When Tailgunner Joe Replaced That Darn Pope

If we treat the WASP ethic as a kind of civilizational operating system, then consumerism could be seen as a symbolic overwrite: replacing the disciplined stewardship of prudence and thrift with the performative abundance of desire and display.

Oh mama I gotsta riff on this a bit:

🏛️ The WASP Ethic as a Symbolic Framework

Historically, the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) ethic emphasized:

• Industriousness: Work as moral duty

• Self-restraint: Avoidance of excess

• Prudence: Careful judgment, long-term thinking

• Thrift: Frugality, resource conservation

These traits were tied to a Protestant cosmology of deferred gratification, moral clarity, and stewardship—what Max Weber called the “spirit of capitalism.”

🛍️ Consumerism as Ritual Inversion

Consumerism doesn’t just ignore prudence and thrift—it dramatizes their negation:

• Prudence becomes impulsivity: The future is collapsed into the now; judgment is outsourced to trends and algorithms.

• Thrift becomes excess: Accumulation is no longer a sin but a virtue; waste signals wealth.

In this light, consumerism enacts a kind of mythic inversion—a ceremonial reversal of the old moral code. It’s not just economic behavior, but a symbolic rite: the sacrificial burning of restraint to summon the gods of novelty, status, and dopamine.

🧠 Epistemic Implications

This shift also reconfigures how we know and value:

• Prudence once required deliberation, memory, and foresight.

• Consumerism privileges immediacy, spectacle, and emotional resonance.

So if the WASP ethic was a kind of epistemic asceticism, consumerism is epistemic hedonism—a reality grid where the self is curated, not cultivated.

Now for my inimitably provocative reframing, almost like peeling back the Reformation’s theological veil to reveal a deeper economic and symbolic drama. While the Reformation is often cast as a rupture with feudal religiosity, my lens suggests it may have also been a counter-movement against the opulent, cosmopolitan mercantilism of the Italian city-states. Capitalism took off in Northern Italy (just outside the Indo-Saracentic Zone before it leaped the Atlantic) and how did this happen in spite of the Catholic doctrine of the Golden Mean and the Fair Price? This is like asking how ancient Greco-Roman slave-owners had handled the tension between them and their forced labor, or Americans handled the tension between YT and their former slaves. Which is to say, by dissociation. Well, let's check out these earlier Axes Powers:

🏰 Axis One: Reformation vs. Feudalism

• Traditional View: The Reformation is seen as a revolt against the hierarchical, land-based power of the Catholic Church, which mirrored feudal structures—lords, vassals, and spiritual serfs.

• Epistemic Shift: Luther’s emphasis on sola scriptura and individual conscience undermined the priestly monopoly on truth, fracturing the feudal epistemology of divine intercession.

• Political Fallout: German princes used Protestantism to assert sovereignty against both the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor—dismantling feudal cohesion.

🏛️ Axis Two: Reformation vs. Mercantile Decadence

• Italian Context: Northern Italy—Venice, Genoa, Florence—was a nexus of banking, trade, and Renaissance humanism. The Church itself was deeply entangled in this world, with indulgences functioning like spiritual derivatives.

• Moral Revulsion: Reformers like Savonarola (a kind of proto-Luther in Florence) denounced the Church’s opulence and the commodification of salvation. His bonfire of the vanities was a symbolic purge of mercantile excess.

• Luther’s Grievance: The sale of indulgences—driven by Rome’s need to fund architectural grandeur—was a flashpoint. Luther’s 95 Theses were not just theological; they were a protest against spiritual commodification.

🧭 Symbolic Reading: A Revolt Against the Venetian Reality Grid?

If we treat Venice and Genoa as archetypes of early capitalist cosmopolitanism—where wealth, art, and power fused into a seductive spectacle—then the Reformation becomes a kind of epistemic austerity movement. It sought to:

• Re-anchor truth in scripture, not spectacle.

• Reclaim moral agency from financialized grace.

• Reassert spiritual simplicity against Renaissance complexity.

In this light, the Reformation wasn’t just anti-feudal—it was anti-Baroque, anti-simulacra, anti-Venetian. A kind of Odin purification rite against Mediterranean  excess. It didn't hurt that it marked the transition from city-state to nation-state when it leapt over the Alps.

What DID hurt was the death toll in the religious wars that changed the West's relationship to money from the Golden Mean and the Fair Price to All the Market Can Bear.

How did the West handle the transition from wartime rationing to the post-war boom? Make consumption patriotic. This is what HUAC did. Joe McCarthy was a true psychopath with no other agenda than himself. But the Red Scare thread was there to be pulled...

The tension persists.