Blind Plutus
Manifesto
With this declaration, we expose the monotheistic character of capitalism and organize a movement toward the overcoming of modernity. Monotheistic capitalism—and the secular economy constituted by commodification at its core. What we proclaim is the proposal of an alternative: not an interpretation of the world, but a declaration of transformation.
Introduction
I.
II.
CONTENTS
Proceed to signature
III.
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 politics as father and its life from economy as mother. 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—death of God 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 temples once held ritual, prayer, and everyday life as an undivided whole. 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 this structural simultaneity is, to be dismissed as coincidence, far too beautiful and far too revelatory. 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—this was a phenomenon that spread at the level of objects alongside the advance of capitalism, rapidly proliferating until it has now seeped even into our breathing. Just as in former times, when all things bore sanctity as God’s creations and life was woven upon that foundation, today we are surrounded at every moment by commodities stripped of all dimensions. By becoming their consumers, we think, work, eat, and sleep—and in this way, the death of God is embodied. Thus, secularization is brought to perfection. 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. Here, the generality of the death of God is revealed. Now, upon the globally unified base of secular exchange, there exist superstructures that are pluralistically separated and differentiated. Only when the particularities of religion, faith, and ideology are erased at the level of the base does the world become unified and shared. This is the true nature of capitalist globalism, which has accelerated secularization and unification alike. Even as we seek salvation, we are compelled to participate in exchanges that harbor death; even as we offer prayers, we tread upon the gravestones of equivalence. A great portion of humanity lives under this very division. That is to say, the secular economy signifies the death of God at the level of the base. The commodity carries within itself the death of God and invites us into a dance of death organized through the objective arrangements of exchange. As Baudrillard suggests, death itself is universal equivalence. In other words, the commodification of everything reduces every cultural, social, political, and religious object to a merely economic one, stripping humanity of all dimensions, rendering it into a spectatorial or objectivist consumer, making all objects comparable, flattening all values, secularizing the world, and thereby completing modernity.
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, in its aftermath, organizes the secularization of the base structure. Yet its economy is, at the same time, profoundly monotheistic. As Walter Benjamin writes in Capitalism as Religion, capitalism draws its power from hiding its own divinity. 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. Capitalism becomes the god born from the death of God—and in this, the contradiction of modernity finds its resolution. What we are concerned with here is a form of economic theology, that is, what has taken the vacant seat left by feudal monotheism is not human existence, but capitalist monotheism.
Therefore, 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 King–People has been transformed into Capitalist–Proletariat, and the majority of humankind now serves the capitalist as its new master in place of the king. This is precisely the transfer of a monotheistic structure that Marx described as the passage from feudal exploitation to capitalist exploitation—a tragic fate in which humanity, in seeking liberation, fell into a new form of servitude. And it is here, above all, that the most profound theological structure of capitalism, which Walter Benjamin laid bare—Schuld, the demonic ambiguity of guilt and debt—comes fully into view. Even before Benjamin, Nietzsche had exposed the symbolic structure of Schuld, through which guilt is generated as debt and gradually precipitates into the interior of the human being. This structure originates in a relation of indebtedness to what is symbolized by ancestors, myth, and history—that is, to the pre-historical. As Nietzsche writes, “here the reigning conviction was that the tribe exists only because of the sacrifices and achievements of its ancestors, and that people had to pay them back with sacrifices and achievements.” In every age, the benefits we receive are the products of what earlier humanity has built; and thus, in every age, we cannot escape a relation of debt to the pre-historical. From Adam onward, indeed even Adam himself, human beings have lived by the grace of the pre-historical. This is nothing other than divine grace, and the regression of pre-historical debt ultimately returns us to myth. Nietzsche argued that it was precisely this relation to God, as the origin of pre-historical debt, that came to be interpreted as guilt; and thus repayment appeared in the form of atonement. The normative force of this pre-historical debt, from the primordial age to the present, demands the dedication of life in its entirety. For our benefits are said to have been created through the immeasurable accumulation of the great works of the past, and to inherit, repay, and atone for them constitutes an infinite ethics—one that can be brought to an end only by death itself. And yet, today, salvation no longer exists. Benjamin inherits Nietzsche’s analysis and argues that Schuld is a dominant structure concealed within capitalism itself. In capitalism, this structure reaches its extreme point. Pre-historical debt is no longer merely an ideological or symbolic problem; it has been totalized as an economic one. Social security becomes the institutionalization of ancestor worship, while the normalization of sovereign debt obliges the state to perpetual growth. In this way, pre-historical debt today appears as a concrete reality that exceeds mission and will alike, making the total devotion of our lives to capital a condition of communal existence. Here we witness the economization of pre-historical debt. Driven into endless repayment, we have reinterpreted this compulsion as infinite growth, that is, as progressivism, and disciplined ourselves accordingly. Thus, Homo economicus is nothing other than Homo Schuld, and their sole destiny has been to devote themselves ever more completely to the sacrificial cult of capitalism itself. In this way, the rich multiplicity of human existence and all alternatives disappear; everything is offered up to the economy, until people come to regard capitalism as the only reality. Yet in the end, this new and singular god offers us no salvation. What remains for humanity is that which never heals—nothing but guilt.
Yet guilt cannot be reduced to a merely normative or moral problem. Just as feudal monotheism grounded guilt as an ontological foundation, so too within capitalist monotheism guilt pervades existence as an ontological ground. It is on this horizon that the decisive importance of Marx’s theory of alienation emerges. According to Marx, under capitalism labor appears as the act by which humanity externalizes and objectifies its immanent powers in the form of commodities. Yet when the products of labor do not return to the subject but are incorporated, as commodities, into the objective organization of exchange, they confront the subject as capital—an alien power that stands opposed to its creator. The more one devotes oneself to capitalism, the more the world comes to appear as an ensemble of external forces; all things enter into antagonistic relations, and the subject is alienated from the world itself. For this reason, Marx himself sought the remnants of consolation not in production but in the sphere of consumption. Yet this line of thought was later radicalized by thinkers such as Fromm and Lefebvre, who exposed alienation as a structure latent throughout every dimension of both production and consumption. Thus modern humanity resembles the Phrygian allegory of King Midas: intoxicated by desire, alienated from the world by his own wish. Endowed with the power to turn all that he touches into gold in the pursuit of glory and wealth, he is nonetheless condemned to hunger and thirst. This tale stands as a prophetic ontological myth of capitalism. Wherever we go, we are alienated from the world; even our attempts to touch things are thwarted by the curse of Midas. Essence is never disclosed. Things appear only as price. And thus we sink into ontological hunger. As Marx writes, alienation is nothing other than the loss of reality itself: “So much does the labor’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death.” Accordingly, Herbert Marcuse argued that alienation is not merely an economic fact but an ontological problem. In this sense, the theologian Paul Tillich regarded the alienation analyzed by Marx as a modern—or secular—variation of sin. As Eisselman observed, The existentialist alienation was evoked by the capitalist alienation. Existentialism and psychoanalysis, which rose to prominence alongside the death of God and capitalism, together with the modern ontological anxiety they took as their object, are not disparate movements but share a single orientation under different names. They form one undifferentiated circuit. The fall from a divine totality once saturated with transcendence, and the alienation from organic relations once woven into worldly life—both appear as a loss of the world itself. In this sense, alienation is nothing less than a second Fall.
All significant concepts of the modern theory of capitalism are secularized theological concepts. Thus monotheistic capitalism, founded upon guilt as its ontological and ultimately normative ground, drives humanity into infinite service and, in doing so, establishes the commodification of all things—the tyranny of the economy. By casting off the divine name and hiding faith beneath the veil of daily life, capitalism escapes the very death it proclaims, arms itself with that death, and claims the authority of the One God. Benjamin inscribes this 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 logic ruled by a single god, 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 once 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. In the former order, though graded, the hierarchy 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.
Plutus myth
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
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 satanic 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 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, the primordial economic principle of gift wove individuals into society, and people shared the blessings of the harvest. 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 those that had once lost their dominant position—the ancient principles of gift and redistribution. 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 that awaits us, 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.
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 our intention 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 modern 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.
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. At that moment, 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, the ideals internalized within Plutus are released, 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, the Great Transformation of capitalism 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.
Polytheistic capitalism seeks to overthrow the tyranny of the economy and to organize the collapse of the monotheistic capitalism ruled by Plutus. Thus, the diverse and abundant facets that have been imprisoned within the economy since the advent of modernity are released from the prison of reason; they reenter relation with people and once more begin to play. At first glance, this appears as a utopia, as though it were the victory of humanity itself. And yet, it remains incomplete. For even at this stage, we still remain within capitalism. Polytheization is no more than a point along a linear scale of reform and expansion, nothing more than a fleeting moment of repose. In this sense, polytheistic capitalism is, so to speak, nothing more than the stage at which Zeus has freed his brothers from the womb of Kronos; yet at that very stage, Kronos continues to rule the world as the supreme god. Even under polytheistic capitalism, Plutus still reigns as the highest deity at the center of the world. Therefore, to render Plutus blind—its true completion—means to dethrone Plutus from the seat of supreme divinity itself. Thus, the myth of Plutus that we inherit consists in the conception of a new order beyond capitalism—and only through its realization does it reach its completion. In this sense, the faith economy reveals to us its dual significance. It lies, first, in the liberation and cultivation of diverse facets through faith, and second, in the emergence of a plural social form built upon them—a form of association.
Absolute security emerges within the order of exchange with a specific purpose or orientation—what may be called an ideal—and, aiming at its own development, weaves individuals into a single set of social relations. Thus we gather under shared ideals, participate by free will, and, through autonomous choice, enter into social contracts. In this way, a social form integrated by ideals under free will has long been called an association; at every point in history it has unified human beings and made resistance and solidarity possible. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau understood the state itself as a form of association. Friedrich Engels likewise treated the ancient polis, medieval guilds and cities, and even leagues of landed nobility as historical forms of association. Marx, in The German Ideology, divided the formation of association—drawing on Rousseau—into two types: an order that necessarily results from given conditions, and an order grounded in will. His argument that, in the Middle Ages, the bourgeoisie necessarily organized associations of resistance and solidarity as a defense against predatory nobles develops, in modernity, into the thesis that the working class necessarily organizes communism as a defense against capitalists. As Marx writes: “The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism.” In other words, communism itself was also organized as a form of association. That is to say, any new social form that transcends the existing order appears, in every age, as an association. This can be regarded as a historical fact that also runs through capitalism. Yet at the same time, association reached an unprecedented florescence under monotheistic capitalism. As discussed by Engels, Marx, and Ferdinand Tönnies, the corporate enterprise is likewise a form of association: it gathers around the purpose of profit, participates through free will, and enters into social contracts through autonomous choice. In this sense, it is only with exchange—as opposed to gift and redistribution—that association becomes widespread and generalized on a global, all-human scale. Association thus comes to occupy the apex of social order under capitalism. Its paradigmatic form appears as an association grounded in security—namely, the joint-stock company. Every society conceals the seeds of what comes next within its existing institutions. Marx understood this well. As he wrote: “The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one.” In other words, Marx discerned within the joint-stock company the possibility of overcoming capitalism itself. And yet, this form remains oriented toward the economy as its end, elevating the economy to the highest principle; in the terms of Polanyi, it is nothing other than a society embedded in the economy. The dominance of gift and redistribution constitutes an economy embedded in society, whereas the dominance of exchange constitutes a society embedded in the economy. Consequently, economic associations organized within the present order merely extend and reproduce monotheistic capitalism. Thus our problem is reduced to a single question: how is it possible for an association grounded in security to appear—and to endure—as an economy embedded in society?
The innovation of a faith economy, of exchange animated by will, lies precisely in the fulfillment of a long-held aspiration: to realize an economy embedded in society as an association grounded in security. In the faith economy, an association is an order structured around ideals as supreme principles. The economy, though inseparable, functions only as a part of social relations integrated by those ideals, and thus appears as an economy embedded in society. The secular economy, grounded in relativity, proliferates joint-stock companies as economic associations founded upon security, cultivating, as it were, obedient believers and churches devoted to the faith of Plutus. By contrast, the faith economy centered on absoluteness breaks through this monotheistic structure—the tyranny of the economy itself. Within a faith economy oriented toward absoluteness, associations grounded in security emerge as orders that harbor plural ideals encompassing the economy, embracing every possible orientation: art and literature, religion and social transformation, ethical practice and revolution. They manifest in a multitude of forms. To be sure, even under monotheistic capitalism, associations bearing diverse ideals have existed. Yet they were established either by excluding the economy from their structure altogether or solely through gift and redistribution. To rephrase Ferdinand Tönnies’s formulation, it is only through a faith economy grounded in exchange that “the principles of the premodern economy acquire new life in a form adapted to the conditions of capitalist existence.” In this sense, the faith economy signifies the cultivation of the very soil within capitalism from which post-capitalism may grow. And one day, within the plural social relations woven by the faith economy, the germ of a new order beyond capitalism will sprout—as an association. Here, the final chapter of the myth of Plutus is drawn. In every age, civilization is destined to be destroyed by the hands of its own child. This has been allegorized as a universal law of history. And yet, the father eternally resists such a fate. Knowing the tragedy of Uranus, Kronos and Zeus, fearing that tomorrow they themselves would suffer the same end, swallowed their children at birth—rejecting not only their offspring but their futures and destinies as well. Even the once-great supreme gods, driven by self-preservation, desired the endless stability of their own order. Feudalism—the father of capitalismlikewise attempted to devour its own child. Yet this resistance ended in utter failure. It was, so to speak, the victory of Plutus over Zeus. And once again, history repeats itself. Plutus, too, fears his own child; gripped by terror, he swallows non-capitalist creations into himself. Thus monotheistic capitalism, tyranny of the economy is Plutus devouring his son. Accordingly, polytheistic capitalism woven by the faith economy signifies the liberation of diverse ideals—art, literature, religion, ethics—from the womb of Plutus. Upon this liberation, associations as economies embedded in society are organized in plural forms. And in their culmination, they bridge humanity toward new principles and unexplored worlds. Therefore, the emergence of the faith economy, and the twenty-first century in which its formation is situated, constitutes the prologue to a new Titanomachy. At this point, we stand at the threshold of a post-capitalist, post–nation-state era.
Yet here we must ask: are we not confronting a new form of domination in place of the old? As discussed earlier, the revolutions of modernity did not abolish monotheism; they transformed it into a new monotheism. Marx described the revolution from feudalism to capitalism as an inversion of exploitation; the Reformation from Catholicism to Protestantism, likewise, was nothing other than a reordering of domination, as Weber observed; and, at the same time, the revolution from monarchy to democracy was, as Tocqueville warned, the tyranny of the majority. Endless domination thus signifies endless liberation. Just as Uranus was overthrown by his own son Kronos, Kronos by his own son Zeus; just as capitalism overthrew feudalism and the victory of Plutus was inscribed into history—so too does this testify that capitalism itself will one day come to an end, and that whatever world is constructed thereafter is likewise already destined for its own eventual collapse. Order and chaos, the negentropy of domination and the entropy of liberation: it is this collision that constitutes the dialectical dynamic of history. Thus we must ask of the future to come: will Plutus, anticipating defeat, mock from his own downfall the collapse that awaits beyond the order we manage to seize? Is order, in every age, destined to end in failure? In this sense, it may be that liberation itself detests order, while domination serves tranquility. The hidden virtue of domination—concealed beneath the heroism of liberation—is nothing other than a disposition that, so long as it does not transmute into excessive violence, creates calm through constraint within a chaotic world and orients itself toward order. Yet unruly libido, across the ages, refines weapons in the name of liberation, and humanity once more turns toward chaos. Had we abandoned truth and renounced freedom, we might long ago have secured paradise. And yet, we transgress again. This is the universal fall implanted within human nature itself: the ceaseless reenactment of the loss of Eden. If we were capable of self-discipline, of loving stillness, of remaining within bounds, then in any age the possibility would have remained open to us of attaining a provisional order and enjoying its quiet blessing. Yet a pacified spirit turns into hunger. Boredom awakens the Icarus sleeping within us. In every world, forbidden fruit lies scattered in unexpected places. It is in this way that order repeatedly closes its curtain as failure. Therefore, when we set out to conceive a true utopia, we must take into account the fall from utopia itself. For human nature desires what is absent, seeks something further, and silently inclines toward chaos. We who reject the paradise given to us and dream of a paradise yet unseen remain, forever, Adam and Eve. Hence, a post-capitalist, post–nation-state order woven by associations through the faith economy must not present a single answer. It is true that the faith economy, through plural associations, may give rise to new economic principles that transcend gift, redistribution, and exchange alike. Such a formation would undoubtedly bestow a new grace upon humanity as a utopia. Yet if associations, liberated from the tyranny of the economy and woven in plural forms, were to cultivate a single ideal association—and if, in the end, they were to be integrated into a single dominant utopia to replace capitalism—this would itself become the seed of a new liberation. Therefore, it is only in elevating the plural associations organized by polytheistic capitalism into plural utopias that the sole possible utopia can exist—one fashioned by human hands that are fated to an endless fall. This horizon—grounded in plural associations and woven of plural utopias—is precisely what Robert Nozick described as Meta-Utopia.
Thus, the faith economy that overthrows monotheistic capitalism simultaneously bridges polytheistic capitalism toward meta-utopia. Initiation and secularization within the faith economy, namely the purchase and sale of securities, appear as participation in and withdrawal from an association, and, in their final consequence, as affirmation or negation of an utopia. So long as securities rest upon absolute price formation, their buying and selling depend upon the faith of the subject. In other words, when faith takes hold with respect to the ideal symbolized by a given security, it is purchased; when that faith is secularized it is sold. At the same time, faith and purchase signify participation in an association bound by that ideal, just as secularization and sale signify departure from that association. And insofar as that association is constituted for the purpose of a particular social formation, faith, purchase, and participation amount to the affirmation of a utopia, while secularization, sale, and withdrawal amount to its negation. Accordingly, when the faith economy arrives and centuries have passed, this new principle of exchange will cultivate a multilayered social order woven from countless associations, each formed around its own ideal values. In time, these ideologically bound associations will come to possess a force commensurate with that of the old nation-states; they will encounter them, cooperate with them, and at times dissolve across their boundaries. At that moment, history quietly approaches a threshold. The state, in other words, ceases to be the sole bearer of sovereignty. The political space once governed by territory, population, military power, and centralization is rewritten as a plural political map in which diverse communities of ideals traverse, overlap, and coexist. Here, for the first time, the nation-state confronts social forms that possess axes of opposition outside itself. Finally, when state and association mutually supplement and intermingle—when the state’s rigid territorial sovereignty converges, in all its formalities, with the ideal sovereignty of the faith economy—the state comes to participate in meta-utopia as one association among others, that is, as one utopia within it.
There, several associations are given. In that world, to depart and to remain are equally blessed, and the subject is to follow one’s own will. For it is through each person’s autonomous will that ideal associations flourish and corrupt associations wither away. And when subjects bring about the absence of a utopia, they arrive at the creation of new associations, through which what was excluded returns, diversity is intensified, and the universality of meta-utopia is expanded. This process continues in an open-ended manner. Associations are formed, rise to prosperity, and, when they harden into corrupt orders, people leave them; they decline; people migrate to new worlds, or create them—and then again. In time, some of the associations thus cultivated in plural form will establish stable relations and deepen into utopias that are loved by people. Of course, the possibility that such utopias may themselves devolve into corrupt orders cannot be denied. Yet when that occurs, people simply depart and move toward different associations. One might say that people participate in associations through selective social contracts: ideal associations attract participants, while corrupt associations are eliminated. Through the free will of subjects, the malignancy of meta-utopia is purified, and the whole moves toward a richer and more ideal plural order. Thus, within meta-utopia, it becomes possible to put an end to the endless historical struggle in which a particular utopia or social form seeks to dominate as a singular order. In the twenty-first century, humanity has discovered within itself an astonishing diversity; yet democracy, capitalism, the nation-state—and even this planet—are too narrow to contain it. As Robert Nozick observed, by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Rabelais, and Dostoevsky, we can come to understand how impossible it is that there be a single utopia in which all ought to live. It is here that the true value of meta-utopia reveals itself. That is to say, the associations that constitute meta-utopia do not recoil from the constraints embedded within their own social structures. Individualism and collectivism, communities of ideals and nation-states, libertarianism and communitarianism, agrarian society and feudalism, monarchy and republicanism, capitalism and communism—all are capable of coexisting within a single order under meta-utopia. Whatever the social form, good associations flourish, and corrupt associations collapse. In other words, all social forms manifest as possible utopias, and each contributes to the universality of meta-utopia. There, every society and every mode of life becomes possible: god and body, king and freedom, intellect and desire, authority and fraternity, competition and equality—all become possible together. Thus, meta-utopia is completed through the synthesis of the diverse and abundant social forms humanity has inscribed into its history over millennia, and the new horizons—equally diverse and abundant, yet still uncharted—that will be dialectically woven in the future. Its universality expands without end, and as the final form of their unification, it continually comes into being. Here, domination and liberation, order and chaos—that is, deviation and fall—are fully internalized. At this point, human history finally acquires a plural universality. In this sense, meta-utopia marks an extreme made possible by the wisdom humanity has acquired upon descending to this earth: the grand summation of history that can be realized only through the convergence of human powers.
Therefore, if meta-utopia—the end of the end of history—were ever to conclude as a blessing, it would not be by human wisdom, but by one thing alone: the advent of the Kingdom of God.
Conclusion
In modernity, the awakened Plutus dons a secular mask. By proclaiming commodification—the bearer of the death of God—to the entire world, he completes the secularization of the base and organizes monotheistic capitalism. Gift and redistribution are thus displaced from their dominant positions, and in the vacuum left behind, exchange takes its seat. A society embedded in the economy comes into being, realizing the tyranny of an economy that reduces every dimension—indeed, humanity itself—into its own womb. At last, all things are positioned within the objective arrangement of exchange; rationalist premises enthrone relativized value as the supreme principle of the base and wrest economic sovereignty from our hands.
Therefore, as the path to reclaim lost sovereignty, to liberate the values that have been taken from us, and to overcome modernity itself, we propose the faith economy. Securities, as vessels fit to inherit the crown, come to bear the ideals of the people and, through our autonomous choices grounded in free will, are sublimated into associations. And when associations are organized, tested, and recomposed according to the ideals of diverse social forms—when new principles take root beyond gift, redistribution, and exchange; and when some associations acquire forces comparable to the existing order—then the age stands at the threshold of a post-capitalist, post–nation-state horizon.
What follows is meta-utopia. By internalizing the endless historical struggle between domination and liberation, order and chaos, and realizing them within a single order, our society attains the summit of the most universal and most plural social form in human history. In that world, all ways of life are possible: prayer offered to God; labor that delights in the body; loyalty rendered to a king; lives that celebrate freedom; thought that refines wisdom; burning devotion to desire; ascent toward authority; solidarity rooted in fraternity; days consumed by competition; and existences fulfilled by equality—each and all.
Therefore, people who serve God in every form. Those who feel nostalgia for what has been lost. Those who live freely and suffer freely. Those who have lost salvation and fear death. Those who have received the baptism of Plutus yet still suffer under monotheistic capitalism. And humanity itself, which longs for universality for all—gather beneath this banner. Rise up. Now is the time to unite our strength against the tyranny of Plutus that has long imposed order upon us, and against the endless struggle between domination and liberation. Now is the time to raise the flag of resistance.
It is true that our ideals may differ. The justice we uphold and the paths we believe in may diverge. We may even be destined never to converge. Yet if there is one force that now brings death upon us all, then—recognizing our differences—we can share our suffering and fight together. We exclude no one; therefore, our movement encompasses all. To place a final period upon the ceaseless struggles of this world, and to transform it into a horizon rich with plurality and universality, we organize a common front of all humanity. Thus, humanity—divided and antagonistic—can once more be united in solidarity through a shared mission that transcends us all.
And when these wills converge, the story without an ending will move once more, and myth will become reality.
Therefore, we issue the call to all humanity—
Blind Plutus
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