Okay I’ve been watching a shitton of those “financial advice self help” YouTube channels and I think you could legitimately consider them sermons for a cult that worships wealth.
They routinely personify money, as in physical currency. These videos are rife with comments like “money flees the hands of those who did not work for it” as if money has some sort of animist spirit that dictates its behavior.
These channels portray poverty as a moral choice, and capitalism as a natural state of the world. If both of those things are true, poverty is a natural sin, an inherent moral wrong. It’s like Calvinism without the fun parts.
To be fair, “cult that worships wealth” could not be a better description of the attitude that has come to dominate this forsaken world if it tried.
I mean, people throw around those words as hyperbole to describe the nature of consumerism, or as a shorthand for the media relationship to the market, but they’re rarely used in a 100% literal sense.
I’m saying these channels are building a system of morality out of a literal mythology that ascribes supernatural powers to physical dollars. These channels have what I can only call financial metaphysics. If you dig deep enough you can find examples of capitalist cosmology.
I used to work for Domino’s Pizza. Franchisees can attend a convention called the World Wide Rally to network and share knowledge and cheer each other on as they build their shitty fortunes on the backs of their exhausted and broke employees.
Tell me this isn’t just a big tent revival service:
I’ve never been to Las Vegas but I love it in concept because it sounds so made up. Imagine if you were reading a fantasy novel and they were like “smack in the middle of a deadly inhospitable desert there is a glittering city of indulgence and lawlessness and cheap sin that has specifically engineered itself to obfuscate your sense of time and keep you there as long as possible while they take all your valuables.” You’d be like yeah that’s some wizard shit.
Added to that one professor at Cornell, this makes two men I’ve heard of citing their continuity with Michel Foucault by reference to having had their fists up his ass
each pope must first fist the previous pope and then speak through him ex cathedra, like Kermit the Frog.
In YA where the parents are still alive, we get some kind of “the authority figure has your best interests at heart scene”, which is only really justified by the auth figure admitting the kid was right this time but ruins it by going “mothers always stand by you” or something. The main character’s friend might need a new home but the main character has rightful, restricted, stability. Teachers take on the role in Harry Potter. (And you idiots’ problem is off-screen terfiness? The hell is wrong with you?)
A lot of YA and fic for adults have the bf/gf being your Main Support Person but an honest-to-god married couple is booooring so either you get miserable conflict about the relationship or the interest comes from the characters getting into a relationship. Sometimes you have a wholesome couple as supporting cast.
And that, I claim, is why a lot of works especially by women have brothers in arms stuff with actual brothers – they’re equals, with small amounts of inequality if you adjust the ages or make one disabled or something. They have Family Bonds and a reason to put up with each other and it feels natural that they’re together despite not fucking. And you’re still free to give them opposite-sex love interests with jealousy being an option for conflict but a happy resolution possible.
Like, I’ve met a pair of brothers like that and Richard Feynman was a little like this to his sister, but that shit ain’t normal, many people I know like their siblings but for all the shit I’ve got from Westerners and other non-Chinese for being an only child through no fault of my own (even ones who are fine with me being a bastard from a broken home!) they just aren’t compatible enough as people to be able to go on grand quests together.
You can have a wildly unrealistic or at least unrepresentative aristocrat family with strong ties and the characters can have a noble and conflicted lineage, but if you want to be more realistic that your main characters are nobodies, it’s not too much of a stretch to make the reader buy that two interesting powerful people cropped up in this nothingburger of a family.
Of course then if you can’t write compelling cross-sex interactions or can’t write a compelling romantic relationship, people will do the “the only well-written relationship in this work is between same-sex best friends so slash it is” now with extra incest, and people get hot for incest because it’s taboo, aaaaaand we all go to horny jail.
I feel like “hey neopagans I know you think X are ancient magick but they were invented by a guy almost exactly 100 years ago” is a line we could apply pretty broadly.
