A friend asks why you are reading a poem that will not improve your career, tending a garden that barely produces food, or spending an afternoon with someone who cannot advance your plans. The question sounds practical, even caring. It also contains an entire metaphysics:
It destroys the sacred by asking: “Yes, but what is it good for?”
The question assumes that a thing earns its place by producing something beyond itself. Under enough pressure, every value is translated into the language of competitive return:
- Friendship becomes networking.
- Exercise becomes body optimization.
- Art becomes content.
- Education becomes credentialing.
- Thought becomes positioning.
- Love becomes mate selection.
- Life becomes portfolio management.
Each conversion is reasonable in isolation. Together they create a world in which nothing is allowed to be an end.
Moloch is the conversion of all values into instruments for winning.
The sacred is whatever must not justify its existence before that tribunal.
Usefulness keeps asking for another reason
A useful object points beyond itself. A hammer is good for driving nails. Driving nails is good for building a house. The house is good for sheltering a family. At some point the chain has to arrive at something worth having for its own sake: warmth, safety, family life, the experience of being at home.
If every answer receives another “what is that good for?”, the chain never arrives. Family life becomes useful for raising successful children. Successful children become useful for preserving status. Status becomes useful for gaining options. Options become useful for gaining more options.
The means proliferate while the end disappears.
This is how instrumental reason expands. It begins as the sensible capacity to choose means suited to an end. It becomes corrosive when it claims authority over the ends themselves. Anything that cannot show measurable output starts to look sentimental, indulgent, or wasteful.
Goodhart’s Law describes what happens next. A measure that once helped us pursue something becomes the target that replaces it. Grades replace learning. Engagement replaces attention. Income replaces useful work. Fitness data replaces inhabiting a body. The proxy does not merely fail to represent the purpose; it begins consuming the activities from which the purpose arose.
Moloch lives in respectable sacrifices
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl gives this conversion a public body: Moloch, the civilization that feeds minds, sexuality, creativity, friendship, and tenderness into machinery for producing legible winners. David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” finds the same altar in ordinary consciousness. The sacrifice happens each time another person becomes an obstacle, customer, rival, audience, or proof of status inside one’s private campaign.
Ginsberg shows the civilization-sized altar. Wallace shows us placing small offerings on it every day.
The public machine and the private habit sustain each other. Institutions reward people who can convert more of life into performance. People then bring the institution’s categories home, evaluating their bodies, partners, children, hobbies, and attention by the same logic. Nobody has to announce a war on the sacred. The sacred is crowded out by thousands of defensible improvements.
This is Moloch’s advantage: the individual sacrifice is often rational. The employee who refuses unpaid availability loses to the employee who accepts it. The company that preserves humane slack loses to the company that extracts it. The school that protects unmeasured curiosity may lose rank to the school that trains every hour toward the exam. Selection rewards what reproduces, not what makes reproduction worth enduring.
The final system can be materially successful and spiritually vacant. Its winners are not spared. They may be the people who surrendered most completely: the student who cannot read without extracting a lesson, the athlete who cannot move without recording it, the artist who cannot see without imagining the post, the executive who experiences friendship as poorly structured networking.
The horror is not merely that some people lose. Even the winners can be mutilated by what winning required.
Instruments become idols
Money, competence, status, measurement, and winning are not enemies of the sacred. They often protect it. Money buys time with a dying parent. Competence lets a craft survive. Status gives a truthful person enough leverage to be heard. Measurement reveals damage that intuition missed. Winning can keep a community alive.
The corruption begins when the instrument becomes sovereign—when life must continuously demonstrate its usefulness to the tool that was built to serve it. Tools serve life. Idols make life serve them.
An idol is not merely something valued too much. It is a partial good promoted into the final judge of all other goods. Money as an instrument asks what can be funded. Money as an idol asks why anything that cannot pay should exist. Intelligence as an instrument helps reality become clearer. Intelligence as an idol treats people as worthwhile only when they can survive its cross-examination.
The distinction is practical:
- Healthy instrumentality: I win so that I can live.
- Idolatry: I live so that I can keep winning.
Finite games belong inside life. A match needs a scoreboard, a company needs solvency, and a student sometimes needs an exam. Trouble begins when finite games absorb the larger game that made them meaningful. The score no longer helps play continue; play is consumed to keep the score rising.
This also explains why self-optimization feels dead even when it works. The optimized self is an increasingly capable instrument with no settled answer about what its capacities are for. Every improvement creates another surface to improve. The person becomes the workshop and the unfinished product, never the one permitted to live in the house.
Some goods appear only after evaluation stops
Sacred does not mean irrational, beyond criticism, or protected from every practical demand. Calling something sacred can conceal exploitation as easily as calling it efficient can. Families, traditions, nations, and art institutions have all used sacred language to avoid accounting for whom they injure.
The boundary is not between useful and useless things. It is between domains where instrumental evaluation clarifies the good and domains where continued evaluation dissolves it.
A partner’s traits matter when deciding whether to date. But catalog mode becomes corrosive when comparison continues after commitment and the beloved remains a bundle of features competing against imaginary substitutes. Friendship may create opportunities, but it cannot remain friendship if every encounter is audited for return. Play develops skill, but play dies when every game becomes training for “real life.”
These goods require moments when the optimization problem is retired. The meal is eaten without photographing it. The walk does not count toward a streak. The conversation wanders without producing a decision. The person is allowed to exceed their usefulness.
That permission is not laziness. It preserves the ends that discipline, markets, and measurement are meant to serve. A civilization needs instruments strong enough to protect what it loves and sacred limits strong enough to tell those instruments when to stop.
The revealing question is therefore not only “what is this good for?” Ask its inverse: what good thing was this instrument originally supposed to protect?
If winning completely would leave none of that thing alive, the instrument has already begun asking for sacrifices.
References:
- Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
- David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water”