Way-out, Saturday party-time, plist-type open-ended question....grounded in Puritanism maybe?

[alice wellintown]

It is far too easy to pile the problems of the world on business and
on men and women in grey suits. And, doing so ignores the issue that
the "cleanliness is next to godliness" phrase begs us to explore. This
phrase, from Acts, has to do with what is sacred and what profane.
And, this distinction is quite germane to our present crisis, how to
engage the Other, the outsider, the foreigner, the person who shares a
new globalized and digitized world with us, perhaps a currency, but
lives over the boarder. First, the forging of the industrial and
mechanical, and now digital way of life, was not done in Big Business
factories. Moreover, the motive for this way of life was not money or
greed, nor was it something technical, nor was it an ideology of
efficiency or some other Big Business Visible Hand value. It was
something sacred. It was a holiness, a Virgin made Dynamo. And, as
your example of a producta that kills those who use it and the world
they live in, suggests, it was about the Control of the Other. So, the
cigarettes of RJR and Phil-Mo were merely a product of the Keeping the
Faith in the machine-cult. The Dynamo was elevated above all else.
And, though Gradgrinds and Spenglers and Mumfords and so on, all
warned that what Adams had identified was a Cult, a religion that
would ignore with Blind Faith, Life and Earth, and though after the
second Great War and several lesser ones after, the Faithful pushed
themselves up off their knees, it was only a matter of time before the
tolling of the Bell called them to service again. And here we are. And
it is not Business we worship. And it is not Businessmen in grey suits
who preach and save us from our wickedness, but the Faith We Keep.