The Gods of Postmodernity: Enlightenment, Crowds and the New Religion of Money

## **Introduction: After the Death of God Came the Religion of Everything** The Enlightenment promised humanity liberation through reason. Superstition would disappear, science would replace myth, bureaucracy would replace arbitrary power, democracy would replace tyranny, and rational debate would overcome fanaticism. Yet the twentieth century produced a remarkable paradox. The more rational modern civilization became, the more irrational its everyday life appeared. Rick Roderick, Jean-François Lyotard, Elias Canetti, Serge Moscovici, Martin Heidegger, Émile Durkheim and Georg Simmel each described different aspects of this contradiction. The Enlightenment did not destroy mythology. It transformed it. Instrumental reason became intertwined with new myths of progress, bureaucracy, science, technology, money and permanent consumption. Television banalized reality, scientific narratives replaced religious narratives, money displaced language as the universal medium of social interaction, while crowds continued searching for prophets, sacred symbols and collective missions. Human beings did not become less religious after modernity. They merely changed their gods. Bureaucracies replaced churches, scientific institutions inherited the authority once possessed by theology, markets became new temples, and currencies became new totems around which modern societies organised themselves. The crisis of contemporary civilization therefore cannot be understood as the disappearance of belief. It is the multiplication of beliefs hidden beneath the language of rationality. The greatest illusion of modernity is not that people continue believing in myths, but that they believe themselves to have escaped mythology altogether. The postmodern condition therefore represents neither the end of reason nor the triumph of irrationality. It is the complete entanglement of both, where every rational system quietly produces its own sacred objects, rituals and unquestionable truths. ## **The Enlightenment Becomes Its Opposite** Rick Roderick argues that the Enlightenment gradually produced an unexpected inversion. Instrumental reason increasingly merged with mythology rather than replacing it. Political systems became so rationalized that they evolved into incomprehensible bureaucratic labyrinths whose complexity generated new forms of irrationality. Bureaucracy itself became an irrational machine precisely because nobody could fully understand or control it. Television accelerated this transformation by banalizing every event. Catastrophes, revolutions, wars, scandals and tragedies all became equally familiar spectacles consumed without genuine emotional catharsis. The self gradually fell under permanent siege as endless streams of information destroyed common sense while encouraging permanent scepticism toward every possible truth. The result was neither critical thinking nor genuine freedom but cynical resignation. Young generations increasingly expected nothing, desired nothing and dreamed of nothing because modern consumer society had transformed every ambition into an immediately accessible commodity. Everything appeared available, yet nothing retained genuine significance. Simultaneously Jacques Derrida questioned the very philosophical foundations of Western thought. Language no longer possessed stable meanings because signs referred endlessly to other signs rather than fixed realities. Meaning survived only through absence. Words existed precisely because the things they designated were no longer present. Language therefore became capable of creating entirely fictional realities independent of physical existence. Authors lost authority over their own texts because every interpretation remained equally provisional. Misunderstanding ceased being the opposite of understanding and became one of its necessary conditions. Truth itself entered the same unstable movement. Lies revealed hidden truths, while truths inevitably contained misunderstanding. Philosophy gradually ceased constructing systems and instead devoted itself to maintaining, cleaning and endlessly repairing conceptual structures whose final completion had become impossible. ## **The Collapse of Grand Narratives and the Rise of Permanent Management** Jean-François Lyotard famously described the postmodern condition as a growing distrust toward metanarratives. Universal stories explaining history, science, progress or emancipation gradually lost credibility. In their place emerged countless micronarratives competing for temporary legitimacy within local power struggles. Scientific knowledge itself ceased appearing fundamentally different from mythology because both depended upon narratives establishing authority and organising belief. Science continued promising a better future while simultaneously generating ever larger bureaucratic systems dedicated to managing information. Progress became institutional rather than existential. Scientific knowledge accumulated indefinitely without approaching any final completion. Every answer generated additional questions requiring further research, administration and funding. Science increasingly resembled an enormous self-perpetuating bureaucracy oriented toward future possibilities rather than present understanding. Meanwhile cultural production itself became inseparable from political power. Narratives no longer merely described reality but actively produced legitimacy for institutions controlling knowledge. History gradually transformed into a consumable archive whose continual reinterpretation simultaneously encouraged collective forgetting. Memory became another administrative function. Scientific abstractions increasingly resolved social contradictions symbolically without eliminating them materially. The promise of future improvement replaced concrete transformation. Every problem acquired its corresponding research programme, committee or institutional framework while remaining fundamentally unresolved. Rationality therefore became procedural rather than emancipatory. Bureaucratic efficiency replaced philosophical wisdom. The Enlightenment's universal ambitions dissolved into endless management of fragmented realities, each requiring specialised expertise yet never achieving genuine reconciliation. Knowledge expanded continuously while meaning steadily contracted. Modern civilization consequently discovered how to produce infinite information without producing corresponding certainty. The future itself became an administrative project permanently postponed yet continually promised.