The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

by Eugene McCarraher

In Network (1976), Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet’s film satirizing the television industry, Arthur Jensen, the chairman of a communications conglomerate, demonstrates that Dexter’s winged demon has already enveloped the globe. Alarmed by Howard Beale—a newscaster whose populist harangues have made him “the mad prophet of the airwaves”—Jensen invites him to a meeting in “Valhalla,” the dimly-lit corporate boardroom. Roaring to Beale that he has “meddled with the primal forces of nature,” Jensen proceeds to explain the universe:4 There are no nations, there are no peoples … there is only one holistic system of Systems … one interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multinational dominion of Dollars.… It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. The pecuniary cosmology of capital has never received a more audacious exposition, and it allows Jensen to acknowledge some stark but intractable truths about the state of the world: the delusion of democratic promise, the open secret of corporate plutocracy, the supersession of all cultural and political limits on the power and authority of money. America itself is a front for the consortium whose mercantile communion embraces the entire planet.