NEW YORK — The gods are angry. Or maybe just imaginary. Either way, Charles Hugh Smith is asking people to look at what they worship.
Technology. Money.
Progress. The whole bundle. Smith runs the blog Of Two Minds.
His new essay landed this week with a question most folks meet with silence. What if the work we are automating was never necessary in the first place?
He names two quasi-religious beliefs propping up modern life. First: technology drives Progress, and Progress is inevitable. He calls that “The Mythology of Progress.” Second: the desire to get rich drives innovation, which drives Progress.
Neither belief, Smith argues, holds up under scientific scrutiny. But both are “cloaked in the finery of science to mask their true nature” as pure belief structures. The gods of technology and finance are treated as real.
Powerful. Question them, Smith writes, and you get silence.
Because if those gods are imaginary — constructs of belief — then “the entirety of Modernity collapses.” So we keep worshipping. With charts. Spreadsheets.
Euphoric headlines. Smith picks a concrete example.
Modular nuclear reactors. Thousands of them, promised to power super-abundance. Not a single one runs 24/7 reliably, safely and cheaply.
Vast sums of dollars are still required to dig up fuel, construct the reactors, operate them. “But never mind that,” Smith writes. “The gods have promised that technological Progress is unstoppable and inevitable.” The deeper problem is baked into the system itself.
Smith sees it plainly. Durable, low-maintenance, low-operating cost technologies are not as profitable as planned obsolescence.
Not as profitable as extracting monthly fees from owners. So the system does not reward what lasts. It rewards what breaks.
What needs replacement. What generates a recurring bill.
This is not a small glitch. It is structural. The economy is wired to produce needless work, then automate it.
The work itself — the human cost, the family strain, the patient waiting — gets treated as invisible. Collateral. Smith does not offer solutions.
He is not selling anything. He is just pointing at the altar and asking why nobody speaks.
The silence, he suggests, is the answer. People know. They just cannot afford to say it out loud.
Because if the gods are fake, the whole temple comes down. And then what?
So the headlines keep coming. The charts keep climbing. The reactors stay hypothetical.
And the work that should never have existed keeps getting automated, while the people who did it keep getting told that Progress is on their side.
