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:
