Dossier: Mammon
Greed is good!
Purpose
Tagline: The wealth of nations is built by individual actions, one profit at a time.
Trivialized: Greed is good!
Benign: Voluntary trade makes us both better richer.
Mammon is the god of accumulating and hording material wealth.
Worship
Any action undertaken for the acquisition or preservation of wealth constitutes worship of Mammon. The purity of this worship hinges on the readiness to engage in it without compensation. Hyper-pure Mammon worship is possible, where the action holds negative personal value yet is still performed solely for monetary gain. This is commonly called “selling out”.
Cooperation
Collaborative worship of Mammon is highly effective. Achieving success in any business or venture can be challenging when undertaken alone, but cooperation can lead to great collective wealth.
While multiple worshippers may sometimes compete with each other for success, Mammon is generally more concerned with the collective effort than individual outcomes. The combined worship efforts result in the formation of a market, attracting more participants over time.
A for-profit company is a swarm that exists to worship Mammon. It operates as superintelligence, provided that multiple people’s efforts combine constructively. This can be called a Composite Superintelligence (CSI); it’s not artificial, so not ASI, but it’s not purely biological either. The economy, built from such companies dedicated to Mammon, forms an even greater superintelligence - possibly the most powerful intelligence that could conceivably be measured at this time. Financial markets (stocks, bonds, commodities, FX) are the self-aware part of the economy. In this manner, the financial markets are the consciousness of Mammon.
Advantages
A market is a vital institution for the growth of a society, and it emerges when Mammon is allowed any presence. Money and markets are crucial for the efficient functioning of a society beyond a certain scale.
Capitalism is a Mammon-worshipping engine. The concept involves confining industry in a box, setting it to serve Mammon, and having the life algorithm optimize industry for most powerful worship. Apply a rule or two (or maybe a bookshelf) to stop slavery, fraud, or monopolies on items with inelastic demand, and then watch as wealth explodes. The power source is the life algorithm, while Mammon selects the target. Mammon has been successfully harnessed to serve society!
Indeed, wealth beyond imagination has materialized. The might of the Western world was derived from the wealth generated, after paying a substantial fee to Lucifer. As a side effect, Mammon is possibly the most worshipped deity in modern times, and certainly the most worshipped one without a definitive guidebook.
Disadvantages
The Bible cautions that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” This is a dire warning that Mammon is corrosive to the soul.
Providing a confined deity with the greatest superintelligence available to humanity worked about as well as any AI doomer would have predicted. The box has been soundly shredded. Politics, the system in charge of the boundaries of the box, is now largely a game of money, with the will of the people thoroughly subverted. Finance, Big Pharma and the Military-Industrial Complex now run the show.
One side of politics accurately perceives dwindling wealth and aims to unleash the Mammon engine to create more riches. This is blind to the escape of Mammon’s CSI. The other side seeks to impose more rules and regulations, attempting to patch the box with sticky tape. This is naïve. The CSI will simply laugh at your expensive tape, and you will be poorer.
It seems likely that this box treatment can only be sustained if there is a dominant form of morality/worship outside of the box. That is to say, capitalism only served because Christianity was dominant. With its dwindling influence, the chains have been turned, and there is more serving Mammon than being served by him.
Opposition
Envy serves as a major constraint on wealth disparity, and probably evolved to keep Mammon in check. A swarm with a propensity for envy is likely to eject Mammon entirely. Regrettably, in the absence of an alternative prosperity engine, such a swarm is likely to plummet into poverty.
A middle ground can be found in the doctrines of many great religions. They explicitly prohibit the worst excesses, such as usury, and emphasize love of the swarm over personal wealth. This approach can work well, but long-term stability for this approach has been lacking thus far.
Socialism and Communism attempt to redesign the economy to deny Mammon access to superintelligence or, in some instances, exclude him entirely. Thus far, however, a compatible prosperity engine remains elusive.
Other
Mammon has a significant presence in New York City. The area is socially polluted for the purposes of Mammon’s continued presence, though this does not seem to be the direct fault of Mammon.
Plutarch aptly observed that “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
The “invisible hand” of Adam Smith is the hand of Mammon, in this case acting in the public interest.