Moloch is a force like gravity. It permeates everything and imposes itself on all of us. It drags us down and through the mud of excess and towards these false promises of infinity. It constricts our worldview and forces us to wander blind into the coming waves of complexity and crisis.
Moloch hijacks the games we play, imposing its own rules and incentives, warping the actions of all players. Our political games are now little more than vain power struggles between oversized and fragile egos, held together by lip service instead of civil service. Our neoliberal economic model — the bedrock of modern western society — encourages infinite growth and consumption rather than doing more with less (the true meaning of economise).
The name of any Moloch game is to acquire and never stop. And out of these exponential games, we [unsurprisingly] see exponential problems arise, from runaway climate change to growing wealth inequality to our loss of existential meaning. These problems are growing and accelerating faster than we can keep pace with. They feel insurmountable. Which brings to the forefront the diminishing hope we seem to have for our species and our world.12
But Moloch isn’t just out “there”. The same force that moves through our culture also turns within us. It tells us it’s all about me and all about more. It steers us onto the spiritual bypass, avoiding the necessary scenic routes on the road to enlightenment. Moloch tells us that lust is love. That it’s all about the peak and getting higher than last time. Our relationships with society and with each other are all affected by our own inner Moloch.
Although we individuals can’t fight Moloch on the world stage, we can work to resolve the conflict that it fans in our own lives. This will then ripple out into our wider spheres. Our moral imperative then isn’t to save the world but to save ourselves in service of it.
Having vs. Being
It’s worth remembering that Moloch is a neutral force. It isn’t good or evil on its own. So, it can help to unpack what kind of force it is and how it might be over-exerting itself on us.
At its core, Moloch is the force of having; of acquiring more and more. As humans, there are things we do need to have like food, water, and shelter. Again, this is a natural force. But, when left unchecked and applied to all of our needs, things become skewed.
Because we have other needs too — what Eric Fromme calls being needs or what John Vervaeke refers to as becoming or developmental needs. We need to be loved. We need to become mature. We need to develop wisdom. These needs can’t be met through having more of anything. Our need for love can’t be met by having more sex. Our need to mature isn’t met when we buy a new car or house. We don’t become wise through attaining more propositional knowledge.
These are examples of what Fromme and Vervaeke call modal confusion: when we try to meet our needs through the wrong existential mode. When we turn to Moloch to meet all of our needs, we experience inner turmoil, inertia, and frustration. We have a void in our being we can’t fill, no matter how much we may have. The more we indulge in excess, the more we seek to be through having, the more of Moloch we’re going to see both within and without.
Moloch can help us tend to our needs in the material world. Without it, we wouldn’t enjoy any of the fruits of modernity. But it’s the Muse — the force which counterbalances Moloch — that helps us tend to everything else. It’s through the Muse that we find meaning and community and awe. Moloch may produce life’s lemons but only the Muse can squeeze the juice and grate the zest.
Complications, Complexities, and the Opposable Mind
Moloch and the Muse have two distinct worldviews. On the one hand, Moloch sees everything as mechanical, as equal to the sum of constituent parts (1 + 1 = 2). So when Moloch encounters “complications” (anything from ecological collapse to depression), it attempts to fix them like you would a broken clock or car. You just need better stuff.
However, the world is more complex than a machine. More akin to a mind, it’s a network of interactions and relationships which produce emergent properties that transcend the system’s parts (1 + 1 = 3).
Complex systems are fluid in nature. Always changing. Never fixed long enough to get a comprehensive snapshot of understanding. This is why Moloch solutions don’t work with complex problems. It’s why our struggles with aimlessness, isolation, and despair can’t be resolved through the having mode of more. Moloch problems arise from our mismatching of the complicated and the complex.
Solutions to complex problems, both personal and planetary, are far from obvious. In fact, it’s impossible to catch a complete glimpse of one. One place we might start looking though, is in the work of Roger Martin, with his idea known as the opposable mind.3
Looking at successful business leaders, Martin found a consistent marker of their success; what he called integrative thinking. This is the ability to hold opposing ideas simultaneously, not choosing one or the other — opting for black or white, yin or yang — instead using that opposable foundation as a platform to reach for new novel ideas or solutions (1 + 1 = 3).
For example,
has talked about the parallel truth that the world appears to be getting both infinitely better and worse at the same time. We have higher life expectancy, lower mortality rates, less war, greater diversity and inclusion (not to mention the opportunities and conveniences technology now affords). On the flip side of the same coin, our planetary ecosyestem is destablising, we’re dying off more than ever from diseases of despair, more and more power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and our connection to nature and anything greater than ourselves has been largely severed.Turning inward, our lives are also getting both better and worse simultaneously. We may be stuck in our career or vocational path but at the same time be moving forward in our relationships and building better habits around our physical health.
However we slice it, the fingerprints of both Moloch and the Muse are all around and all over us. If we can cultivate and nurture a more opposable perspective — if we can hold both of these forces and their relative truths in our awareness — the closer we can get to the capital-T Truth that is our immediate reality. What Jamie Wheal calls the Deep Now is the only place we can find the answer to our complex problem — to have and to hold it lightly, to be with it and become through it.
This is the only ground upon which we can actually face Moloch and win.
The collapse of organised religion and the French Enlightenment values of rationality and scientific materialism as pillars of meaning have left a chasm we’ve yet to fill. As many of us still cling to one or the other we move into either denial and false hope (the blind faith end of this spectrum) or despair and nihilism (the purely materialist end).
Also, watch this illuminating and urgent video from Liv Boeree on the nature of Moloch and how it drives us:
Check out his book called “The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking”
Wise words!