‘Moloch Theory’ offers tools for understanding how power works in our strange situation.
We live in a corpse-world birthed by the brutal alliance between global financial capital and the biopolitical state — capital (M-C-M’) continuously accelerates its own reproduction, converting humans into both its zealous servants and machinic components, all while the biopolitical state gradually tightens its tender loving embrace in response to our increasingly hysterical demands to be cared for — to be loved. How can we theorize our situation?
Any vital response to our moment (and one which prepares us for the next) must include a critique of both prongs, maintaining an awareness that Daddy Capital and Mommy State are constantly playing us against each other (even while they’re doing it behind the scenes). Daddy demands more work, while Mommy demands more of you. At the end of the day, you’re expected to trust the experts and get back to work. There will be punishments for any back talk.
The contemporary Left has fallen into a trap of its own success (cowardly failure?) by becoming entrenched in powerful institutions. They sought to capture the halls of power in order to change things, but it was those very halls which captured them instead. Addicted to material comfort and psychological rewards, they have accepted a largely performative role which grows increasingly disconnected from the reality of the middle and lower classes.
However, while the contemporary Right’s outsider status has delivered it the mandate of the people and a platform for drawing attention to the contradictions and hypocrisy which drive and uphold the current uni-party system, the actually-existing organs of Rightist politics have been captured by shadow money, social media shysters, and an aching nostalgia for a fantastical past. Even as populism is ascendant, many leaders on the Right have not relinquished their life long fealty to tax cuts, deregulation, big business, and endless wars.
At Moloch Theory, I turn to a lineage of oddball political theorists who don’t fit on the Left or the Right — Michel Foucault, Ivan Illich, James Burnham, David Graeber, and others. These thinkers are critical of the technology of bureaucracy and its core fantasies, but they also use imagination and experimentation to devise new forms of concrete human freedom. However, I ultimately place their astute analysis of the everyday operation of power into a broader religious and philosophical narrative involving Hegel as the champion of a strange new mutation of Christianity which offers an alternative to the aggressively nihilist position of the accelerationist Nick Land (but that story is still developing).
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Who writes Moloch Theory?
Thanks for reading — I’m Matthew, a writer working to develop the future of intellectual labor in the digital age. My dream from a young age was to be a professor of theology (weird, right?), but when the time came to wager my life on the path of the graduate student, I couldn’t bring myself to accept the raw deal I saw on offer from the Academy (you can read more about that here).
Ever since then, I’ve paid the bills leading complex implementation projects at software startups, mainly serving enterprise clients in the public sector. That experience has given me valuable insight into how processes work (and don’t work) and the potential technology holds to transform our work. I’ve been able to continue my research on the side, delving deep into philosophy, religious studies, and psychoanalysis, all while continuing to learn and refine my own model for understanding how our society works today.
I’ve published on a wide range of topics, including Martin Heidegger and the Kyoto School, Hegel and Nick Land, and Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence. Moloch Theory serves as my public working space for the “critical bureaucratic studies” project which I’m currently developing into an online course to launch later in 2025. I also serve on the board of the Sacramento Psychoanalytic Society, and am actively involved in a number of online communities, including Theory Underground, Philosophy Portal, Incite Seminars, and Other Life.
I write Moloch Theory in the early hours of the morning before my family wakes up — I love this and can’t imagine doing anything else with my time, but the demands of life can often get in the way of my vision for what Moloch Theory could become. I’d appreciate it if you’d be willing to support me and my work by signing up for a premium subscription at Moloch Theory, buying my book, or sending me a one-time tip. Thank you for supporting independent scholarship on the internet!
My recent book about liberation, Christianity, and Tokugawa Japan exemplifies the type of analysis I carry out here at Samsara Media. Check out Ideology and Christian Freedom: A Theo-Political Reading of Shusaku Endo’s Silence (paperback or ebook) for a ride through the unification of Japan under Tokugawa Ieyasu, the political history of Japanese Buddhism, an in-depth analysis of Shusaku Endo’s challenging novel Silence, including a smattering of Nietzsche and Žižek, all wrapped up with some applications to the subjective traps we experience everyday as people living under a global capitalist system.
Samsara Diagnostics constitutes the esoteric core of my intellectual practice, consisting of an email newsletter where I share a monthly essay about religion, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. You could say that the work I do at Samsara Diagnostics provides much of the subjective and theoretical background for my more concrete work in the realm of political theory. Subscribe to receive a free piece in your email inbox each month.
