The great political sin

Idolatry is a specifically political evil. In recent history, its two most prominent forms have been capitalist marketing and ideological utopianism. In this way, liberal capitalism and "Communism" were forms of the same disorder. What all idolatry does is link some idea or image to a promise of happiness that it cannot possibly sustain. This leads people to invest energy in possibilities that can only disappoint them, even if some people, perhaps cynically, benefit. In fact, cynicism and idealism often go together for the simple reason that these are different forms of investment in false promises. The two dominant institutional forms of the modern world, commodity exchange and bureaucracy, which excels in solving problems on paper, largely by articulating them, and in this operates its own forms of advertising, both have this liability built into them. The trouble is, it's not easy to see how large national societies with diverse economies can be managed otherwise.

There is a benefit of these things, however, and it is idolatry's opposite: thinking. Thinking consists of two principal elements: reason and imagination. The opposite of thinking is stupidity. Stupidity is wrongly thought innate; the fact is, it is usually willed and learned. People can unlearn it. The trouble that bedevils thinking everywhere is that people like to have things to believe in, and they especially like to believe the great lie. The great lie is that the world and its governance are essentially good, as we are, and good because innocent. Innocence has its own form of good, it is the good untainted by evil, which is to say suffering, mortality, and the fear of them and what results when that fear is entertained as it so often is, by people of cowardice. The truer form of good passes through recognition of evils. While it is more satisfying, it can be rare, because it is more difficult. Thinking is difficult, while believing is not. The opposite of merely believing is not knowing. Knowing does not require work but only accumulation and consumption. It is a kind of consumption. Thinking is not a consumer activity, though it can benefit from such things, but a kind of work. Thinking is rare. Religions are not helping the world much, and their slow decline in favor of art and thinking in various fields is the most hopeful trend in the modern world.

This is insufficiently noticed. Art is the product of alienation. Alienation causes people not only to suffer boredom and loneliness, and flee these things through gregarious and information-saturated escapisms, but also, sometimes, to think. If the popular arts (like film, television, and pop music) are considered, today’s world is one in which there are more artists and many more people who are audiences of art, in much more of their time, than ever before. The hope is not that all that is false will disappear or even be recognized and as such refused, but that among all the bavardage there will also be more thinking. In America - and this should trouble us - this is happening without a very good educational system. As a result, most people doing business in America do so very deficiently when it comes to the aspect of thinking that involves reason. That has become a dirty word, and most people don’t know what it means anymore, and they also don’t care. That the arts still flourish is testament to the power of the imagination.