My central argument is pretty simple. A god-image is not primarily a theological opinion but a highest-order psychophysiological regulatory architecture organizing perception, affect, interpretation, motivation, contradiction tolerance, and bodily coherence. If that is true, then articulating a new god-image in systematic form is not an intellectual exercise but a regulatory intervention.

This changes almost everything, because if the god-image is regulatory rather than merely propositional, then contradictions at that level do not remain intellectual, they propagate downward recursively into perception, affect, bodily tension, motivation, moral orientation, relational patterns, identity stability, political participation, and eventually civilization-scale symbolic organization. Therefore theology, psychology, politics, embodiment, and cybernetics cease being separate domains entirely and become different observational angles of the same recursive regulation process. The god-image sits at the apex of that process because it determines how contradiction itself is metabolized. Modernity became capable of analyzing subsystems by severing them from the total regulatory architecture they once inhabited - theology became belief, psychology became cognition, politics became administration, economics became incentive management, and embodiment became biology. This fragmentation increased analytic precision while simultaneously obscuring the organism-level regulatory unity those domains previously constituted. The modern mind therefore tends to interpret symbolic systems as “mere ideas” because it encounters them after the regulatory totality has already been conceptually disassembled.

My contention is that essentially everyone today has a redemptive God image - the “moral arc of history” bending toward truth, justice, and egalitarianism, regardless of the purported label of one’s beliefs. This belief has been furthered by the massive material plenty of the past three hundred years caused by industrialization and the discovery of cheap energy. It’s like an ant colony that discovers a massive pile of sugar, consumes it as its colony grows and grows. But eventually the sugar pile runs out and the ant colony collapses. In the same manner, the economic plenty of the past multiple hundred years is over, and will only get worse as we descend into neoliberal feudalism, and the gap between the redemptive god-image and reality is going to continue to grow under increasing material deprivation. I suspect that a non-redemptive, tragic God image - of an uncaring, horrifying God of totality - will find some resonance as times continue to get worse, even though history shows that times of material deprivation are met by intensification of redemptive god-images (messianism, revolutionary utopianism, apocalypticism) rather than non-redemptive alternatives. Weimar Germany produced National Socialism, not tragic acceptance, and the Soviet collapse produced Russian Orthodox revivalism. Economic contraction tends to produce more desperate forms of redemptive belief rather than abandonment of redemption as a category. Regardless, a God image of totality works for me, now, and the audience will either find it or it won’t (although social media censorship including Substack’s is massive and AI slop is ubiquitous with swarms of bots, none of which help).