My great-uncle Willem Koenraadt, a former sociology professor at the seminary of Hoeven who later become vicar-general of the Bishop of Breda, authored this entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia, year 1937, volume 17, on page 122:
Mammonism is the service of mammon; mammon is a Syro-Chaldean word, handed down by the Bible (Mt. 6.24; Lk. 16.9), meaning wealth; mammon is also used in a personified sense as a god of money. Mammonism is not the search for earthly goods as such, but the pursuit of riches as an end in itself, so that no means are spared to acquire and increase them. Mammonism is often associated with capitalism, insofar as rightly so, that the spirit that animates economic actions is often, in an annoying and very fatal way for the general well-being, a mammonistic spirit.
The faltering of Christian morality after WW2 explains why the Dutch began worshipping money and have since created a negative economy based on exploiting weak and vulnerable people.
The suicidal girl is euthanized instead of loved. The autistic girl afraid of puberty is medicalized and has her breasts removed. The child with behavioral issues after getting hit by a car is sent to a youth prison. Why fight for a better life if weed can make you feel happy?
The problems never get solved because real solutions now undermine the dominant business, namely allowing big social issues to fester into commercial industries, and then to secure perpetual profits for state-aligned providers.
Issues such as abortion, prostitution, drug use, euthanasia, gender care, immigration, homosexuality, surrogate babies, youth prisons, even the appropriation of farmland, and so on, has become very profitable for state bureaucrats to get involved in.
The underlying causes are moral, but the money lobby doesn’t want to solve the problems morally. Industry providers and practitioners now have an incentive to market their services by convincing people that there is something wrong with them, that they are the problem rather than their society.
We can’t blame capitalism alone because often the state is the sole big client to many of the players in this negative economy. It’s already a giant redistributive system with state-driven markets usurping people’s taxes. And as long as there are taxes paid, there will be businesses looking to spend that money on management fees and operational costs.
This is why, for example, in the Netherlands, most youth care organizations rarely do prevention or care to develop children’s skills and competencies, because locking kids up is more profitable.
Politicians should be regarded the managers of the negative economy. Their reforms usually benefit the bigger players in the markets at the loss of smaller (still more morally conscious) providerds, until a cold corporate bureaucracy grips the whole society.
This isn’t a matter of socialism versus capitalism, but one of money versus morality. What we need is a morally renewing movement that pushes back against such exploitation by reminding people that there was never anything wrong with them.
This is a battle of God against Mammon, of the people against their exploitation.
This will be the theme of the new book I started writing. It will probably be called Appeal to Reason: The Netherlands as Battleground against the Money God Mammon. Please support my work with a subscription here or via Buy Me a Coffee.