When Revolution & Religion Die

Connecting the Nicaraguan revolution to our current state of affairs.

Photo by Isis França on Unsplash

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”

― Franz Kafka

Whether you’re threatened by socialism or neoliberalism, their mixture is creating a meaningless world. You only need to watch the “debate of the century” between Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson to know the gutless new enlightenment thinkers have severed their pessimistic spirits.

Peterson, a defender of capitalism, and Žižek, a Marxist of sorts, both describe themselves as radical pessimists, laughably believe the ‘victimization-savouring’ academic left is some omnipotent cultural force, and agree capitalism needs some form of regulation.

Any of you who have read or watched Žižek know he’s actually a proponent of dismantling capitalism, but when it comes to concrete ideas, the free-market-loving Peterson and capitalist-hating Žižek both agree capitalism needs regulation. In other words, these self-proclaimed pessimists have nothing more to offer than the optimistic new enlightenment thinkers—those pointing out all our progress so we can happily stay on the capitalist-but-with-social-intervention road—the road that keeps us comfortably numb.

Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses, but that’s no more accurate than saying liberalism is. Religion’s promises of salvation and liberalism’s promises of liberty have proven empty. We cannot trust organizations whose leaders rape kids and justify terror or ideologies that birthed the ivory towers in academia and corporate titans, both full of corruption and self-interest. These ideas that gave us collective meaning are deteriorating, leaving us as the dying god in a terminally ill system.

So, where do we go from here? Can there be a meaningful revolution that ends our planet-killing system rather than just adding regulations to it?

For that, let’s take a historical dive into a place where nuclear superpowers, socialism, neoliberalism, religions, and environmental destruction intersected—Nicaragua.