of capital— a secular commandment that strips revelation of transcendence and converts the oracle of the beyond into an order imposed upon the world. Modernity begins with the death of God and unleashes secularization, yet a monotheistic logic still governs it, for it is capitalism that draws its power from hiding its own divinity, as Walter Benjamin writes in Capitalism as Religion. Modern capitalism is, so to speak, an economic principle that feigns its own non-divinity, proclaiming the death of all gods while quietly enthroning itself in their place. It dons the mask of secularity, denies its divine status, yet commands all others to prostrate themselves before it. No one calls its name—yet everyone kneels before it. No one beholds its form—yet all are incorporated into its ritual. Benjamin writes: “God’s transcendence has fallen, but he is not dead. He is drawn into the fate of man.” What was once exalted is no longer in the heavens; it descends behind the order of market and profit, and capitalism organizes itself as a new monotheism. Thus the contradiction of modernity is resolved: capitalism becomes the god born from the death of God. By casting off the divine name and hiding faith beneath the veil of daily life, it escapes the very death it proclaims, arms itself with that death, and claims the authority of the One God. Benjamin inscribes the name in fragments of his thought: Plutus.
In the fourth century BCE, Aristophanes penned a myth that foreshadows the very genesis of capitalism. The tale is none other than the myth of Plutus, the god who governs wealth and the son of Demeter, goddess of fertility. The story opens with a single loss. Plutus, god of wealth, has been deprived of sight by the judgment of the king of the gods. From the depths of a long darkness, unable to see the destination of wealth or to discern its weight, the world was built for ages upon his silence. Yet one day, Chremylus—filled with a sense of justice yet foolish and naive—together with his companions, rebelled against the will of the king of the gods and reached toward the seal that bound Plutus. They wished for a future in which wealth would be freed from its curse, corrupt power overturned, and the world once more illuminated. When Plutus awakens, the command of dispensation returns to its former master and to its rightful seat. The resurrected Plutus is praised, celebrated, danced around in joy; the people imagine the advent of a coming utopia. This hope mirrors that of the economic liberal or the progressive— those who believe that freeing wealth from the constraints of authority will unlock human flourishing. As Immanuel Wallerstein writes, “ The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed, by far, the harm. ” But they could not have known. That the mere opening of wealth’s eye would invert the very principle of the world. That the mere liberation of wealth would bring down the order of the gods. In the final act, the awakened Plutus, by his invisible hand, exercises the command of dispensation. Wealth is guided, supplied, and reorganized by the god himself. Yet once unified under a single logic, wealth loses the accidental diversity that once allowed the multiplicity of gods to flourish. The many gods fall into poverty, for people’s hearts turn away from them; prayers cease, offerings vanish from the altars. The diversity of the gods had been sustained only through the contingency of wealth—through the blindness of Plutus. And at the end, wealth subdues even the king of the gods. Having ordered all gods beneath him, Plutus claims the name that once belonged to the supreme deity. But this new order does not resemble the old. The former hierarchy—though graded—was still plural; each god possessed ritual, faith, and power of its own. Yet the Plutian eye, by concentrating wealth, draws all prayer into its grasp. The gods have no choice but to surrender to Plutus or lose their very status as gods. Thus, “ Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. ” The opening of Plutian eye signifies the liberation of wealth, that is, the creation of modernity itself. Chremylus and his companions symbolize the Mills and Smiths of modern economics. And the final order ushered in by Plutus corresponds to monotheistic capitalism. Our present condition was already foretold in 388 BCE.
However, we must once again recognize that the revolutions which sought freedom have ended in failure. What once stood as the divine right of kings has now been replaced by the divine right of capital. The former schema of God–King–People has been transformed into Plutus–Capitalist–Proletariat, and the majority of humankind now serves the capitalist as its new master in place of the king. This is the very structure diagnosed by postmodern thought, a lament for humanity which, seeking liberation, has only fallen into a new form of slavery. Yet this subjugation exceeds the domain of external domination; it penetrates into the innermost depths of every person. Here the most profound theological structure of capitalism— identified with acuity by Walter Benjamin—comes into view: the homonymy of guilt and debt, Schuld. Plutus not only compels humans to labor, but inscribes every being that belongs to capitalism— the state, the family, the individual— as an endless debt, driving them for all eternity toward the commodification of everything their existence can touch. In this sense, Homo economicus is none other than Homo Schuld, and their only form of salvation lies in devoting themselves ever more fervently to the sacrificial rites of capitalism itself. Thus the rich plurality of human life and all possible alternatives vanish; everything is offered up beneath the dominion of the economy, and people come, at last, to regard capitalism as the only reality.
Aristophanes did not call this tale a tragedy, nor did he call it a blessing. The myth breaks off in the very midst of Plutus’s awakening and the collapse of polytheism, its trajectory left without a final resolution. This, however, is what gives us hope. For this point is precisely where humanity now stands, and those who must live the continuation of the story are none other than we who inhabit the present. An unfinished story is not a structural flaw; it is the sign of an open future. The absence of an ending itself foretells the emergence of a subject capable of bearing that future. The story did not end there; it merely left the seat of the narrator unfilled. Modernity failed to occupy this seat, and even now the place remains vacant. The right to sit there belongs, at last, to no one but us. Thus, the task of completing the story has been entrusted to us. We are the witnesses of the myth. And so we must ask: monotheistic capitalism—which, through commodification that carries within it the death of God, invades all things day by day. The economy—that is, the tyranny of Plutus. Under the Plutian eye, all things bow to the rule of exchange, and the rich and manifold facets of human life fall into ruin. Will we rise here and now as the subjects who will weave the future of this story? Or will we merely fulfill our existence as consumers within the given order, watching as spectators the twilight of a world collapsing into unity? The choice lies in our hands.
Thus we proclaim our mission—Blind Plutus. Now is the time to gather our strength and raise the standard of rebellion against the tyranny of Plutus, which has imposed its order upon us for far too long. Monotheistic capitalism—its birth cry resounded like the fanfare of the end of history, and commodification, reenacting the death of God and the despotism of the economy upon all things, transformed that foreboding into certainty. In the early twenty-first century, humanity bent its knees to capital and accepted defeat. In the failure and collapse of all alternatives, we have spent this past quarter century lost in despair. Practice leaned forward until means alone fascinated us, and when those means were lost, we retreated into theory. But from silence nothing can follow. Monotheistic capitalism continues even now its advance into the very facets of society, reassigning everything external to its own interior, transforming people from subjects of the world into mere spectators, stripping away the remnants of revolution, and enclosing what little critical attitude remains within discourse. Now we must return to that thesis: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Gilles Deleuze foresaw this despair. In every regime, “liberating and enslaving forces confront one another.” Humanity has no time to despair; we must— as Deleuze wrote—“There is no need to fear or to hope, but only to look for new arms.” Therefore we seek arms, and we rise. Cast off despair. Somewhere in this world, the means of liberation still remain. By knowing the world and exposing its structure, the path we must walk will reveal itself. And when the next arms descends into the hands of humankind, the long-silenced story of Plutus will once again begin to move.
FAITH ECONOMY
Overcoming Modernity
Once, when Plutus was blind, he was nothing more than one deity among the many in the polytheistic order. In other words, before modernity, the economy was merely one limited phase within society, which nurtured a rich plurality of facets. But after the throne and the altar were toppled, it was Plutus, god of wealth, who seated himself upon their ruins and remains. And when his Plutian eye opened, all values fell from the heavens down to the plane of the economy, and a secularized monotheistic order was organized. Thus the economy came to occupy the throne, becoming a law that devoured all things—a despotism without remainder. Gone is any trace of the former world. The economy is no longer a part of society; instead, society has been inverted into a subordinate of the economy. Every human activity is reinterpreted through the language of price, and all that once lay outside the economy is reassigned into its interior. This historical process of modernity is precisely what the economic historian Karl Polanyi formulated as the great transformation from an “economy embedded in society” to a “society embedded in the economy”—the birth of the devil’s mill. The facets of society are now given meaning by the economy, stored within it, and assigned their hierarchy of value by it. This entire process—what we call the monotheistic phase—is none other than the embedding of society into the economy in Polanyi’s sense. Therefore, the sealing of Plutian eye, which is our task, lies in the decommodification of capitalism. For it is commodification that renders every social facet and every worldly value into price, embedding all things into the economy. In every age, all things originally bear their innate essence. Yet once they are connected to this society, their value is converted into price, submerged into relativity, the death of God begins to permeate them, and they become proper commodities. Thus decommodification means re-embedding the economy back into society; it is the liberation of human life, of the phases of value, and of all things from the despotism of the economy. Decommodification, oriented toward an alternative to the commodity, is therefore the final and only chance to restore the contours of the world stolen by the economy and to return all things to their original phase.
Yet it would be hasty to condemn the entire society now embedded within the economy. Monotheistic capitalism, and the secular economy it has produced, has indeed enriched us. Humanity, once afflicted by hunger and pain, now enjoys unprecedented prosperity through technology and the market; equality and fairness have advanced gradually, and national statistics attest to this steady progress. The death of God and the rise of capitalism, at the cost of every higher dimension, granted us immense calculability and ushered in tremendous material development in the real and practical world. Before we are human beings, we are living organisms; thus many of us, as a foundation, desire to eat as we wish, to sleep in peace, to avoid pain, to seek pleasure, and to prolong life. The value of capitalism, therefore, is undeniable. The world that lies at its endpoint will surely appear as a utopia for those who drown in entertainment, consume food, sex, and signs, and seek a comfortable lifetime. Yet now, in the midst of this very process, the existential functions of human life are being silently and steadily lost. A life no longer lived for meaning but for survival and its extension symbolizes both the achievement and the tragedy of the system. The more materially wealthy we become, the less spiritually fulfilled we feel; we work without reward, and at the end of abundance many still sense a profound emptiness. Their existence is the proof that the scales of society—unbalanced by the death of God and capitalism—have begun to warp. For we seek more than survival; we yearn for the true, the good, and the beautiful, and we aspire toward freedom, equality, and fraternity. We seek the meaning of life—higher values that transcend mere survival and exceed the realm of vital values. Thus the next stage of capitalism we propose is the attainment of complementarity through the inversion of the current principle of exchange. If the secular economy woven by commodities forms the earth of capitalism, then the new economy that accomplishes its inversion forms the ensemble that sketches the lost firmament. The physical and the metaphysical, utility and ethics, materiality and interiority, phenomenon and meaning, body and spirit—under the name of a new exchange, firmament and earth shall be bound once more into a single circulation, and the indivisible duality of humanity shall be reconciled. This is the new creation, the great transformation of capitalism.
Before capitalism, the dominant economic principles—gift and redistribution—served, however imperfectly, both the realm of vital values and the realm of ideal values, the earth and the firmament. In the agrarian age, people shared the blessings of the harvest, and the primordial economic principle of gift, which sustained life, wove individuals into society. The ripening of grain was not the possession of the individual but a blessing of the gods and the community, enjoyed by all. Gift first served vital values: when the future was uncertain, communities bore their fate together; those who had gave to those who had not, and a spirit of mutual aid nourished the collective. Yet its work did not end with survival. Gift also cultivated ideal values. Songs of joy announcing the harvest to the heavens, the dances performed at festivals, and the ornaments and murals offered to the gods were all acts that served the ideals of the community beyond mere subsistence. Priests and priestesses who embodied these ideal roles were likewise sustained by the blessings of gift. The economic principle supported food while simultaneously nurturing prayer; earth and firmament were bound together in a single circulation. As time passed and the earth was organized under the dominion of lords, feudalism adopted redistribution as its governing principle. The lord prospered through his subjects and used this surplus for war—for the flourishing of the territory, for order, and for defense against invasion. In its origin, redistribution was not exploitation but a contract of order and protection, a service to vital values. Moreover, redistribution sustained public architecture, churches, and monasteries. The church, as the center of ideal values, gave bread to the poor and to artists, and provided desks and dwellings to priests and scholars. The murals of cathedrals and the hymns of praise were spiritual fruits born of redistributed wealth, offerings to God and, at the same time, ethical pillars of society. Thus, in feudal society, the economic principle fed the poor, preserved order, and cultivated culture; earth and firmament once again formed a single cycle. But with modern capitalism, exchange serves only survival and its extension. A god crawling upon the earth, devouring the heavens—the secularization Plutus wields as his weapon is the downfall of the ideal values symbolized by religion, and thus he established the despotism of economic value, which most fully satisfies survival. Thus, the logic of the death of God and of capitalism—the modern logic of exchange—opened the age of monotheistic capitalism. It was no longer a mere institution but a law that swallowed the world; the death of God ceased to be symbolic and became the governing principle of the economy itself, before which all values were to kneel—or so it seemed. The principle was indeed perfected: no deficit, no distortion, no margin remained. As stated earlier, it had established a unified completeness as a system. Yet the death of God—the end of ideal values—has not yet been fulfilled. Even now, though their forms are being eroded, pure modes of ethical practice, art, literature, social movements, and religion still retain their contours and continue to breathe within capitalist society. There were those who, refusing to let this ember die, escaped the dominion of exchange and continued to protect ideal values. They were the ancient principles—gift and redistribution—which had once lost their dominant position. The gods, fading from human consciousness, left behind a grace. Gift and redistribution, though steadily stripped of their authority by the death of God and by the commodity economy of monotheistic capitalism, nonetheless sheltered ideal values with whatever strength remained to them. And what sustained them was the unwavering will of those who believed in these values. Even as the logic of commodification sent waves of desire cascading across the world, even as the rhythm of money sought to rule all things, it was their belief—their heart—that bound the fading balance in the deep recesses of the world.
History, since Adam, has been irreversible. The paradise of those earlier days, its radiance, must be sealed away within nostalgia. To cling forever to the vestiges of the past as one’s foundation is frailty; to call for a simple return is mere dreaming; and to praise the market alone is a foolish act that forgets the heights of life. Therefore the path left to us lies neither in resigning ourselves to the present order—resting within the unstable equilibrium in which gift and redistribution support ideal values while exchange supports vital values—nor in a revolution that seeks to restore gift and redistribution, which once harmonized ideal and vital values; nor in surrendering everything to the logic of current exchange, waiting in cynical inertia for the triumphant return of Plutus. We must press forward into the abyss. Not into the present, nor the past, nor the future faintly visible ahead, but into an age whose name has not yet been spoken. What we must accomplish is the restoration of the lost balance on a higher plane: the sublimation of exchange into a new form that harmonizes vital values and ideal values—the overcoming of modernity itself.
Vital values advance by the inertia of desire. Gift, redistribution, and exchange—each of them organized the economy under this inescapable gravity. So long as we live, this is a universal law. Yet ideal values require the will of a subject. They breathe in this world only through those who believe in them; without a vessel, such values decay. Gift and redistribution entrusted everything to the subject: economic sovereignty rested with us. Their survival depended not on external institutions but on will itself. Exchange, however, objectifies sovereignty. Capitalism no longer requires the subject; its relativized equivalences and market-determined standards subordinate people to an external metric of value. In the present form of exchange there is no space for will, and thus ideal values had no refuge but in gift and redistribution. Therefore, the regeneration of ideal values means restoring economic sovereignty to the subject. What was taken by the awakening of Plutus—sovereignty, freedom—must be reclaimed. Secular economy, through commodification that bears within itself the death of God, collapses the continuity between objects and human beings, reducing their rich facets into a single economic plane. With this distance imposed—with death seeping into the subject—we become spectators, objective consumers, and in doing so we participate in the twilight of ideal values and the loss of sovereignty. Thus the alternative to the commodity—an object capable of bearing will—is the new principle of exchange that shelters and cultivates ideal values. We must now bring forth, upon the horizon of capitalism, an exchange animated by will, where the believing heart and the believing mind themselves become power. The economic principle contains a duality: a facet that projects desire and a facet that bears will; vital values that sustain human life and ideal values that elevate it; the secular economy woven by commodities and the new economy woven by their alternative. When this indivisible harmony is bound once again, capitalism will overcome modernity, and the prologue of the next epoch will begin.
There is Alternative
God is not dead—only our vessel is. We have not lost the divine itself, but the structure capable of bearing it. Yet through long labor of thought, we have uncovered a new vessel in which conviction may dwell—a weapon of hope that resists the chain of death. Here we proclaim the advent of a new economy. Opposed to commodification—the process that administers the death of God to every object—there arises its counter-form: an alternative whose power rests on belief, on the heart, crystallized into ideal values. Its name is security—the heir to the crown, the new vessel of humankind. But today, its powers lie sunken within the market, its structural potential confined inside the financial forms of the secular economy. Although the system itself was already established in the nineteenth century, most still understand securities merely as instruments of profit, failing to recognize their structural capacity to found a new order of capitalism. Why is this so? Because we ourselves have been contaminated by the death of God and by capitalism. Since modernity, economic rationality has assumed that price must be grounded in external factors—labor, production, utility, scarcity, supply and demand. Thus, securities whose prices are linked to fundamental assets such as gold, real estate, or equities are regarded as valid, because they are backed by external criteria like physical scarcity, market valuations, or corporate earnings. As a result, the modern security rests on a rationalist premise: that it must possess fundamental grounding; anything without such grounding is dismissed as fiction, illusion, or fraud. For example, in equity markets, subjects make buy–sell decisions by referring to values calculated through countless formulas and models. Prices far above these modeled values are condemned as excessive, and all those who do not believe in the security’s worth sell their holdings. Likewise, meme-coins in the cryptocurrency market have repeatedly been criticized for lacking fundamental grounding, accused of being mere breeding grounds for fictitious financial games. Yet this logic excludes a different possibility latent within securities: that a security may function as an exchange principle that composes a heavenly economy—its price formed not by external measures but by the will of the subject as its absolute basis. This is the next phase of exchange. Stock ownership contains faith within it. For the portion of a stock’s price that diverges from the external measures produced by countless models is, in fact, the very manifestation of those who believe in possibilities opened toward the future. A corporation may, to be sure, attempt to forecast that future through rational procedures. Yet there has never been a history in which the future was fully determined, and in the end, the decisive judgment always returns to the subject. Here, no coupling with fundamentals exists; the act of holding is sustained, in part, by belief. And under the rationalist premise, the collapse of a bubble in any given security is a form of secularization. Just as the death of God drove Homo economicus from the church to the office, the collapse of belief drives price toward what is taken to be fundamental. Thus, the rationalist premise absolutizes a particular future: that belief will, sooner or later, disintegrate, and that price will ultimately converge to fundamentals—that the secularization of securities is their destined end.
Yet, to insist that all of our beliefs will, in the end, collapse is nothing other than the logic of the death of God—and of capitalism. “Secularization will, sooner or later, be completed.” Such was the prophecy of the modern rationalists, and in this century they are witnessing its failure. To believe is elemental to humanity; faith is imperishable. Certainly, a portion of it may be destined to fall under the blows of rationalist discourse. Yet so long as the agent of the economy is we human beings, faith will ceaselessly dwell within us. Thus faith stands, in its own right, as fundamental—as fundamental as the rationalist outcomes modeled by countless theories. In this sense, the cryptocurrency market, though immature, may be seen as a precursor to a new world of exchange founded upon belief. Many meme-coins surge in price not because of fundamental earnings or assets but through a pure aggregation of subjective forces—collective frenzy, fashion, impulse—and collapse the moment that heat cools. There, price is formed solely by belief without fundamentals; accordingly, the distortion of belief immediately brings about the collapse of price. The secularization of faith without fundamentals reveals nothingness—nihilism. Meme-coins, then, are a wild demonstration of the very thing modern rationalism sought to exclude: that belief, by its own force, can create value. Yet at the same time, such belief is shallow, temporary, and fragile, for it depends upon price itself; it has not yet come to embody ideal values. It resembles an early religion that flares without institutions, without rites, without doctrine—only to extinguish just as quickly. But this does not prove, as the rationalist premise would claim, the inevitable secularization of securities. It is merely that they are still incomplete. Meme-coins are indeed pure belief without fundamentals, but they are also playful belief without ideals. However, if historically universal ideal values were to reside within them—if frenzy and fashion were to be replaced by salvation and Raison d'être —then belief, and therefore price, would be immortal. Here, a new possibility of exchange emerges. We proclaim the advent of an economy grounded in faith: an economy of will woven not by commodities but by securities—an alternative to the secular economy of the commodity. We call this horizon the Faith Economy. Under this principle, the grounding of value is no longer an external rationalist measure but is restored within the subject; value appears not as relative comparison but as absolute belief. Likewise, price ceases to be the aggregate of social agreements about external metrics; instead, it moves in accordance with the proportion of believers who hold the security as its fundamental. Thus, value is liberated from external guarantees, and the very act of believing becomes the principle that structures the economy. From the standpoint of rationalism, this is indeed a fictitious economy—for it has no standardized external measure, and what supports each security is the totality of the holders’ internal belief. Yet in societies prior to modernity, belief itself served as the ground of value, the condition that allowed value to come into being. Thus, an economy in which faith provides the basis of value is, in fact, the natural structure of human society. Therefore, to condemn absolute price-formation grounded in faith—to dismiss securities as components of a Faith Economy as mere fiction—is an operation of modern reason. Just as modern rationalism declared religion a fiction destined to collapse and be secularized, so the rationalist premise of the secular economy declares the Faith Economy a fiction destined to fail and collapse. It is in this sense that Marx’s description of securities as "fictitious capital" was profoundly suggestive: ultimately, fiction can be expressed only in the language of fiction.
Thus, economic activity within this structure appears not as market competition founded on relative comparison, but as an absolute enlightenment—a mode of expansion in which each system autonomously unfolds according to its own value-principle. In this domain, any common evaluative scale is inherently meaningless; each system develops according to its internal logic, without mediation through comparison with others. This mode of being closely resembles the tendency observed in eras marked by the rise of multiple religious systems, in which early faith communities expanded not through relative comparison with rival religions but through the sheer force of their own belief. In this sense, religious value is the very paradigm of faith-based value. Many believers of old asked nothing of superiority or inferiority; guided solely by the heat of their own faith, they expanded their communities. This was not a relative competition based on objective or external measures, but an absolute enlightenment grounded in subjective and internal conviction. Indeed, the soteriologies, rituals, existential values, and exertions of will that each system wove may well be comparable, and one cannot deny a certain structural sameness among them. The same applies to securities: because each security ultimately outputs as a price, it is theoretically possible to compute its price-stability or investment performance. Yet such objectivist attitudes—held by scholars or investors—are meaningless for the believers who sustain a genuine religion or an absolute security. In all systems, the pillar that supports the structure lies not in institutions or external measures, but in the enlightenment of subjects who house faith within themselves. Thus, the relative dimension of an absolute security, like that of religion, contributes nothing to its essential value. Put differently, its true vocation is not a struggle for relative advantage but a pluralist enlightenment, in which multiple value-systems unfold in parallel according to their own internal principles—an absolute plurality. The decline of price within the Faith Economy mirrors the life of religion. Throughout history, religions have suffered countless ordeals, each bringing faith to the brink of crisis. Plague, persecution, secularization, and war again and again forced communities into decisive choices, and at times faith indeed lost its power. Yet through the prayers of the devout, faith revived again and again, restoring its force. So, too, with absolute securities: they may fluctuate under rationalist premises, critical discourse, or the collapse of fragile forms of belief; they may even face the prospect of disintegration. Indeed, many securities whose value was “believed” simply because everyone else was buying—because prices were rising—have been recorded in history as bubble collapses. This is inevitable, for religions founded on the equally fragile basis of “believing because everyone else believes” have likewise been culled by history. However, if a security can come to house a faith that transcends such contingent choices—if it can construct a truly universal system—then through the will of those who believe, pray, and place their faith in its value, the security will revive again and again.
Thus, economic activity within this structure appears not as market competition founded on relative comparison, but as an absolute enlightenment—a mode of expansion in which each system autonomously unfolds according to its own value-principle. In this domain, any common evaluative scale is inherently meaningless; each system develops according to its internal logic, without mediation through comparison with others. This mode of being closely resembles the tendency observed in eras marked by the rise of multiple religious systems, in which early faith communities expanded not through relative comparison with rival religions but through the sheer force of their own belief. In this sense, religious value is the very paradigm of faith-based value. Many believers of old asked nothing of superiority or inferiority; guided solely by the heat of their own faith, they expanded their communities. This was not a relative competition based on objective or external measures, but an absolute enlightenment grounded in subjective and internal conviction. Indeed, the soteriologies, rituals, existential values, and exertions of will that each system wove may well be comparable, and one cannot deny a certain structural sameness among them. The same applies to securities: because each security ultimately outputs as a price, it is theoretically possible to compute its price-stability or investment performance. Yet such objectivist attitudes—held by scholars or investors—are meaningless for the believers who sustain a genuine religion or an absolute security. In all systems, the pillar that supports the structure lies not in institutions or external measures, but in the enlightenment of subjects who house faith within themselves. Thus, the relative dimension of an absolute security, like that of religion, contributes nothing to its essential value. Put differently, its true vocation is not a struggle for relative advantage but a pluralist enlightenment, in which multiple value-systems unfold in parallel according to their own internal principles—an absolute plurality. The decline of price within the Faith Economy mirrors the life of religion. Throughout history, religions have suffered countless ordeals, each bringing faith to the brink of crisis. Plague, persecution, secularization, and war again and again forced communities into decisive choices, and at times faith indeed lost its power. Yet through the prayers of the devout, faith revived again and again, restoring its force. So, too, with absolute securities: they may fluctuate under rationalist premises, critical discourse, or the collapse of fragile forms of belief; they may even face the prospect of disintegration. Indeed, many securities whose value was “believed” simply because everyone else was buying—because prices were rising—have been recorded in history as bubble collapses. This is inevitable, for religions founded on the equally fragile basis of “believing because everyone else believes” have likewise been culled by history. However, if a security can come to house a faith that transcends such contingent choices—if it can construct a truly universal system—then through the will of those who believe, pray, and place their faith in its value, the security will revive again and again.
Unlike the secular economy—where continuity with the object is severed and an objectifying, spectatorial attitude reigns—the faith economy restores participation. Here, people engage in economic life as subjects, not spectators; each person’s will, and the belief that animates it, becomes a real force. And when prayers that surpass the market converge, a new economy is woven. In the economy shaped by securities, numbers become the traces left by the heart, exchange is suffused with living blood, and profit is called by the name of blessing. Money is no longer an inorganic medium: it becomes a thread that binds one’s inner intention to another. A security is the visible form of faith within this world; its value deepens with the number of its believers, resonating with their convictions and growing more radiant in response. The economy returns to the people; price appears as a resonance of souls; and the market ceases to be a battlefield of capital, becoming instead a symphonic space where plural forms of faith interweave. Thus Plutus returns to his rightful place, and once more the heavens blossom with diverse and abundant facets. A security grants wings to exchange, lifts it toward the lost ideal values, and restores sovereignty to us. At this point, our Great Transformation is fulfilled. If the secular economy woven by commodities builds the earth of capitalism, then the faith economy woven by securities is the ensemble that sketches the once-lost firmament. It is the harmony of humanity’s indivisible duality—a polytheistic capitalism.
And when the will and devotion of humankind become one—when the faith economy arrives, and centuries have passed—the new economic principle that binds people through ideals will give rise to a multilayered social order woven from countless associations: communities formed around their own distinctive constellations of ideal values. In this order, the domains once monopolized by the nation—education, culture, welfare, and ethical practice—will be decentralized into these ideologically unified communities, each generating value according to its own faith, will, and conviction, sustaining a circulation of order through mutual solidarity. Thus, the plurality of associations, each bearing its own worldview and value system, will not merely maintain an economic order; they will begin to experiment with new social orders encompassing politics, culture, ethics, and ways of life. At that moment, capitalism will no longer possess the monotheistic character it once held; instead, it will respond to the multiplicity of ideals that people believe in, filling various associations with their respective forms of prosperity. One association may, with its abundance, construct a community centered on art and education; another may unite religious practice and ethical cultivation with economic principle; yet another may dedicate itself to scientific research or innovations in public health. These associations will not compete against one another; rather, each will flourish autonomously according to its own ideals, and the world will be filled with a richness of color never before witnessed in history. In time, these multiple associations—bound together ideationally—will come into contact or cooperation with the old nation-states, and at times will dissolve across their borders. And then history will quietly approach a threshold. The nation will no longer be the sole sovereign subject. The political space once governed by territory, population, military force, and centralization will be rewritten into a pluralistic political map in which diverse ideological communities cross, overlap, and coexist. Only here will the nation-state, for the first time, confront a social formation possessing an axis outside itself: federations of ideological communities, networks, layered sovereignties, and digital polities. And at last, when the nation and the associations mutually complement and intermingle with one another—when the rigid territorial sovereignty of the state converges, in all its formal manifestations, with the ideational sovereignty of the faith economy—humanity will stand at the threshold of the post-capitalist and post-nation-state era.
Conclusion
There is Alternative. Modernity—monotheistic capitalism organized by the awakened Plutus; the death of God endlessly reproduced through commodification; the secular economy that extends this reign of death. The weapon of hope that frees us from that tyranny and severs the chain of death is the security. When value is incarnated into that vessel and prayer regains its purity, the economy once again takes on the warmth of human presence. And the faith economy that arrives will sublimate relative diversity into absolute multiplicity, ushering capitalism into its next stage.
Yet that future exists nowhere—not yet. For what awaits at the end of our silence is the triumphal return of Plutus. Thus the fate of this story rests upon the will of each of us. Behold: the firmament is already cracking. Gift has been buried beneath utility; redistribution has withered away; only the logic of exchange grows fat, and history remains sealed in silence. But something still remains to us. It is the will of those who, enduring the death of God inscribed in commodification and the tyranny of monotheistic capitalism, continued nonetheless to protect the ideal values that have not yet been lost. It is the prayer of those who could not give up. The silent cry. The wish meant for no one. The very thing modernity once discarded—we still hold it here. And that irreplaceable sentiment, that unwavering will, is what transforms the security from a mere economic instrument into a weapon of liberation. Rise, Homo Schuld. Rise, comrades who seek the alternative. Rise, you who would reclaim the world that has been taken from you. Even now, the security waits in the depths of the market for the hour of its rebirth. Rewrite its name—marked with guilt and debt—in the name of faith and sovereignty. Break the glass. Step down from the spectator’s seat and onto the stage of myth. Seize the security with your own hand; uphold the economy with your will; inscribe your name upon its value. Declare your ideal, gather your comrades, and found your association. The will and the faith of each person will transform capitalism, liberate humankind, and overcome modernity. And when these wills converge, the story without an ending will move once more, and myth will become reality. Therefore, we declare—
And when these wills converge, the story without an ending will move once more, and myth will become reality.
Thus, we plocraim our mission—
Blind Plutus
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