Theme: Institution

“Q: Is there a connection between capitalism and religiosity?”

Great question.

There is a relationship between the military, empiricism, rule of law, and markets that tend to favor capitalism since once you have those influence capitalism is all that one can do. That’s why Europeans invented empiricism, rule of law, markets testimony in all walks of life, and high trust: european civilization was, at least, among the aristocracy, an “army of everyone” for 5000 years. And moving up the status economic and political hierarchy meant integration into that set of values – so much so that we practiced it until 1918 without ever even writing it down as our ‘bible’ of western civilization.

There is a relationship between empiricism and atheism – which is what you would expect. Whether you mean ‘capitalism’ in the ‘free trade’ regardless of local costs, or rule of law, which produces markets within the limits of local costs, determines your understanding of it. In other words, rule of law of reciprocity will produce a mixed economy. Weak (limited) rule of law with a capitalist bias will produce the bad effects of capitalism.

There is a relationship between Christianity and building a large middle class so that one can have a modern, self-organizing economy that will function by incentives – which is the more general name of capitalism. This is why Christian countries tend to become wealthy and Islamic countries tend to become poorer and poorer. Christianity treats everyone as family and customer and treats customers as necessary to keep in order to stay in business. However, this behavior doesn’t require religiosity. Because post-theological peoples retain those ethics. It’s only been postwar immigrants from ‘less moral’ cultures that have undermined it.

So like many ‘skills’ (arithmetic > math > geometry > calculus > analysis) or (grammar> logic > rhetoric )(physics > chemistry > biology > sentience) or (stories > novels > biographies > histories ) christian ethics appears to be a ‘stage’ through which groups must pass in order to develop an equal to high trust western civlization.

Unfortunately, that very same Christianity and high trust creates a vulnerability because it normalizes trust to a degree that individuals polities, nations, and civilizations are vulnerable to false promises and seditious behavior, as we have seen over the past seventy years.

GIVEN:

Anarchism| < – Capitalism < -… Rule of Law … -> Socialism -> |Communism

………Individual Priority…………….Equilibrium……………..Group Priority…………….

Non-Coercion…Private Corruption……………..Public Corruption… Coercion.

AND GIVEN:

Masculine Strategy: Capitalism requires adversarialism (market competition).

Science, law, economics, war require costly personal responsibility for physicality.

-Versus-

Feminine Strategy: Communism requires submission (absence of competition)

Religion, philosophy, public popularity, politics are cheap and the absence of physical (material) responsibility.

Religiosity is determined by the following factors:

EXPERIENCE

1 – Familial, Social, Institutional indoctrination

2 – Saturation of the environment with ‘falsehoods’ by social construction

ENVIRONMENT

3 – The Utility of Religiosity in the local social-political economic environment.

4 – The Utility of Religion as an organization for political resistance or change.

MINDFULNESS

5 – Mindfulness(self): (a) sedating powerlessness in the world, (b) evading responsibility for the world, ( c) imaging false power in the world.

6 – Mindfulness (others): (a) resisting influence of others, (b) common non-conflict protocol for interacting with others, ( c) method of expressing dominance against others.

EMOTION

7 – Empathic vs Analytic: personality trait : those people who have a higher intuition, want, or neeed, for a conflict-free (relatively) framework with others

8 – Experiential(closed) vs Intellectual(openness): personality trait: those people for whom abiilty, desirability, and status find greater security in regularity than novelty whether mental, emotional, or social.