Library Article: Business, State, and Church
Church, State, and Market
A library examination
In all of human history, there have been certain power
organizations that have helped restrain or control society. Three very
important ones are the State, the Church, and the Private sector.
Interestingly, the separation of these three things only
occurred a long time later. The concept of a transcendent God meant that
Spiritual authority could not be vested in a ruler, except if it came directly
from God. The separation of the private sector came later.
The progression is fascinating. Let us examine it:
1.
Combined sectors.
Originally, each king was a “god-king,” and they controlled their city’s
economies, spiritual life, and pretty much everything else. They were the sons
of the gods, and all things belonged to them.
2.
God’s system for Israel
instituted private property. It also made the Priests and the Kings separate,
and often restraining to each other.
3.
Possibility: Solomon’s
wisdom may have spread this system to some extent.
4.
Fast forward to the
medieval ages. Interestingly, Divine Right of Kings was tied to the Feudal
Powers of Kings. This meant that a king was a landowner as well as a
divinely appointed ruler as well as a landowner as well as the
only protector of the people against the Islamic Threat. Furthermore, the
people were laymen, slaves, and subjects, all at once. Some progress was done,
though, with the Pope being a restraining force. Also, landowners were separate
from the Kings, having some restraint.
5.
Martin Luther started the
separation of Church and State, with the political power of the Church being
weakened.
6.
The spiritual power of the
Government was weakened in England for a long period of time. This included the
reign of Henry VII, Bloody Mary, and Queen Elizabeth. Eventually, this
culminated in the American Revolution, in which the Divine Right of Kings was
dismantled comprehensively.
7.
Separation of economy and
government was partially helped by the rise of the Middle Class, who were
private property owners, but not rulers.
Interestingly, with the onset of modernism, certain other
ideologies came in, with this balance of Church, State, and Business suddenly
being interrupted. Ironically, modernists considered themselves a step forward
for freedom and progress. Rather, it was a regression, so that one of the three
branches overruled the other two.
First, liberalism and secularism. This basically sought to
abolish a key restraining force: the Church. In one situation, the French
Revolution, this was taken to the extreme. Due to religious warring, the
Protestants were kicked out of France. The destabilization and loss of power of
the Catholic Church led to a rapid deterioration, that eventually led to a
revolution, known as the French Revolution. It was a total massacre, and the
people erected rulers worse than before. The Middle Class was also swept away.
This system was a catastrophe.
Next, Fascism and Nazism. This system was formed by a sudden
merger of State and Business. These two sustained each other and propelled each
other forward. These two also combined to somewhat put down the Church. For
example, the New Testament was rewritten by the nazis. It was also somewhat
replaced by a government-sponsored ideology, which was basically a religion: Aryan
Supremacy. It was like a religion in that it was a worldview: all of history
and politics was interpreted through its lenses, and the Bible was altered to
support it better. So, simply put, the private sector and the government
combined, and doubled down on the church, turning it into a tool.
Communism, another fruit of modernism, took an even more
extreme stance. It had the government completely abolish the two other
sectors. Something like this was unknown beforehand. The excuse they
gave for it, equality, matters little. This made Communism one of the most
brutal totalitarian regimes ever. Eventually, some versions of communism (like
in China and the Soviet Union) realized that without businesses and churches,
the whole situation was futile. They allowed these two other sectors to some
extent, under strict national supervision.
Today, America has three sectors, all pushing in from
different political viewpoints. One is the Conservative Movement, largely
hailing from the Religious Sector. The other is the Business Sector, largely
coming out as Libertarian. The Government-supporting sector are the Democratic
Socialists. The Republican Party is mostly a union between the Religious sector
and half of the Libertarian one. The other half of the libertarian sector (big
tech, silicon valley) allies with Democratic Socialism to form the Democratic
party.
Interestingly, each sector tries to form policies that root
out the other two. Let’s examine them:
1.
Religious sector: Socially
Conservative, Fiscally Conservative.
a.
Social Conservatism is for
the purpose of preserving the Religious sector.
b.
Fiscal Conservatism is
mostly for the purpose of stopping the encroaching government.
2.
Business (libertarian)
sector: Socially Liberal, Fiscally Conservative
a.
Social Liberalism is to
stop the encroach of Religion.
b.
Fiscal Conservatism is to
stop the encroach of Government.
3.
Government (democratic
socialist) movement: Socially Liberal, Fiscally Liberal
a.
Social aspect: stopping the
encroach of religion.
b.
Fiscal aspect: stopping the
encroach of business.
Libertarians ally themselves based on whether they fear
socialism or religious imposing more.
Interestingly, Democratic Socialism (and, to some extent,
liberalism, and progressivism) differ from communism in just one thing: the extent
to which they take their goals. Communism wanted to massacre Church and totally
end private property, killing business owners. Democratic Socialism does it in
a calmer way, and doesn’t totally abolish these things.
Democratic socialism claims that they want freedom and
equality. But their excuse for takeover matters little: what matters is that
they want control, and to subjugate businesses and the church.
Fascinating.
ReplyDeleteThe tripartite division of Church, State, and Market, as delineated in your analysis, invites a meditation upon the perennial dialectic of power structures that shape the fabric of civilization. It is no trivial observation that these entities, though now conceptually discrete, once coalesced in a singular manifestation of sovereignty—the God-King, whose ontological status simultaneously occupied the immanent and the transcendent. In the originary paradigms of civilization, sovereignty was not merely an instrument of governance but a totalizing ontological reality, suffusing all domains of existence, such that economic, political, and spiritual functions were indivisible.
ReplyDeleteIt is precisely in the progressive bifurcation of these spheres that one discerns the emergence of what may be termed the “fragmentation of sovereignty,” an inexorable process set into motion by the desacralization of power. The Hebraic tradition’s institution of a priestly class distinct from the monarchy heralded this disaggregation, prefiguring the broader historical trajectory in which the vectors of religious, economic, and political authority would increasingly find themselves in mutual antagonism—each seeking primacy, yet unable to wholly absorb the others without negating the delicate equilibrium that permits civilizational stability.
The subsequent historical evolution—from the medieval feudal synthesis to the Protestant disestablishment of ecclesiastical political supremacy—evinces a dialectical oscillation between consolidation and dissolution, wherein epochs of synthesis inevitably generate antithetical reactions that further subdivide power into more particularized domains. The American Revolution, in its ultimate rejection of divine-right monarchy, represents the apotheosis of this logic, formalizing a political architecture wherein the Church, the State, and the Market were theoretically insulated from one another—yet never wholly divorced, for the nature of power is such that it is never truly divided, but merely shifts loci of dominion.
Thus, we arrive at the contemporary milieu, where the equilibrium of Church, State, and Market exists in a state of precarious disequilibrium, as each faction seeks dominion over the others under the guise of ideological imperatives. The Religious sector, invoking a metaphysical telos, seeks to subsume the Market and the State within its moral imperatives; the Libertarian sector, invoking an economic teleology, resists both ecclesiastical and governmental encroachment; and the Democratic Socialist faction, wielding the rhetoric of egalitarianism, endeavors to subordinate both religion and enterprise to the imperatives of centralized governance. Each movement, in its pursuit of hegemony, unwittingly reconstitutes the very structures it ostensibly opposes, for power, once divested from one sphere, invariably reemerges in another.
Democratic Socialism, in its measured approach to statist consolidation, offers a palatable alternative to the overt brutalism of communism, yet it remains fundamentally animated by the same impulse: the subjugation of economic and spiritual autonomy to centralized authority. That its methods are incremental rather than revolutionary does not negate its teleological end, which, if left unchecked, must inevitably culminate in a totalizing hegemony wherein all spheres of life are subordinated to the managerial state.
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