Non-Prophet Capitalist Game Shows: Who Wants to Be a Convert?

Under totalitarian economic systems in which the market is God, it no longer matters whether you believe or disbelieve in the older, pre-capitalist deities. What matters is that you make a profit. So it should come as no surprise that — whether you are trying to win atheism converts to your chosen -ism or -ology on a reality-TV show, or taking children to atheist’s camp — the real winner in both stories is neither faith nor the lack of faith, but capitalism itself.

Amintore Fanfani prophesies from 1935: “It is a vicious circle. A man seeks goods because he no longer believes in a faith that bounded his desires, and he no longer believes because he has experienced the pleasures of possession and influence.”

The sanctification of the real is only possible under digital conditions — in which all of reality has been etherealized by electronic media — which flips the Old Testament God into something of a redundancy.

Doubting Thomas said, “Show me, and I will believe.”
Today’s skeptic simply screams into his cellphone, “Show me the money!”

See Freakonomics for the official dogmatics: “Whereas morality describes the world as it ought to be, economics describes the world as it really is.”