The Rite of the Broken Table, where the communal feast fractures into private altars and ledgered offerings

 

From Communion to Competition

I don't know where Yeshua got his economic beliefs, but they're African. Things can get so bad in an Epochal Crisis that a moral inversion can result. Max Weber didn't use the word "heresy" for the Protestant Reformation, but evangelical hypocrisy and sadism can be traced to it.

I'm trying to critique the tension between American business values and the emotional demands of family life. This means field-stripping the middle-class yada-yada. (When it's p'tit-boo, Jesus suddenly looks like a very fierce Japanese warrior. Robocop 3 rendered homage via Otomo.)

• The marketplace rewards assertiveness, competition, and self-interest.

• Family life, by contrast, thrives on emotional generosity and mutual sacrifice.

• These “bankruptcy qualities”—yieldingness, altruism, tenderness—are economically disadvantageous but morally essential.

This insight dramatizes a cultural paradox: the very traits that sustain intimate relationships are often punished in a profit-driven society. This formulation turns moral virtues into liabilities, highlighting how capitalism can distort human priorities.

Now add consumerism, which America did with the same dedication that it had retooled industry for WW II. The problem had suddenly become what to do with this enormous industrial capacity. This is a further twist to the JC ethic. I see consumerism not as a natural evolution, but as a strategic repurposing of wartime machinery—a civilizational redirection of industrial firepower toward domestic desire.

🔧 From Arsenal to Appliance: The Postwar Pivot

• Industrial Overcapacity: By 1945, American factories had been scaled to produce tanks, planes, and munitions at unprecedented levels. The question loomed: what now?

• Consumerism as Solution: Riesman noted that consumerism became the answer—a way to absorb this massive productive force by turning it toward household goods, cars, and entertainment.

• Emotional Engineering: Advertising, gender roles, and media were recalibrated to generate demand. Women were urged to leave the factories and become idealized consumers of domestic technology.

🌀 Riesman’s Institutional Twist

• The sacrificial forge of war becomes the altar of abundance.

• The yielding virtues of family life are commodified, packaged, and sold back to the public.

• The moral inversion is masked by the glitter of postwar prosperity.

• The inner conflict is palliated by anti-Communism: consumerism is patriotic. Later it was marshaled against Islamic terrorism.

• The Big Chill did not repurpose the forge. Instead it outsourced the industrial muscle required to meet the challenge of living on our energy income rather than on our energy capital. The touted wealth-creation is not real but rentier.

The intellectual confusion is nearly impenetrable.

Like ancient Rome's absentee landowners of the huge slave-worked plantations, shareholders are divorced from the realities of production. They have perverted the investment process itself. As I keep saying, investment is as important as innovation.

In 1997, Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, a major American aerospace manufacturer and defense contractor. Although officially a merger, Boeing was the dominant partner and retained its name, headquarters, and leadership structure.

Interestingly, some analysts argue that McDonnell Douglas’s corporate culture subtly influenced Boeing post-merger, especially in its approach to management and cost-cutting—an echo of Veblen’s critique of pecuniary logic overtaking technical precision. What makes this worse is McDonnel Douglas's parasitic reliance on defense contracts pre-merger. It's spoiled rotten.

Engineers, in contrast, are not trying to cheat or get by cheap—they’re trying to make things work, often in spite of business constraints. They're more Lutheran than Calvinistic. They're Spartan when it comes to savings, generous when it comes to investment. This Guild of Precision verges on Christian communism. Its ethic is functional, not pecuniary.

Veblen saw engineers as potential revolutionaries—a class that could disrupt the price system by prioritizing production over profit.

Well, Yeshua WAS an engineer to start with.