The Enchantments of Mammon Quotes

“We will not be saved by our money, our weapons, or our technological virtuosity; we might be rescued by the joyful and unprofitable pursuits of love, beauty, and contemplation”
― Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

“Under capitalism, money occupies the ontological throne from which God has been evicted.”
― Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

“Whether true or errant, our loves make us what we are; so if we are what we desire, history is the convoluted record of our loves in all their magnificent and ignoble forms.”
― Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

“Walter Benjamin suggested almost a century ago that capitalism is a religion as well, a “cult” with its own ontology, morals, and ritual practices whose “spirit … speaks from the ornamentation of banknotes.”6 I take this as a point of departure and argue that capitalism is a form of enchantment—perhaps better, a misenchantment, a parody or perversion of our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world. Its animating spirit is money. Its theology, philosophy, and cosmology have been otherwise known as “economics.” Its sacramentals consist of fetishized commodities and technologies—the material culture of production and consumption. Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism. Its clerisy is a corporate intelligentsia of economists, executives, managers, and business writers, a stratum akin to Aztec priests, medieval scholastics, and Chinese mandarins. Its iconography consists of advertising, public relations, marketing, and product design. Its beatific vision of eschatological destiny is the global imperium of capital, a heavenly city of business with incessantly expanding production, trade, and consumption. And its gospel has been that of “Mammonism,” the attribution of ontological power to money and of existential sublimity to its possessors.”
― Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

“Thus, Campbell implies, modern capitalism rests on a metaphysical fault line: a profane, inanimate external world given over to calculation and control, and a hedonistic, “enchanted” internal realm of daydream, fantasy, and romance. In a world increasingly understood in terms of Newtonian physics and mechanism, what John Brewer has dubbed “the”
― Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

“As Henry Miller realized, “the earth is a Paradise. We don’t have to make it a Paradise—it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it.”23”
― Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity