Towards a critique of capitalist reason

There is a moral image of world order that was long sustained by thinking in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is a form of the management of persons that operates by way of intuitive recognition of presumed moral error. This recognition is wielded deliberately through the application of sanctions to reward and punish behavior that is consensual or deviant. The form of thinking that corresponds to this is essentially practical and anti-theoretical, as well as anti-democratic. Its intuitive character grounds the notion of common sense. What is "true" because it corresponds to the common sense is obviously true and cannot be questioned. The one who questions the common sense appears as a deviant and is immediately called out or negatively sanctioned personally. This practical moral ideology becomes part of that of capitalism and the capitalist state. Everything then is proven true or false by its success or failure. What fails is automatically false, and failure is sanctioned. The market itself can often be relied on to perform this working of sanctioning. This is how the moderate center is right-wing. All this is built into the usual way of operating of capitalist society, particularly in America, whose culture is historically blind to most forms of social criticism that are not personal and psychological. Of course, psychological and moral criticism will only reinforce this pervasive sanctioning.

The media world that fits this is one of morality without thinking. There is right and wrong action, like everyone is on a team and they must play by the rules, and if you're called out, you're out. Shock the monkey, or silence those with the wrong opinions, maybe by just shutting them off with a central switch. Thought is reduced to obedience. The most typical religious form of this, in America, is the protestantism of worship as obedience to the Boss of It All who made things to be the way they are (and stay that way) and wrote the book of true statements, which are all commands.

The Calvinist model gives an economic interpretation to the Gospel Jesus’s saying, to them who have, more will accrue, and to those who have not, more will be taken; thus is moral justified the systemic orchestration of economic success and failure. It is Nietzsche who most clearly saw the moral problems of modern capitalism. Defenders of the Judeo-Christian order and way of thinking accuse Nietzscheans of antisemitism, but of course in doing this they are just applying sanctions to prohibit thought that they want forbidden. As the late Jewish philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel pointed out, Nietzsche, who hated Christianity, opposed antisemitism and saw modern Jewish culture as playing a key role in developing a revitalized European culture, something that began to happen massively in the German-Jewish world in the generation after Nietzsche's death, before this was all destroyed locally, and displaced to other environs, by the rise of the Third Reich.