Capitalism Won't Get You into Heaven Anymore — One Last Good-Bye

For a long time, the American mythos operated on a simple bargain: work hard, accumulate, and salvation — spiritual, social, economic — would follow. The good person was the productive person. The productive person was the wealthy person. The wealthy person was, almost by definition, blessed.

That bargain has collapsed. Not quietly, not gradually, but spectacularly — in the form of climate catastrophe, widening inequality, the unraveling of democratic norms, and a pandemic that revealed exactly whose lives the system was designed to protect.

We are not celebrating the collapse. The suffering it has caused is real and unevenly distributed, falling hardest on those who never benefited from the bargain in the first place. But we are interested in what comes after — in the imaginative space that opens when an old story ends.

This is our farewell to the paradigm that told us that profit was virtue, that growth was the only metric, that individual accumulation could substitute for collective care. We do not yet know what will replace it. But we believe that naming what must end is the first step toward building what must begin.