How canceling the Protestant work ethic was suicidal for the West

Read Hanne's The Herland Report.

Some still refer to the West as "the Christian West." The very opposite is the case. The West has chosen to completely depart from its traditional Christian ideals. Our culture is totally submerged in atheistic Marxism with its remarkable hatred of God and the religious dimension of life.

Marxism's amorality has poisoned every aspect of society. For example, the capitalist system. The capitalism of greed, theft and total ruthlessness that is on full display today is very different from the historic capitalism that became the dominant economic model over 200 years ago.

Today, the quest for wealth at the expense of the interests of the people has become a personalized project, "a financialization game" devoid of social responsibility, a counterproductive catalyst for limitless greed. Capitalism has transformed into an economic order that legalizes merciless selfishness with openly accepting deceit as a path to success. The rampant disrespect for the Ten Commandments is grueling. Trustworthiness, the very glue that bound us all together, is evaporating to the detriment of solidarity.

This I point out in my newly released book that explains how billionaire control cancels the interests of the people, "The Billionaire World. How Marxism serves the Elite" -- currently the Amazon bestseller in the Education History category.

Market Capitalism – the historic economic system in which capital and property are privately owned, prices set by market supply and demand making hard work essential – gave ordinary people a possibility of unprecedented economic growth. Millions were lifted out of poverty as the distribution of wealth sifted into the middle and lower classes.

The famous sociologist, Max Weber explained how interconnected this historic form of capitalism was to the Protestant ethic. In "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," he explored the sociological connection between religion and economy, and found that the historic capitalist system was dependent on the Protestant ethic in order to succeed.

Weber theorized the importance of values for the development of the economic order, outlining a system of social organization that empowered the individual, his morality and duty toward society in a disciplinary and dynamic social structure.

His point was to show that the form of capitalism developed in the historic West was made possible by the Protestant religious belief that deemed hard work to be a calling from God.

Virtues such as self-discipline, temperance, endurance, trustworthiness and an ascetic view on the limits of value in material wealth, made Christians dedicate themselves to saving earned money, reinvesting it and not spending it, keeping up the hard work in order to demonstrate to God one's godliness.

Much of the same attitude is found in Jewish communities, where the idea is that since God created the world, man is put on earth so that he may help the Creator to make the world an even better place. This is man's vocation and goal of life. The spirit of capitalism becomes a spiritual goal, a vocation or calling that one responds to by a hard work ethic and aim to please God.

Asceticism was deeply tied to the concept of hard work, which undeniably made the Calvinists – whom Weber studied in particular – prosperous and wealthy.

The concept of renouncing the temporal values of materialistic wealth, yet using the money to further reinvest in industries, strengthen churches and social communities, created social conditions in which living a simple, earthly life devoid of excess pleasures became the Puritan capitalist goal.

Weber pointed out that "the ascetic conventicles and sects … formed one of the most important foundations of modern individualism."

Yet, as religion declined as a defining public force in Western culture, Weber found that capitalism somehow was freed from its Puritan limits and thereby could develop into a quest for acquisition of material wealth.

When the religiously motivated anti-materialism present in the Calvinist Protestant ethic faded, the social structure and capitalist bureaucracy remained. This bureaucratic social structure and worldviews that sustained it became central to shaping modern, post-Christian social life. It was this very phenomenon that Weber conceived as an iron cage.

No longer limited by the Christian ethical requirement of ascetic self-control and humility, money could now freely be used to display wealth, skipping the part about "reinvesting in order to make the world a better place for others."

Capitalism changed. The aim of wealth changed. As the economic model and its corporate disciples split from Christian thought, capitalism became the quest for total power and the ruthless materialism devoid of compassion that we see today.

The canceling of the Protestant ethic has truly become the suicide of the West.

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