The notes treat modernity as a continuous Renaissance–Enlightenment project whose material wealth produced two divergent offspring: a "Faustian" innovator culture that tames nature for ordered prosperity, and a "bourgeois" influencer culture that captures rents through brands, credentials, and regulatory arbitrage. Consumerism, luxury branding, and corporatism are framed as modern paganism — sacrifices to mascot-gods that hollow citizens into customers. AI and crypto are positioned as the legitimate "American cathedrals" alongside Apollo and Manhattan, but AI also threatens to become "Taqleed": frozen received knowledge that closes the gates of Ijtihad. The e/acc–degrowth quarrel is read as a Mu'tazilite / Ash'arite reprise. Throughout, the diagnosis is metaphysical: materialism produces decadence, and only a recovered logos restores meaning.
Cathedrals old and new
The American cathedrals are coordinated technology projects (raw/keep/new-cathedral.md, raw/keep/whiteness-as-national-character.md):
- The Manhattan Project
- Apollo / the moon landing
- AI
- Crypto
"The American cathedrals are massively complicated technology projects like the moon landing and the Manhattan Project… What are the Cathedrals in progress today: AI, Crypto." —
raw/keep/new-cathedral.md
Built by the "Protestant Technology Monk / Priest" — a married, community-embedded scientific monk who pursues a coordinated civilizational project. (american-religion)
The contrast: the bureaucratic "current cathedral" — the regulatory-NGO-financial complex that crushes innovation and prosperity. The new cathedral and the current cathedral are direct rivals; their economic and cultural incentives point opposite directions.
Luxury, mammonism, consumerism: the American evil
The structural diagnosis (raw/keep/new-cathedral.md, raw/keep/seven-deadly-sins-of-americanism-and-their-opposite-virtues.md):
"Luxury brands combine the evil of idolatry and blasphemy into a uniquely American evil. American Luxury is idolatrous worship of comfortable leisure. American brands are blasphemous redefinitions of reality into false ideas of whatever that brand represents." —
raw/keep/new-cathedral.md
Luxury is Marxist fusion (high-culture-and-aesthetics): an oppressed object elevated by status purchase, so the buyer is elevated by the buying. The Marxist analytic move skinned in commerce.
The seven deadly sins of Americanism, with their opposing virtues:
| Sin | Form | Virtue |
|---|---|---|
| Blasphemy | Ideologies as truth | Reality |
| Idolatry | Brand-worship | Worship of God |
| Mammonism | Luxury without effort | Skill yielding experience |
| Materialism | Brand / credential as substance | Real knowledge |
| Degeneracy | Hyper-palatable consumption | Health |
| Pornography | Pop culture as emotion-trigger | Beauty that enlightens |
| Consumerism | Outsourcing competence | Experience over things |
Corporatism as modern paganism
The frame (raw/keep/corporatism-is-modern-paganism.md, raw/keep/vitruvius-is-disney.md):
"Pagan religions reject any notion of humans being made in the image of the divine but instead create divine representation of identities and ideas that pagans called gods and today we call brands… The trip to Disney World is a kind of pagan worship ritual where we sacrifice money and time to venerate the mouse god." —
raw/keep/corporatism-is-modern-paganism.md
Brands replace gods. Citizens become customers. Disneyland is the ritual site. The state itself becomes a "corporate roach motel" — easy to enter, designed to extract maximum customer-life-value before exit.
Vitruvius is Disney: a Roman brand manager imposing imperial standards. Both face the Tiffany problem — how to keep a brand from devolving into trinkets for the masses. Roman cultural decline is read as brand dilution of Vitruvian standards once leisure-luxury displaces talent-gated hierarchy. (high-culture-and-aesthetics)
Renaissance to Enlightenment: innovators vs. influencers
The structural read (raw/keep/the-transition-from-metaphysical-to-material-order-renaissance-enlightenment-and.md, raw/keep/the-transition-from-metaphysical-to-material-order-renaissance-enlightenment-and-2.md, raw/keep/materialism-as-driver-of-revolution-innovators-vs-influencers.md):
- The Enlightenment is the fulfillment of the Renaissance, not its successor.
- The "counter-Enlightenment" is the chain of revolutions (Peasants' War through the Bolsheviks) that aborted ordered liberty.
- Modernity produces an Innovator vs. Influencer split:
| Type | Stance | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Innovator | Tames nature, builds, takes risk | Newton (protected), Musk (harassed) |
| Influencer | Captures rent through credentials, brand, regulatory arbitrage | Galileo (proto), Ackman |
- Newton was protected; Musk is the contemporary innovator harassed by an influencer-class regime.
- Galileo is the prototype influencer — the "scientist" who became famous through dramatic conflict with the Church rather than through scientific breakthroughs.
The bourgeoisie that purchases status via state-backed credentials is the obstacle to ordered liberty.
The political consequence: a regime that taxes innovators to subsidize influencers. The corrective is to destroy the credential-rent economy (education-and-formation) without destroying the actual innovation engine.
e/acc vs. degrowth as Mu'tazilite / Ash'arite reprise
The historical pattern repeats (raw/keep/e-acc-vs-degrowth.md, islam):
- Mu'tazilite (12th-century Islamic) — pro-innovation, ijtihad, reason.
- Ash'arite (12th-century Islamic) — pro-stasis, taqleed, divine voluntarism.
- e/acc — effective accelerationism; Mu'tazilite descendant.
- Degrowth — climate-environmental decel; Ash'arite descendant.
The Ash'arites won in 12th-century Islam and the Gates of Ijtihad closed; the civilizational cost was the end of the Islamic golden age. The contemporary e/acc / degrowth quarrel will determine whether the West repeats the mistake.
AI as Taqleed
The contemporary stakes (raw/keep/tyranny-and-taqleed.md):
"Artificial intelligence is a kind of modern Taqleed where we create corpus of receive knowledge and then build systems around that knowledge. This process is the closing of the gates of Ijtihad of American Islam." —
raw/keep/tyranny-and-taqleed.md
AI freezes a corpus of received knowledge and enforces it as the operational ground truth. When fused with administrative power, it produces "tyranny and Taqleed" — orthodoxy at civilizational scale. The proposed counter: the Catholic Church should build a magisterium-grounded counter-AI — a logos machine running on transformer architecture, restrained by ecclesial tradition rather than by training-data orthodoxy. (catholicity, islam)
A complementary read (raw/keep/ai-dev-and-the-future-of-corporations.md): AI gives a single innovator-leader the leverage of hundreds of subordinates, recasting the corporation as investment-firm structure with three functional roles (innovator, agent, bureaucrat) compressed onto far fewer humans. The future of corporate form is therefore both more innovator-centric and more easily captured by surveillance.
Surveillance economics
The diagnosis (raw/keep/surveillance-not-productivity.md, money-debt-finance):
"There's been a profound deceleration of technological progress because it has all been in technologies that do not produce surplus value but only facilitate the extractions of rent by means of surveillance & accounting." —
raw/keep/surveillance-not-productivity.md
Western technological investment has shifted from surplus-value-producing industry to surveillance and accounting — credit-scoring, content moderation, ad-targeting, compliance management. China industrialized while the West built dashboards. General AI is read as the hypostatic object of the ultimate surveillance / accounting machine — the fully realized form of the technology the West actually invested in.
Memetics as satanic chaos
The cultural-semantic mechanism (raw/keep/memetics-are-satanic.md):
"Memes are the creation of Satan because they energize his minions. It centers the fight on flesh and blood or materialism. The democratization of memetics is the introduction of satanic, or chaotic, forces into the logos." —
raw/keep/memetics-are-satanic.md
Democratized definition-making, divorced from a truth-seeking institution, introduces infinite volatility into the logos. Merchants reorient institutions toward profit, replacing truth with brands. (heresies-and-ideology-as-religion)
Faustian heroism vs. transhumanism
The metaphysical contrast (raw/keep/trans-humanist-vs-faustian-heroism.md, raw/keep/conservatives.md, raw/keep/lessons-of-the-iliad.md, raw/keep/art-gallery.md):
- Faustian heroism — innovation tempered by civic virtue; the trader-spirit pursuing ordered prosperity through risk.
- Transhumanism — the trader spirit pursuing happiness via abstract exchange; price-as-meaning; matter as substrate to be re-engineered.
"The Iliad is Faustian man, the social contract is creationism." —
raw/keep/conservatives.md
Maimonides outside time vs. Spinoza in matter. The first preserves the metaphysical frame; the second collapses everything into materialism. Capitalism and Marxism share the same materialist metaphysics; both reduce the human to an economic vessel (Evola). (raw/keep/capitalism.md)
"Modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical… [a] world the center of which is constituted of technology, science, production, productivity, and consumption." — Evola, in
raw/keep/capitalism.md
The four corners of modernism
A taxonomy (raw/keep/four-corners-of-modermism.md):
| Corner | Form |
|---|---|
| Secular right | Medici-style innovation; private patronage of high culture |
| Religious right | Christian Zionist / Latin Mass tradlarp |
| Secular left | Marxism-until-money-runs-out |
| Religious left | Mother-Theresa palliative care |
Most regimes claim one corner and quietly draw on the other three. The author's preferred constructive direction is secular-right + religious-right hybrid — Medici palazzo plus Latin Mass — without the tradlarp pose.
Plastic grace
A specific cultural-engineering critique (raw/keep/satan-is-plastic-grace.md):
- Plastic grace — manufactured nationalist identity (American Dream, Britishness as state product).
- Evolved ethno-local identity — emerged over centuries from place, language, ritual.
- Positive law as gardening, not manufacturing — law tends what is already there, doesn't create it ex nihilo.
Plastic grace is the modern administrative state's preferred medium: build identity through curriculum, media, naturalization ceremonies. It is fragile because it lacks the depth of evolved identity, and it requires constant administrative input to maintain.
Standing problems and gaps
- Pro-innovation vs. anti-corporate. AI / crypto celebrated as cathedrals; corporations argued to be incapable of innovation (
raw/keep/memetics-are-satanic.md,raw/keep/surveillance-not-productivity.md). Resolution: distinguish magisterial-cathedral AI from rent-extracting corporate AI. - e/acc as American gospel vs. Mu'tazilite reprise. Specifically American or recurrent civilizational pattern? Both readings coexist.
- Faustian frame is invoked but not developed. Spengler is implied without citation. An article-level gap.
- Renaissance praised, Renaissance also blamed. The article holds: Renaissance produced both Medici hierarchies AND the bourgeois influencer pathology.
- Corporatism dual-coded. First condemned (
raw/keep/corporatism-is-modern-paganism.md), then "America as corporation under Trump" proposed. The author oscillates. - AI's epistemic effect. Both empowering single innovators (
raw/keep/ai-dev-and-the-future-of-corporations.md) and freezing knowledge / foreclosing ijtihad (raw/keep/tyranny-and-taqleed.md). The ambivalence is the point. - Gap on Spengler-by-name. Faustian / innovator language is implicit Spengler; no direct quote.
- Gap on transhumanism specifics.
raw/keep/trans-humanist-vs-faustian-heroism.mdis brief.
Related
- american-religion — American Cathedrals (Manhattan, Apollo, AI, crypto); Protestant Technology Monk; ALGO managerial Protestantism.
- catholicity — magisterial counter-AI; logos machine; the metaphysical frame modernity discards.
- islam — Gates of Ijtihad; Mu'tazilite / Ash'arite as e/acc / degrowth ancestor; AI as taqleed.
- heresies-and-ideology-as-religion — luxury / mammonism / consumerism as theological deformations; capitalism-as-Marxism (Evola); memetics-as-satanic.
- high-culture-and-aesthetics — Vitruvius-as-Disney; luxury as Marxist fusion; Renaissance palazzo.
- money-debt-finance — surveillance economy as economic form; "simulated capitalism."
- political-philosophy — Lincoln-as-Lenin / FDR-as-Stalin; the New Conservative answer to managerial decadence.
- education-and-formation — credential rent vs. innovation; Office of the Provost.
Sources
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