Monday is not a celebrated day of the week.  For a many of us Monday signals a return to the responsibility, evaluation, tension of a competitive work place.  Who looks forward to Monday?

This Monday morning, I have promise of an answer to a conundrum which I have pondered for many years.  Raised in an evangelical household. I was taught quite intentionally the valuations, the sense of propriety that was common to a majority of those around me in the North Carolina of the mid 1950s into the 1960s.  Morality was rooted in the ten commandments, and was best understood by paying attention to the words of Jesus.  Outside of the community of the faithful (the church), the world was amoral, a potentially violent place.  A relationship with Jesus served as a lifeboat.  If you trusted “the Lord” and behaved in a conventionally civil fashion, you could rest easy.  In the afterlife you’d receive your eternal dividend.

That is the evangelical take on “reality” as I remember it.  There was nothing particularly political about the viewpoint.  The focus was on personal rectitude, practice of the golden rule.  You had a sense of schadenfreunde, you knew something of momentous import that your acquaintances didn’t seem to understand try as you might to explain the deal to them.

That is how I remember that side of my life.  The enigma that I have puzzled over: is how a community of people aspiring to practice kindness, having a studied interest in the afterlife (heaven), have become so closely allied with the neoliberal economic ideology, making common cause with their politicians, becoming enthusiastic foot soldiers with a personal allegiance to  a quintessential economic animal, President Donald J. Trump.

Reading the slim volume by Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative, reference was made to an essay by Wendy Brown, American Nightmare: Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism, and De-Democratization.  In the essay written in 2006 six Brown asks:

How does a rationality
that is expressly amoral
at the level of both ends and means (neoliberalism)
intersect with one
that is expressly moral and regulatory (neoconservatism)?

How does a project that empties the world of meaning,
that cheapens and deracinates (exterminates) life
and openly exploits desire
intersect one centered on fixing and enforcing meanings,
conserving certain ways of life,
and repressing and regulating desire?

How does support for governance modeled on
the firm (corporation) and social fabric of self-interest
marry or jostle against
support for governance modeled on church authority
and a normative social fabric of self-sacrifice
and long term filial loyalty,
the very fabric shredded by unbridled capitalism?

That is indeed the question of our time.  We need an answer.  Our survival as a people, and even as a species may depend upon what we are able to do.