Digital Faneuil Hall

Your Introduction to ‘System Failure’

The United States was supposedly the first country in history to be founded without an official state religion. But we most definitely have an unofficial one: Money. And these days, our church is in big trouble. Federal debt, mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, and student loans have all exploded to historical highs. Wealth inequality has soared to levels imperiling societal stability. Drug overdoses and suicide rates balloon while birth rates stagnate. Within the innermost sanctums of our temples, high priests are sweating bullets. They know the awful truth; their gods have abandoned us, but they continue to carry out the usual public rituals as if nothing is amiss. Like so many matadors flourishing red capes, the media stalls for time by pitting factions of the citizenry against each other. Meanwhile, an eerie twilight has settled over the land. While everyone can sense that something has gone horribly wrong, it’s very difficult to pinpoint exactly what with our own institutions sandbagging us.

This faith—our faith—replaced the Roman Catholic church during the Renaissance. That was when a scientific revolution began conjuring up new technologies and handing them off to the captains of finance and industry who knew, then as now, how best to profit off of them. For 500 years the Holy Trinity of science, finance, and industry has generated a gravy train of exponential economic growth. Science supplanted the church as our new Oracle of Truth. Unquestioned faith that it would never run out of miracles to capitalize on gave rise to sanctioned pyramid schemes. Each boss has numerous underlings that aspire to be bosses of their own. But that is only possible under conditions where business can keep multiplying itself infinitely. Landlords collect rent from the propertyless. Banks collect interest from the penniless. Every institution founded for five hundred has been pyramid shaped. Global capitalism is a titanic ponzi scheme born of our hubris. Like the church before it, the doctrine of science-based growth is about to face a reckoning born of limitations that have been taken for granted. Economic growth across the developed world has ominously stalled already for a generation as the hour grows late…

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Our institutions have predictably reverted to self-preservation mode as the storm clouds gather. We, the people, are flying solo on this one. Consensus building among the independent-minded is our only hope of cracking the great problem of our time: that infinite growth is the logic of the cancer cell that inevitably kills its host. This Substack newsletter will therefore channel the old spirit of Bostonian patriots airing their grievances over the clinking of frothy mugs. We will summon to our new, digital Faneuil Hall the ghosts of Galileo and of Martin Luther, the Mad Monk of Wittenberg himself. Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ, too, will belly up to the bar next to Sam Adams and John Hancock. Old friends Plato and Dionysus will also swing by for a few belts. After all, no party would be complete without a cameo from the classic god of ecstasy and wine.

You are invited to join the throng, dear reader, by entering your email at the bottom of this page. I’ll send a welcome email your way after you click subscribe. Then come back here to comment on posts, old and new. Your participation will be indispensable as the age turns and the rug of our old paradigm is pulled out from under us. Sign up for System Failure now, and join the merry ghosts of rebellion.