Christ, it seems, merely died

The strange character of a social system (that is, one of the management and governance of persons, in the interest of whatever social forces, like capital) that does not actually want people to be happy, but only contented, even if stupifyingly, in an unhappiness that they are afraid to even recognize, let alone try to change.

This is the state that people are subtly encouraged to adopt in institutions of emotional correction for exhibiting one of the psychological abnormalities that any honest observer would admit are attributable to the majority of people today, and it is the only possible attitude 'proper to' the mind-numbingly and exhaustingly unpleasant recorded announcements to which many companies now routinely submit members of the public who must contact them by telephone. 

At best, this system succeeds as well as it does only by promising as close as possible to a majority of its necessarily servile public the prospect of participating in all of the unpleasantness of managing that other majority which is almost everyone when and if they are on its receiving end. 

But dividing the population into the supposedly antithetical groups of the 'privileged' and the 'oppressed' is of little help since it only provides does of resentment which can be redistributed without changing anything. And in this way, those charged with enforcing law, norm, and above all mere power, the enforcement of force, are handed alibis so that cheap anger can be directed in ways that help oil the very same machinery. 

This is a society that runs on cynicism. Cynicism is always circular, and it is conservative. That is why there are so many bullies, for they are inevitably conservative. "Hey, look, there's someone who doesn't understand that the world is one of power and obedience and people seeking their own advantage,"-- even to the point where God and everything divine is reconfigured in just such terms, the God who is in effect little more than a master of slaves, and remains so even when some particular liberations are recognized and codified now that they have been replaced by something more substantial, enduring, solid, and deserving its own service of cynical sycophants and power suckers. "Ha ha, what fools, we'll show them, won't we! They too will die, while we who worship the machinery of power can at least identify with something immortal in its indifference." Christ, it seems, merely died.