Sunday, September 20, 2015

Capitalism and its Discontents:

 An Existential Crisis and the Birth of a New Religion

  
Jade LaMarche
999445809
RLG404H1
Summer 2015



Table of Contents

1.    INTRODUCTION
2.    THE BIRTH OF CAPITALISM
3.    RELIGION AND CAPITAL
a.     Taming Nature
b.    The Market God
c.     Religious Illusions
4.    THE BIRTH OF CONSUMERISM
5.    RELIGION AND CONSUMPTION
a.     Totemism
b.    Obsession and Compulsion
6.    THE MODERN WORLD
a.     Having
b.    Dangers
c.     A New Religion
d.    The Existential Solution
e.     Buddhism
7.    CONCLUSION

  
INTRODUCTION
In Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism Stephen Batchelor says,
Our age is fittingly called the “space age. The astronaut in his technical and complex machine, effortlessly orbiting the earth, alone and weightless in the emptiness of space, is the perfect symbol of man today. Despite our domination over the forces of nature and our highly developed technology, we have come to feel empty, without any real inner purpose or meaning to our existence.[1]

With the rise of secularism in North America and participation in organized religion on the decline, the worship and consumption of Capital has replaced religious devotion. The growth and success of Capitalism and Consumerism is built on an existential crisis where the “Market” replaces God and Consumerism replaces ritual devotion. This paper draws on sociological, psychological, and philosophical theories to illustrate the dialectical relationship between religious theology and Capitalist consumer culture over time. I draw on the theories of Max Weber and Edward Bernese to discuss how Capitalism and Consumerism came to be worldwide phenomena. I draw on Marx, Freud, and Feuerbach to discuss they ways that religious devotion was predisposed to being posited onto Consumer culture. I conclude by taking a look at some contemporary theories about the current economic, environmental, and existential crisis that has arisen as a direct result of this fusion between economic and religious forces.


THE BIRTH OF CAPITALISM

Max Weber defines Capitalism as the relentless quest for profits based on cost benefit calculations. Under a Capitalist regime everything is priced and the cash nexus is the ruling force.[2] Capitalism, says Weber, works according to three major principals; production of commodities for profit rather than need satisfaction, wage laborers that produce surplus, and machine-based production. The goal is market dominance and profit maximization made possible through the lowering of production costs.[3] In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber asks the question, why did Capitalism originate in the West? Other countries like India, China, and the Islamic world were in a far better position to be the setting of Capitalism with dense populations, skilled crafts, and booming commerce. With the fall of the Roman Empire and the dark ages, Europe was not the ideal place for Capitalism to emerge and yet it did.[4] Weber believes the answer to this question is in Protestantism, claiming that the relationship between Capitalism and Protestantism was that of “Elective Affinity.”[5] One did not cause the other but rather they intersected over time and grew in dialogue with each other.
Protestantism began in 1517 when Martin Luther, a charismatic German monk published the “Ninety-Five Theses on Power and Indulgence” and posted it on the door of the All Saints Church in Wittenburg, Germany.[6] In his theses, Luther denounced the pope as the antichrist and the Catholic Church as indulgent and corrupt. Luther pointed to Paul’s letter to the Romans, which called for the “saving power of God for everyone who has faith.” He utilized the Guttenberg press, which translated the bible from Latin to German and other common languages so any Christian could read it. In this translation he introduced the idea of  “beruf,” a word that in its original Latin form translated to “task” or “service” but in the German version translated to “spiritual vocation.”[7]
This new Christianity spread over the 16th and 17th centuries with the introduction of a number of new branches including Calvinism, which became the dominant religion in much of Europe by the beginning of the 18th century. Calvin introduced the idea of “predestination” to the Protestant movement. Within this theology, Christians were predestined to go to Heaven or Hell before they were born. Saving grace was the inexplicable choice of God. This created great psychological stress for Protestants.[8] With predestination and no saving intermediary the Protestant Puritan stood alone before God, which begged the question, how should faith be lived?
The protestant movement answered this question with “practical pastoralism”, a way of life that called for intense worldly action. Practical pastoralism urged members to be self confident, finding signs of God’s election within worldly activity, to resist sin and prosper in a calling.[9] By restricting luxury, Protestants were encouraged to save capital and reinvest it into their calling or enterprise. Poverty was taken as a sign of “sinful slothness” and the poor were given the choice of workhouses or jail, working for a pittance while the profit went to the owners who lived with “the comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of the goods of this world was a special dispensation of Divine Providence.”[10] The Protestant Ethos garnered practical results. Capital was accumulated through the ascetic compulsion to save and it was reinvested in the profits of the calling, trade, or enterprise. Puritanism stood at the cradle of the modern economic man[11] and their vocational ethos now “prowls about our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.[12]

RELIGION AND CAPITAL

1. Taming Nature
To Sigmund Freud, religion and capital have been connected since the beginning of civilization in man’s natural instinct to conquer nature. In The Future of an Illusion Freud described what he believed were the two trends of civilization: knowledge and the capacity to control forces of nature and extract wealth, and regulations necessary for order in relations of man to distribute wealth.[13] Nature, according to Freud, “restricts us be destroying us through the very things that satisfy us”[14] Through natural disasters and disease nature has continually put us in a position of powerlessness. As a result we venerate and fear it by producing Gods who exorcise the terrors of nature, reconcile man to the cruelty of fate, and compensate for the suffering of civilized life.[15] 
2. The Market God:
            In The Essence of Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach posited that theology is anthropology. In other words, man created God out of his own consciousness, projected it outside himself, and then subjected himself to his own creation.[16] According to Feuerbach the construction of theology came from the human tendency to have a strong inner and outer life. The nature of man is to converse with himself in his consciousness. He is then at once “I” and “thou.” He can put himself in the place of another but he is nothing without an object in the outer world. Through exploration of this object with his consciousness man learns to know himself. Whatever we are conscious of we are always simultaneously conscious of our own nature. So to Feuerbach, religion is consciousness of the infinite which then reminds man of his infinite self. The very fact that we can perceive the infinite proves that our own consciousness is infinite. “How couldst thou perceive the divine by feeling it, if feeling itself were not divine in its nature.”[17] Thus through gazing at the heavens, man is able to understand the infinite nature of himself. This very consciousness makes us perfect and complete. “Every being is in and by itself infinite – Has its God, its highest conceivable being, in itself.”[18]
To Feuerbach, the problem with the religious God is that it fancies itself to be superhuman, contemplated and revered by humanity as another. Religion knows nothing of its anthropomorphisms. To it they are not are not anthropomorphisms.[19] The new monotheistic God denies and condemns mans lower instincts. It is the perfect human being, majestic and of the highest dignity. “Religious sentiment is the sentiment of supreme fitness.”[20] If the divine subject is in reality created by a human being, then putting a difference between man and God denies the identity of the human and human nature is depreciated. “To enrich God, man must become poor.”[21] In other words, to make God all, man must be nothing. Man withdraws from himself and denies to himself what he attributes to God. We deny our own knowledge and thoughts and place them onto God. We make God self seeking and egotistical yet frown on that in every other being.[22] Religion further denies goodness to man by making us wicked, corrupt, and incapable of good.[23] In sum, “man projects his being into objectivity and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself, thus converted into subject.”[24] 
Just as Feuerbach described religion, so is our relationship with social systems. The human being created Capitalism, projected it into an objective system, and then subjected ourselves to it. We anthropomorphize the market with statements on the evening news such as, “the Market is uneasy today,” as if it carries on a life of its own outside of our contributions to its ethos. In Future of an Illusion, Freud posits that humans are not inspired to give up their instincts naturally, but are in fact coerced to do so by charismatic people in positions of power.[25] As Karl Marx said, Capitalism has created a structure where we are “dominated, ruled, and possessed as a privilege from heaven while rulers themselves possess greatness in inverse proportion to their numbers.”[26] Unlike Feuerbach, Karl Marx did not believe that all of humanity projected this Market God, according to Marx, the Capitalist dream is “the dream of the bourgeoisie, who universalizes their interests as the interests of the whole society.” [27] David Loy in his 1997 article “The Religion of the Market” wrote that capital has assumed a separate independent vitality. Over time capital has ceased to be a servant and has become a master.  Like the monster in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, the market now embodies the statement, “you are my creator, but I am your master.”[28]
3. Religious Illusions
Sigmund Freud believed strongly that “religious ideas are illusions.”[29] The characteristic of illusions, according to Freud, is that they are derived from human wishes. We wished our Gods into being to protect ourselves from harmful nature and we wished our religious systems into being to protect us from harmful human instincts. To Freud, religion imposes on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering, “its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism, and drawing them in a state of mass delusion, religion spares many people an individual neurosis”[30] Marx believed that religion was produced by civilization to provide illusory happiness to the lower working class. To Marx, “the abolition of religion as this illusory happiness is the demand of the people for their real happiness.” He called on people to give up a condition that requires illusions.[31] Freud believed that religion had contributed a lot to civilization - to taming our instincts and bringing happiness to people’s lives – but not enough. To Freud and Marx, religion would always be an illusion but “without religion man could not suffer the cruelties of fate.” Both men believed that religion was on the decline but suggested that it ultimately could not be removed without putting another system in place.[32]

THE BIRTH OF CONSUMERISM

Unbeknownst to Freud, it was his ideas that set the Consumer agenda in motion.[33] After World War One the banks were funding department stores and they needed assistance upping profit.[34] Freud’s nephew Edward Bernese was already famous for his contribution to advertising American war efforts so he was charged with innovating a new consumer culture. Bernese took Freud’s theoretical framework of psychoanalysis and used it to manipulate the masses. People at the time were shopping out of necessity but Bernese believed people could be trained from need to desire.[35] In Freud’s book, Civilization and its Discontents, he outlined how humans have a need to be controlled but that very need leaves them perpetually discontent.[36] To Freud and thus also Bernese, people couldn’t manage their instincts and needed to be guided to make the right decisions. Bernese took this idea and began his "engineering of consent."[37]
 His first experiment was to persuade women to smoke contrary to the fact that it was taboo at the time. He marketed cigarettes as “torches of freedom”, adding the phallic element of the penis to the cigarette which he believed would cater to women’s natural “penis envy”, an idea Freud outlined in his theories.[38] To Bernese, the trick was to move away from linking products to intellect or rationality. Most products at the time were promoted in functional terms as a necessity, emphasizing practical virtues. Bernese began linking products to emotional desires and feelings, adding product placement in movies and articles, linking Hollywood stars to products.[39] Catering to our deepest desires and repressed instincts to inspire us to buy was so successful that it catapulted Consumerism into a worldwide mass industry.[40]
To Bernese, Consumerism solidified the marriage between democracy and Capitalism, making people think that democracy cannot exist without Capitalism, when in fact under a Consumerist agenda democracy is reduced from active citizenry to passive people whose needs and desires can be manipulated.[41] World War One reaffirmed the dangerous forces present in people that needed to be tamed, and by 1928 J. Edgar Hoover said that consumerism had become the central motive in American life. Bernese had successfully turned people into “constantly moving happiness machines.”[42] He made the economy work and people were happy to be made docile for society.[43]

RELIGION AND CONSUMPTION
1. Totemism
According to Lyn Thomas in her introduction to Religion, consumerism and sustainability: Paradise lost?, “the term consumerism implies that something more than consumption is taking place. It’s not just the proliferation of goods to be acquired, it’s the symbolic value we attribute them and our level of attachment to them.”[44] In truth, the connection between religion and material worship happened long before Capitalism and Consumerism were born. In early religion materials were often used to represent symbols or totems and therefore they became emotionally powerful.[45] In Totem and Taboo, Freud discussed early civilizations and their relationship with religious symbols. He believed that ego instincts and libidinal instincts were directed toward an object. Similar to Feuerbach’s belief that man is nothing without an object in the outer world through which he can explore and thus come to know himself, Freud believed that the narcissistic ego turned toward objects and thus became object libido.[46] To Emile Durkheim, The totem in early civilization is “the visible representative of the social religion of these races. It embodies the community, which is the real object of veneration.”[47] Tylor Frazer’s first psychological theories were based upon the belief in an ‘outward soul.’ The totem was meant to represent a safe place of refuge where the soul is deposited in order to avoid the dangers that threaten it.[48]
In Shamans, Sorcerers and Saints, Bryan Hayden takes a look at totemic practices in Shamanism. In these hunter-gatherer societies materials are often used to represent symbols.[49] Shamans almost universally employ a device called the “Axis Mundi” which translates to axis of the world. It is usually a pole, tree, column, or shaft, which connects this world with the realm of the spirits. The shaman travels to the spirit realm down the Axis Mundi where they can reach an afflicted soul or the enemy spirits and a battle ensues.[50] In time, many households began to assign the hearth as the traditional axis Mundi of the house. The ashes represented the underworld and the smoke reached up to the heavens. Long before Santa Claus, the first Gods and Goddesses were thought to come through the chimney when they visited the human realm.[51] Coca-Cola universalized Santa Claus to sell their drinks, catering to our ancient beliefs in the supernatural benevolence of a protector that comes down the chimney. While totemic offerings were given to the Gods of the hunter-gatherer societies, we put Coca-Cola next to the Christmas tree for Santa.
2. Obsession and Compulsion
In Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices Freud explored the uncanny similarities between religious ritual and obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Any activities, according to Freud, including going to bed at night can become obsessive actions if they're given a repetitive and rhythmic order.[52] Freud believed the need for obsessive neurosis and religious ritual was the repression of inherent human instinctual impulses. He believed that people do religious action without entirely concerning themselves with its psychological significance; however, psychical displacement dominates the processes behind obsessional neurosis[53]. This unconscious ritual process can be easily posited onto Consumer culture. Where once religious leaders mimicked the seemingly anachronistic rituals of their ancestors, now we listen to the sermons of the Market and line up for the newest iPhone or video game. Where people once touched the sacred statues of Jesus so many times that his foot is nearly rubbed off today, now women sit in front of their television and order Faberge eggs to add to their collection.

THE MODERN WORLD

1. Having

            According to Sigmund Freud, “civilization is a process in the service of eros.[54]” What decides the purpose of life is the pleasure principal, which dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start.[55] The modern human, having been characterized by our acquisitiveness, is motivated by the notion that the aim of personal existence is fulfilled in proportion to what we are able to amass and possess.[56] “In times such as ours, when secular and material values dominate social and cultural life to an extreme degree, the intensity of the urge to have creates an ever widening gulf from the awareness of who and what we are.[57] Shopping has become a great national pastime. “Buy me in you want to be happy” messages are so enticing that they overpower all other messages.[58]
Consumerism offers an alternative explanation for our unhappiness than the previously religious framework and it also offers and a new way to become happy, but according to Stephen Batchelor this new solution of having inevitably leaves us Alone with Others. “Anxiety, alienation, loneliness, emptiness, and meaninglessness are the fruits of living as an isolated subject amidst a multitude of lifeless objects. We wander around as strangers in a lonely crowd.”[59]
2. A New Religion
            According to David Loy, our current economic system should also be understood as our religion because it has come to fulfill a religious function for us. It is a worldview with ontology and ethics – the Market is the first “truly world religion.”[60] Richard Sennett defines “The New Capitalism” as
a world where the global economy is driven by multinational corporations and entrepreneurs who have lost any local connections, roots or responsibilities, and where free floating enterprises and individuals relocate wherever profit motives drive them. More stable and lasting values are replaced by constantly mutating targets, desires, and identities[61]

Weber’s sociology of religion describes two types of religions, legalistic religions, which adapt themselves to the world, and salvation religions, which are hostile to it. According to Loy, Market Capitalism is a salvation religion.[62] With the never satisfied desire for an ever-higher standard of living, “we don’t give our surplus to God, the act of creating surplus is God.”[63] Matthias Zick Varul in his 2008 article "After Heroism: Religion Versus Consumerism", pointed out that the modern consumer is looking for confirmation of their worthiness of character through consumption, just as the modern producer, the puritan businessman, was seeking confirmation of their worthiness through production.[64] Todays Puritan American Protestants are far from anti-consumers. They express their Christian beliefs and identity through a host of material goods and images.[65]
3. Dangers
According to Zick Varul, “one could indeed say that consumption has consumed theology.”[66] From a religious perspective, however, the problems with Market Capitalism and its values are twofold: greed and delusion. The unrestrained market requires greed because the desire for profit and consumption fuels the entire system to keep producing. But according to religion greed is an unacceptable instinct that is based on the delusion that happiness can be attained by consumption.[67] Trying to find meaning through greed amounts to idolatry in almost every religious tradition other than Market Capitalism.
The problem with Market Capitalism from a sociological perspective is social stratification. Marx believed that “if one class is to stand for the whole of society then all the deficiencies of society must be concentrated in another class.”[68] Those who do not participate in Consumer culture are rejected and marginalized. Just as the puritans labeled the inability to participate and produce “sinful slothness’, the modern economy makes no room for the unemployed, they become as Judith Butler says, lives that do not count, and are not “grievable.”[69]
According to David Loy, Market systems are profoundly flawed in the sense that, left on their own they will lead to inevitable environmental damage and destruction of irreplaceable ecological systems. Under the rule of the Market Religion the earth is objectified into a collection of resources to be exploited, and humanity is reduced to a source of labour. Villagers were driven off their land by new economic forces and communities disintegrated into aggregates of individuals competing to attain private ends. “The market corrodes the very shared community values it needs to restrain its excesses.”[70] David Loy believes that the commodification of land, life, and community over the last century is directly related to ozone holes and global warming today.[71] “This impending ecological catastrophe is awakening us to the fact that we need a deeper set of values than Capitalism can provide.”[72] Whether or not we believe in God I think we suspect that something is missing. As Stephen Batchelor says, “a lack of being remains unaffected by a plenitude of having.”[73]
4. The Existential Solution
            Lyn Thomas’s 2011 book Religion, consumerism and sustainability: Paradise lost?, is a collection of essays that grew out of a conference held at the London Metropolitan University in April 2006. The theme of the conference was “Countering Consumerism: Religious and Secular Responses.” The decline in religious participation opened up the space for the Market Religion to flourish, but it also left us hungry for meaning and isolated from one another. If the Capitalist and Consumerist ethos has indeed left us socially, existentially, and financially bankrupt then the solution lies in a system that can answer some of these existential questions that are hidden behind our insatiable desire to shop. According to David Loy, “we are struggling against the false religion of our time until we redirect this spiritual urge back to its true path.”[74]
5. Buddhism
David Loy and Stephen Batchelor suggest that Buddhist philosophy offers an array of answers to our ever-urgent existential questions and a solution to managing our urges to consume. In Buddhism, “the insatiable desires of the ego-self are the source of the frustration and lack of peace that we experience in our daily lives. Overconsumption, which distracts and intoxicates us, is one of the main symptoms of this problem. Unfortunately for us, such compulsiveness does not allay our anxiety but feeds it.”[75] The Buddha was a wealthy heir but he left his home of luxury in search of greater meaning. He successfully made the transition from having to being.[76] The Buddha’s teachings say that desire leads to suffering and true peace lies in the cultivation of renunciation and generosity. To David Loy the solution is interconnectedness. “If we can see that there is no me apart from you and no us apart from the phenomena of the world then ownership begins to lose its meaning. There can be no acquisitiveness if nothing is lacking.”[77] It is imperative that we involve ourselves in an existential framework and remind ourselves that we are connected both with the environment and with each other. Feuerbach suggests that we come to understand the meaning of our selves through conversation with the other so personal meaning must be acquired through the re-introduction of connectedness. Marx believed that the proletariat (working class) is the class that can dissolve all classes, and also dissolve the existing world order.[78] “If the human mind has created compelling and coherent visions to inspire the flourishing of civilizations for the last five thousand years, surely the same rich and diverse religious imagination will continue to activate the energies and commitments needed to sustain life on the planet.”[79]

CONCLUSION
The decline in hereditary religion as a system that connected people socially and provided answers to our existential and moral questions left an opening for a new ontology to step in and dominate. Capitalism grew and prospered alongside a critical development in Christianity that brought God into the home. Consumerism flourished alongside a psychological crisis for meaning that blurred the lines between sacred and profane and assigned totemic status to everyday items, allowing us to bring a host of material goods into the home. The result is a new religion of the Market God and a new site for worship in the shopping mall. Where many previous religious social systems emphasized connection between our fellows and the environment, this new system encourages a dominating lone-wolf mentality that ultimately leaves us disconnected. At one time we went to Church for social connection and entertainment. Now each person can own a bible, a TV with Netflix, or a computer with Facebook: hosts for entertainment and a simulated social life within the comfort of our own homes. Our new system of meaning encourages having and accumulating as an effective source of happiness but ultimately our existential questions of being can never be answered by a system of having.
According to Max Weber, the problem is this,
the Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of the monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.  This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are
born into this mechanism (…) Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”[80] 
           
In researching this paper I asked the questions, how did Capitalism and Consumerism come to be? And what sociological, psychological, and religious frameworks set the stage for such developments? A look at the history of Capitalism and Consumerism as well as the psychological, philosophical, and sociological theories that accompanied it provides evidence for a close connection between religion and Market dominance. Changes is the way religion was lived stood at the foot of the birth of the Market God, and changes in the way religion is lived today provide a very viable solution to replacing it.
 




           


References

Batchelor, Stephen. Alone with others: an existential approach to Buddhism.     
     New York: Grove Press, 1983.
Curtis, Adam. The century of the Self, video, directed by Adam Curtis.
     UK: BBC Four, 2002.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. New York: F. Ungar Pub.
     Co., 1957.
Freud, Sigmund. Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices. SE, Vol. 9, 1907
Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Standard Edition of the Complete
      Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 1927.
Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Civilization and Its Discontents. New
     York: Norton, 1930.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the
     Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Authorized Translation. London:
     Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950.
Hayden, Bryan. Shamans, Sorcerers and Saints. Washington: Smithsonian
     Books, 2003.
Marx, Karl. Early Writings. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
Loy, David R. “The Religion of the Market." Journal of the American
     Academy of Religion 65.2 (1997): 275-290.
Thomas, Lyn (editor). Religion, consumerism and sustainability: Paradise lost?
     Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Weber, Max, and Stephen Kalberg. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
     Capitalism. London: Routledge Classics, 2011.
Zick Varul, Matthias. "After Heroism: Religion Versus Consumerism.
     Preliminaries for an Investigation of Protestantism and Islam Under
     Consumer Culture." Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 19.2 (2008):
     237-255.




[1] Stephen Batchelor. Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1983): 43.

[2] Max Weber and Stephen Kalberg. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (London: Routledge Classics, 2011): xxviii-xlii 
[3] Weber. Introduction: xxviii-xlii. 
[4] Weber, xxviii-xlii. 
[5] Weber, xxviii-xlii. 
[6] Weber. Chapter 3: Luther’s conception of the calling: task of investigation: 39-51.
[7] Weber, 39-51.
[8] Weber. Chapter 2.  The Spirit of Capitalism: 13-39.
[9] Weber, 13-39.
[10] Weber. Chapter 5.  Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism: 120
[11] Weber. Chapter 5.  Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism: 102-126.
[12] David R. Loy. “The Religion of the Market." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65.2 (1997): 280.
[13] Sigmund Freud. The Future of an Illusion (Standard Edition of the Complete  Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 1927): 6
[14] Freud, 1927, 10
[15] Freud, 1927, 11
[16] Ludwig Feuerbach. The Essence of Christianity. (New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1957):
1-33. 
[17] Feuerbach, 9.
[18] Feuerbach, 7.
[19] Feuerbach, 25.
[20] Feuerbach, 21.
[21] Feuerbach, 25.
[22] Feuerbach, 28.
[23] Feuerbach, 28.
[24] Feuerbach, 30.
[25] Freud, 1927, 7.
[26] Karl Marx. Early Writings. (New York: Vintage Books, 1975): 254
[27] Marx, 246.
[28] David R. Loy. “The Religion of the Market." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65.2 (1997): 279.
[29] Freud, 1927, 25-29.
[30] Sigmund Freud and James Strachey. Civilization and Its Discontents. (New York: Norton, 1930): 31.
[31] Marx, 244.
[32] Freud, 1927, 51.
[33] Adam Curtis, The century of the Self. (Video, directed by Adam Curtis. UK: BBC Four, 2002).
[34] Curtis, 2002.
[35] Curtis, 2002.
[36] Curtis, 2002.
[37] Curtis, 2002.
[38] Curtis, 2002.
[39] Curtis, 2002.
[40] Curtis, 2002.
[41] Curtis, 2002.
[42] Curtis, 2002.
[43] Curtis, 2002.
[44] Lyn Thomas (editor). Religion, consumerism and sustainability: Paradise lost? (Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 2.

[45] Bryan Hayden. Shamans, Sorcerers and Saints. (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2003): 76.
[46] Sigmund Freud. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Authorized Translation. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950): 105.
[47] Freud, 1950, 158.
[48] Freud, 1950, 164-165.
[49] Hayden, 76.
[50] Hayden, 77.
[51] Hayden, 80.
[52] Sigmund Freud. Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (SE, Vol. 9, 1907): 118
[53] Freud, 1907, 124.
[54] Eros (The Life Instinct): in my reading of Freud I have come to understand the term as the drive to sustain the life of the individual, as well as the continuation of the species.
[55] Freud, 1930, 69.
[56] Batchelor, 25.
[57] Batchelor, 25.
[58] Loy, 278-287.
[59] Batchelor, 27.
[60] Loy, 275.
[61] Thomas, 1.
[62] Loy, 280.
[63] Loy, 281.
[64] Matthias Zick Varul. "After Heroism: Religion Versus Consumerism. Preliminaries for an Investigation of Protestantism and Islam Under Consumer Culture." Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 19.2 (2008): 240.

[65] Zick Varul, 240.
[66] Zick Varul, 240.
[67] Loy, 286.
[68] Marx, 254.
[69] Thomas, 2.
[70] Loy, 277-283.
[71] Loy, 290.
[72] Loy, 276.
[73] Batchelor, 28.
[74] Loy, 288.
[75] Loy, 288.
[76] Batchelor, 33.
[77] Loy, 288.
[78] Marx, 256.
[79] Thomas, 4.
[80] Weber, 123.