Sub-Rosa Transcendent
Transactional relationships, financialized spirits, and how we can actually make our thing real (right now).
Financialization of Friendship and Family
It goes without saying we lack organic relationships these days. People apply for jobs, not through knowing a guy, but seeking out or being seeked out via some virtue-signaling middle man of a website or app like Indeed or LinkedIn. Same goes for education, and same goes for many of the friends we make.
Transactional is the only way you can put it. We don’t feel much reliance on our friends like we used to, but the boxes we tick on a résumé (self-starter and team-player); the marks we have in school. When it comes down to it, in a real career, especially owning your own business, it is the word of mouth from your customers that really decides whether you are successful or not, though. What a lot of modern people lack is that go-getter attitude where they feel as if playing the transactional game isn’t worth it. Especially young people, we are predisposed to the mechanical eye’s appraisal, and not the thoughts and opinions of those we serve.
This is very damaging to our psyche. We can’t work up the gumption to act human because any organic-ness, any humility, and even any style or confidence, is but “LARP.” Ironically, the only people who look fondly on you for being genuine, having personality, having style, having strong handshake and eye-contact are the rich boomers and self-made types who admire gumption and merit. That is because these people don’t operate in the transactional frame of mind.
When you are able to perceive what you do for others as a gift, when you can do a favor for someone, whether it have a dollar sign on it or not, the person isn’t just in your debt - they are your friend. What do I mean by “friend,” though?
In my recent podcast with my good buddy Android, we analyze that friendship that Don Vito Corleone, in The Godfather by Mario Puzzo, had with those who served him. Well, actually, those he served. Vito didn’t look at you as someone he could blackmail or destroy when he did a favor for you, but brought you into his thing. You accepted responsibility that anyone has for a real, true friend who will be there for you through thick and thin, just like you would for them. Friends don’t see debts, they see people they know will stick their necks out for them. Debts are for people being used; people in a transactional relationship. A user and those being used.
The modernday Cash Apps and Paypals have corrupted friendship in that sense. Now, when a friend does something for another friend, there is this biding sensation in the back of both people’s minds, both on the “debtor” and the “creditor” ends. Say I pay for my friend’s meal, I don’t want him to have this convenient way to “make it even.” I’m doing something for my homie, and that’s that. The way he “repays” me is by being my damn friend just as any other time in history would have made clear.
I hate using this phrase but “Late Stage Capitalism” really rings true in this situation. Line-go-upism has taken our sentiments hostage. The impersonality of the internet and its tendrils seeping into all aspects of our lives is what makes us so obedient to the poz masters. We can whine and bitch all day, but at the end, we know how encaged we make ourselves by entrusting the system more than our people; our homies. It has encaged us so bad that instead of leaning on the shoulders of our friends, we lean on the shoulders of finance to keep us cozy. Religion is not the opiate of the masses, but High Finance is.
Yes, the same part of society that loans to us our cars, our abodes, and in many such cases, our own consumption. Finance has replaced the role of the church, the role of the family, the role of the friend. It productifies the most important parts of our lives that would be filled by the role of a friend, a paisano, a compadre, a buddy. You don’t go to your friends or family for money anymore because only bums do that. Instead, you borrow money from an app like Dave (literally personifying usury into a friendly cartoon character lol). You don’t save up your money with fellow entrepreneurial buddies to buy a business - no, you get a loan from a commercial bank. Something Android brought up to me in private: the most personal parts of our lives have been robbed by finance. Where cultures like the Basque of north Spain and southwest France live on the same land their very ancestors have for over two-thousand years, the average American treats the most spiritual thing - their home - as a financialized asset to flip to some jagoff they don’t know after a couple decades.
How This Can Change
It is quite hypocritical how many of us recognize the innate issues of usury, and yet will call it a necessary evil. Do you not realize how you are playing yourself? You’re speaking from the mouth of the enemy when you talk like that! The role of money is to be a tool to glorify God. The best way to do this is to expand your influence by growing the power of the community you want to see prosper; hopefully a community built in God’s Holy Name.
This is where, if you do have capital, or on track to raising such capital, you have a duty to honor this Covenant, and support the growth of what you want to see grow. This means doing favors for those, not in expectation of being paid back, but with the presupposition the person(s) you are giving your gift to will honor their covenant and create holiness with the tool of wealth.
This leads to further trust and growth when such liberality is taken in this thing of ours. Not that this won’t be abused by fools, and probably used in not the best ways (especially at the beginning), but such wastefulness can be avoided when God’s Word precedes that of any decision made. Do not fund those who will squander your wealth. Do not put your wealth towards endeavors that will create nothing but waste. Wealth is power. Put your wealth towards productive feats, and not “productive” purely in the capitalistic sense, or your community will resemble that of Indian reservations where casino venture capitalists do better than the trailer parks living on welfare. Allocate your resources intelligently and subtly. This could be buying property to then subdivide and give your homies good deals. This could be building cabins on your property to rent at low prices to your homies. This could be pooling money together to start a business. This could be angel investing in a group of young bucks with inclination, energy, time management skills and a sense of altruism to spread their entrepreneurial seed across the land. The creativity of such an ecosystem of intermingling would emerge the most important aspects of a community: finding out people’s roles and getting a general sense of how people are (grinders, minders, and finders), what endeavors are pointless, who works with who the best (rules of engagement), creating a reliable system of gatekeeping, and above all - normalizing an economy of friends doing favors for each other, normalizing goodwill, and normalizing actual friendship.
Nevertheless, the financialization of capital is where community goes to die. When tangibility and creativity take a backseat to pathocracy and transaction, the glory of a grand future for your thing will not rouse. If we treat our relationships with one another as purely transactional, then we are not friends. It is for scratching backs, and all good-doings and debt-paying will be a chasing of the wind, because all the shared visions of a better future will be seen as foolish and “LARP.”
Surely, we must be productive, as that is how capital is generated in the first place. This is why I encourage everyone reading this to get off their fucking asses and make money. Hustle and grind. Find people you would trust giving ten-thousand dollars, and not for the sake of being repaid fifteen-thousand, but for the sake of glorifying a shared belief in doing good works for your Almighty. Get what I mean? This trust isn’t born from a vacuum. It isn’t built from shared interests or visions. It is built by taking risks, and honoring your damn responsibility in being a friend to someone. Ya dig?
Friendship isn’t something you use, nor leverage. It isn’t something that is there for your interest-bearing desires. It is there to be sanctified and glorified. It is there to create goodness and love. It is there to build and honor. All of us want people we can die for, so start being a person worthy of dying for. Start sticking your neck out. Start taking risks.
Start enterprising.
Because the enemy knows none of this. They want backs scratched. They see people as things to take advantage of, to use at their whim, to sexualize and commercialize. They do not see friends - they see peons. This is why, yet again, as I always will, stress the importance of a Christ-orientation for our movement. Good done for nothing, is nothing done in the first place!
“Again I saw something meaningless under the sun:
There was a man all alone;
he had neither son nor brother.
There was no end to his toil,
yet his eyes were not content with his wealth.
“For whom am I toiling,” he asked,
“and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?”
This too is meaningless—
a miserable business!
Two are better than one,
because they have a good return for their labor:
If either of them falls down,
one can help the other up.
But pity anyone who falls
and has no one to help them up.
Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm.
But how can one keep warm alone?
Though one may be overpowered,
two can defend themselves.
A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”
Ecclesiastes 4:7-12