the free market is a cult.

(a good one)

x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1863959636451221554

What is the social contract? Is it an agreement between citizens and government, where responsibilities are exchanged for rights? Or is it the enslavement of working-age men to a welfare state? Are rights good, or something made up by the longhouse to enslave Nietzschean supermen?

The term “contract” means to “drag together.” A contract is a religion, and this is how early Judaism was understood, as a covenant, or contract, with God, having both responsibilities (keep the commandments) and rights (to the promised land). Most early religions offer similar promises: God blesses those who engage in sacrifice and ritual, and curses who neglect their duties.

The term religion may derive from relego, meaning to select, choose, or appoint. But Christian authors derived it from religo, meaning to bind together, as in the ligaments of the body.

The Latin word ligo, as in ligament, may be related to the Germanic word rik or rig, which both mean to bind, from Indo-European rign, reyg. I wonder if this is related to Reich, but Reich seems to be derived from hreg, meaning to straighten, stretch, or protrude. This is where we get the terms regulate, regime, and rake.

But if I am correct, and there is a link between lig, rig, and hreg, then religion, regime, Reich, and regulate all derive from the same source. The point I am driving at is that a law, a social contract, and the act of regulating or binding society together all have the same source at a deep etymological level.

For libertarians, the ideal market is unregulated. Theocracy, in attempting to control the individual, is antithetical to libertarian values. But if property rights come from the social contract, and the social contract is a religion, then libertarianism is itself theocratic. In fact, libertarianism is an expression or extension of radical spiritual principles which first emerged in the popular consciousness in the 11th century.

The Fanatic Origins of Free Markets

The most fundamental form of property is real estate. Calories and resources derive from land. The freedom of the market begins with the freedom of land.

For most of history, land was not free. By this metric, most governments were communist. This communism was not predicated on providing worker’s ownership of the means of production — quite the opposite. Government was feudal, meaning that participation in government required land ownership. But you couldn’t just buy land. Land could only be granted by marriage or ennoblement. If you wanted to become a landowner, you had to either fight in a war and gain the gratitude of an existing landowner, or you had to marry into a land-owning family and inherit land when someone died.

The problem with marrying an existing land-owner is that land-owners were extremely endogamous within their class. It was considered scandalous, sacrilegious, dirty, and disgraceful to marry a commoner. That left war as the easiest path to land-ownership.

Land was emancipated from feudalism in two stages:

1. First, European kings began mass donations of land to monasteries. This occurred mostly in the 11th century with the Gregorian Reform.

2. Second, European kings (starting with Henry VIII) stole all the monastic land and sold it off to merchants in the 16th century.

Source: researchgate.net/figure/Population-and-monastery-growth-and-the-monastery-based-population-proxy-Monastery-trend_fig1_305417655

This two stage process is important. If a medieval king wanted to seize land and sell it off to merchants, he would face the wrath of the nobles. Each individual noble family was jealous and held tightly onto their land. No noble would “break ranks” and sell off the land to a non-noble, lest he incur the shame and infamy of being a class traitor. However, the monastic movement of the 11th century allowed nobles to save face by using a religious justification for donation. Instead of tithing 10% of their income to the church, they could instead donate land to a monastery.

Once the land was in the hands of monks, it was protected by the religious structure of the church. Anyone who wanted to seize this land was threatened with excommunication. But Henry VIII confronted this fear. By the 16th century, Europeans were fed up with the corruption of the Catholic Church. Machiavelli, an Italian, criticized the church as evil and called for a religious revival in emulation of “German piety.”

Protestantism destroyed the religious structure which protected monastic lands. Since monks did not have the means to defend themselves, and the nobility abandoned faith in the church, they had to passively watch as a free market emerged.

Free markets didn’t emerge from increasing intelligence. Free markets emerged from two religious revolutions:

1. First, an increase in religious fanaticism in the 11th century, expressed by the First Crusade of 1096, led to mass donations of land to the church.

2. Second, dissatisfaction with the church led to the church collapsing in northern Europe and the collapse of the feudal system.

In both revolutions, true believers played a large role in changing the structure of the economy. The Gregorian Reform of the 11th century was “woke.” It ranted and raved over the secular appointment of bishops; it denounced the practice of clerical marriage; it condemned the selling of priestly offices. Similarly, the early proto-Protestants were communists. John Ball called for the whole-sale slaughter of all aristocrats and judges, to be replaced by the pious masses. His friend, John Wycliffe, translated the Bible into English, setting a precedent for the King James Bible.

Ball and Wycliffe were both Lollards. Lollards held many beliefs which influenced Protestants:

1. They rejected:

   1. Transubstantiation of the Eucharist;

   2. Baptism as necessary for salvation (faith alone or anabaptist);

   3. Priestly confession. Christians should ask Christ alone for forgiveness;

   4. “Bells and whistles” of the church. They believed that churches should be simple, humble, and bereft of “graven images.”

   5. The honoring of the crucifix: “If the cross of Christ, the nails, spear, and crown of thorns are to be honoured, then why not honour Judas’s lips, if only they could be found?”

   6. The religious orders of women (nuns).

   7. Fasting and feasting days, since Saint Paul said holidays were to be determined by individual choice, not by the church.

   8. Pilgrimage, since Christians should bring the word of God to new lands, not sequestering it in established places.

2. They believed in:

   1. Universal priesthood — that every man was called to be a priest, not just a select few;

   2. Sola scriptura, that only the Bible could be trusted, not inherited traditions;

   3. That the Bible should be translated into a language that everyone could understand, since Jesus did not speak Latin anyway, and since the Pentecost authorized translations.

The declarations of the Lollards were called the Twelve Conclusions, which sounds an awful lot like the “95 Theses” of Martin Luther.¹

John Wycliffe was born in 1328, and arrived in Oxford around age 17, in 1345. The Black Death arrived in his Junior year of college, in 1385. He became a priest in 1351, and began to criticize his fellow clergy as uneducated.²

He became the dean of Balliol College in 1361, and at this point, he began to seriously promulgate Lollard ideas to his students. In 1377, he attracted enough attention to be officially condemned by Pope Gregory XI. Wycliffe's most dangerous idea was communism: he believed that the church should surrender all its property and the clergy should live humbly.

Some noblemen liked the idea of this kind of communism, like John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The Duke was aggravated by the power of the church, which he felt encroached upon the power of the nobility. Gaunt was a powerful protector of Wycliffe and hoped that, through Wycliffe’s reforms, the properties of the church could be seized and redistributed to the nobility. It was only in 1381 that Wycliffe lost Gaunt’s favor over the doctrine of transubstantiation.

What Wycliffe lacked in 1381 was not sufficient fervor or theological strength, but the support of a violent nobility who could protect him from the church. It wasn’t until 1527 that Thomas Cranmer was able to gain the protection of Henry VIII in order to forward the cause of Reformation.

Recap:

Europeans became religiously fanatical in 1096, when thousands of knights laid down their lives to conquer the Holy Land. The Gregorian Reform challenged the authority of the king to appoint Bishops, the practice of clerical marriage, and the sale of priestly offices. In the same way that Bernie Sanders complains about “getting money out of politics,” the Gregorian Reformers wanted to rid the church of secular corruption.

The success of the Gregorian Reform is evident from the fact that, for the first time, the construction of monasteries began to outpace population growth. I have criticized the concept of elite overproduction, but maybe it has some utility here.

During the Black Plague, priests were disproportionately killed off, since they were forced to perform last rites for the dead. This meant two things:

1. Surviving priests had a narcissistic belief in their spiritual superiority;

2. New priests were unqualified and unfit to fill the empty positions, leading to a decrease in trust for institutions.

Wycliffe was one of the survivors, and he had a great disdain for the growing corruption of the church.

One of Wycliffe’s followers, Peter Payne,³ fled England and joined the Hussite Revolution in Bohemia among the Czechs. The Hussites were successful at gaining religious toleration, which opened the pathway to Luther’s reforms.

Estimate of reformation intensity per year.

Here is a representation of “reformation intensity” in Anglo-Germanic culture. The spike in the 11th century represents the mass donations of land to the church, which became excessive and led to a conservative backlash in the Statutes of Mortmain. The 13th century was, in religious terms, fairly stable, but then spiked again during the Thirty Years War. Since that period, race has become the salient issue of sacred dispute, first in the American Civil War, and then again with the Civil Rights Act.

If we take a very broad view of history, these three religious events have had tremendous impacts on markets, economics, and property:

1. The Gregorian Reformers established a communist University System, the first European education system, using about 10% of GDP;

2. The Protestant Reformers abolished the cathedral and monastic schools, and sold these properties off to the bourgeoisie, creating the first “free market capitalist economy”;

3. Racial Revolutionaries like John Brown create the moral precedent for Chief Justice Earl Warren to strike down property rights in the name of anti-racism.

Source: statista.com/statistics/894223/immigrant-numbers-germany/

The logic of Civil Rights reached a peak in 2015 with the European migrant crisis. Since that point, non-white migration has decreased (with Ukrainian migrants in 2022 overwhelming new non-white migrants by a large margin).

In 2023, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action as unconstitutional. This is very similar to the Statutes of Mortmain, which sought to curb the excesses of land donation.

Prediction.

The Reforms of the 11th century were centered on the question of church property, ownership, and purity. Could the priesthood be bought and sold? Could priests marry a woman, or was the church to be married to Christ? Could kings appoint bishops? The fundamental question was whether the church had been corrupted by the material world.

That question resurfaced in the 14th century, when Lollard revolutionaries like Wycliffe and Ball questioned the traditions of the church as extra-biblical, and therefore, idolatrous. They wanted to strip the church of human tradition, and return to the purity established by Christ.

The Lollards presented the nobility with the opportunity to reverse the property gains of the church. When Henry VIII finally began the confiscation of the monasteries, the nobility were soon surprised to find that an entirely new class emerged out of this confiscation: the bourgeois. For you English majors out there, you might recognize Arden of Faversham as a piece reflecting the class-conflict of the period.

In the same way, the racial reforms of the 19th century (abolishing slavery) were followed up in the 20th century with desegregation and affirmative action. Just as the Lollards were proto-Protestants, John Brown was proto-Woke.

The next religious drama in store is centered on elite immigration and genetic engineering. As Asian Americans come to dominate American politics, the Judeo-Christian ecumenical backdrop of American morality will lose its justification. The result is a desperate latching onto conspiracy theories, cults, and strongmen (like Qanon and Trump).

On the other hand, liberals will confront the science of genetics. Just as Galileo, Copernicus, Brahe, and Darwin assailed the church with discoveries which violated Christian dogma, science will increasingly encroach on the tabula rasa morality of the Christian-Socratic tradition.

Sasha Gusev is currently grappling with things as they are, throwing out numbers like “4%” for the heritability of educational attainment. Assuming Gusev is correct in these low-balls, that doesn’t dismiss the danger of genetic experimentation. Heritability will only increase as bureaucratic uniformity increases, and as parents have greater tools at their disposal for influencing genetic outcomes. Even if racial differences can be dismissed as unscientific, the threat of genetic sovereignty, the ability to alter the genetic future of one’s lineage, presents a moral threat and challenge to the Liberal-Socratic paradigm.

I use phrases like “Christian-Socratic” and “Liberal-Socratic” to underscore the fact that these egalitarian ideologies, Christianity and Liberalism, have covered up the question of nature at the heart of Socratic philosophy. What is human nature? Are some humans superior to others, by birth? Is there such a thing as a natural hierarchy, or a natural caste system? In asking these questions, Socratic tradition undermined Athenian Democracy.

Rather than defeating or answering these questions, they were covered up and sublimated by the totalizing force of Christianity. With the decay of Christianity in the 16th century, Liberalism picked up the slack and adopted a new mask with which to disguise or avert the Socratic Question. But the moment is approaching when science, the daughter of the pre-Socratics, will bring this question to a head, and reveal the crisis of Socratic Civilization.

Genetic Property.

Initially, I stated that land is the most fundamental form of property. This is not true: the most fundamental form of property is genetics. Land is the software, while genetics is the hardware.

If we assume that all human beings have had exactly equal genetics for the last 40,000 years, this truth remains. Perhaps humans got “lucky” (or unlucky, depending on your perspective): no genetic differences have existed for all of human existence. But once genetic differences arise (even very small ones), genetic property becomes the foundation of all other forms of property, including land.

Proof by inversion:

Imagine there was a pollutant which destroyed genetic integrity. For the sake of convenience, imagine this is a pollutant which enters the air due to an industrial process. It damages the human genome, producing cancer and reproductive harm. Those affected cannot have children.

Once the truth of this matter is discovered, the assailant, the company producing this pollutant, will be found guilty of the greatest property crime imaginable: genetic assault. A bloody nose will dry; a broken bone can be mended; even a heart can be replaced. But once genetic code is damaged, no amount of wealth can heal the wound.

That is, unless and until genetic therapies are produced which can, in fact, heal genetic damage. Genetic therapies would open the door to not just healing existing wounds caused by pollutants, but to improving upon natural imperfections.

Christians maintain that the mind is not a product of the brain, but a gift from God. It is not possible to improve upon God’s creation with genetic science. Any attempt to do so is the equivalent of rebuilding the tower of Babel.

Cognitive Idealism and Genetic Fidelity

In an idealist view, minds exist independent of brains. The brain is simply a channeling device, like a radio. The brain is a receiver, a transmitter, a decoder, and a speaker. But it is possible to improve cognition by altering the brain, even if the mind is not a product of the brain.

Radios do not create music: they receive radio-waves, interpret them, and produce sound. Music is created by musicians, and the music which plays on the radio is a mere transmission. In the same way, it is possible that human minds are contained within some kind of Platonic realm, and that the brain is a mere “radio” which incarnates the mind (or soul) in the physical realm.

If this is the case, then improving human genetics cannot change the nature of the mind, which is outside of the material realm. However, although a radio cannot write a better song, it can produce a sharper sound, a more authentic or high fidelity sound. In the same way, it may not be possible to improve the mind by material means, but it is possible to engineer a more high fidelity brain. In this view, whatever noise or static exists can be reduced through genetic engineering.

Another metaphor is that of light passing through dirty water. As the water is purified, the original light shines through more and more. Or in the case of glass, as the glass is made clean, the light shines brighter. The water or glass is a medium of transmission, and not the original source of the light. But as the medium of transmission is refined, the source will be made clearer. In the same way, even an idealist can admit that genetic engineering will improve the apparent (received) quality of the human mind.

The human ability to extract value from land is a product of mental ability, and mental ability is a product of genetic property.

Conclusion.

For most of human history, there was no such thing as a free market. Property was transferred as a result of marriage or awarded in warfare. It was only the religious revolution of the 11th century, and its completion in the 16th century, that first allowed for humans to freely buy and sell property. In this sense, the free market is the result of fanatical religious revolutions. It is not the default state of humanity, but a particular theocratic form developed by puritanical priests and ideological monks.

If we understand secular atheism in the Enlightenment to be a product of this process of spiritual liberation, then we come to the ironic conclusion that secular atheism is also the result of religious extremism. Nietzsche has remarked: atheism has maintained the moral core of Christianity, the Will to Truth, while dispensing with the limiting bounds of mythology.

Free market secular atheism is the most radical, revolutionary, and trans-human ideology of all time. Dugin would call it “anti-human,” but it is no more anti-human than the butterfly is “anti-caterpillar.”

When libertarians understand the spiritual roots of their ideas, they can fully appreciate the arch of history and anticipate the moral revolution on the horizon. The most fundamental form of property is not land, but genetic property.

Communists, feudalists, and theocrats want to restrict human development. Such restrictions are the historical norm. Land was not free until 500 years ago, which is less than 5% of the span of human civilization. The next frontier is the freedom of genetic property. This is the battle to be fought.

There is always a threat that we could be sent back to stone ages by reactionary ideologies. We should not underestimate the spiritual power of Duginism and its allies. It is entirely possible that if the Chinese win, they will restrict the freedom of land and return humanity to the cozy homeostasis sought by traditionalists. Populism, nationalism, and sectarianism will win if not forcefully opposed.

Assume that all of these forces can be contained, and things continue as they are. This is not enough.

Each organism grows, or it dies. Faustian civilization is no different. We need new vistas to conquer, new lands to explore, new adventures, new quests, and new horizons. If we do not pursue free genetic markets to the utmost, Faustian civilization will hit a wall, shrivel up, and die. This is a spiritual quest at the deepest level. We are on a mission. This mission cannot be captured by the individual Will, but is transcendent and spans centuries.

tl;dr

If you have to choose between a 15% tax hike and restrictions on embryo selection, choose higher taxes.

1. Also see: “Remonstrance against Romish corruptions in the Church: addressed to the people and parliament of England in 1395.”

2. Thomas Murray, in his biography of Wycliffe, claims that “Some even of the dignified clergy had never read the Bible... And they were as totally devoid of erudition and secular knowledge.” (page 131)

https://books.google.com/books?id=FsIEAAAAYAAJ

3. Any relation to Thomas Paine?