Notes on the underclass, materialism, corruption, religion, and ethnicity

2026-10-01

I recently spoke at a philosophical symposium that was organised by an acquaintance in my region. This was a small circle of people whom I know. Other than me, there were 9 men and 5 women present. 3 people were of Balkan background, which I will keep generic, and the rest were Greek Cypriots.

What follows is a reformulation and combination of comments I made over the course of five hours on the wider theme of values in the context of social dynamics and historical trends.

The comments here are broad strokes which necessarily take a bigger-picture view of historical phenomena. They are theories of event sequences rather than descriptions of individual cases.

I did not even bother to record a video of my comments because I know that what I cover is sensitive. Many people are not prepared to learn how their world actually is. They will call me “cynical”, which means “descriptive, indeed, but I do not like the truth you are describing, so I call you names”.

I am increasingly more cynical in this way because I am concerned that niceties will not take us anywhere and we are running out of time.

The social and ethnic underpinnings of early Christianity

Early Christianity spread out of the wider region that encompasses Palestine and Syria. I am calling this region “broader Syria”, without implying however that everybody was Syrian in the modern sense. I could have used “broader Palestine”, “Western Asia”, “Near East”, and the like, but you get the idea. This is just in the interest of brevity.

Broader Syria was a place that was dominated by foreign empires in the centuries prior, first by the Persians, then by Alexander (so-called “Great”), and then by the Romans.

Every empire creates its own petty bourgeois class. It consists of those who are beneficiaries of the regime. The most successful among them get close to the locus of power and so the rest have the wish to climb the social ladder accordingly. They live in urban centres and their world-view is defined by eclecticism, namely, the cherry-picking of profoundly different beliefs without committing to any of the corresponding worldviews.

The modern equivalent, if you need an analogy, is the New Age spiritual person who likes Christ but detests Christianity, does a little bit of yoga and knows about the chakra, admires Sufi poetry, is inspired by the vitality of the Greek gods, talks about the conscience of Gaia, engages in mindfulness meditation like the Buddhists, delves into psychedelics, will visit some Ayahuasca resort, i.e. yet another theme park, to cosplay for a few days as an indigenous person of the Andes, and does all that in the backdrop of an unmistakably consumerist ethos of capitalism.

This bourgeois figure is the kind of person that gave us the travesty of Greco-Buddhism in the region that is modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. The idea is that “basically”, the Olympic spirit of struggle through vigour, symbolised by the Olympic Games, and Buddhist monasticism are the same. Sure, we can always find similarities and interesting points, but flattening the differences is how we end up with New-Age-y bullshit. You want monasticism, go become a Buddhist. You want to power through this life, then do what the Greeks do, and so on for all other beliefs.

It is also how Rome developed its Pantheon. The Romans would absorb religious narratives from the places they would conquer in order to appropriate and control them. This was their way to legitimise their rule but also to dictate the norms of future religiosity. In so doing, they were necessarily debasing their own elegance of thought in favour of a hogde-podge of increasingly meaningless spirituality.

The destiny of the petty bourgeois world is that of rampant corruption through materialism. This is because it lacks purity of values. Theirs is an “all numbers win” sort of outlook which is underpinned by the illusion of permanent affluence. It thus does not have strictness and discipline embedded in its quotidian affairs, which make it prone to the short-term impulses of instant gratification.

[ In the talk I elaborated on “pornification”, but I will not cover it here because I have a complete essay on it: About structure, the little things, and critical thinking (2026-10-01). ]

From there we get moral decadence. The high society, which is already defined by its wealth, will be caught up in intrigues over power and sex diplomacy (e.g. think of Cleopatra). It will become increasingly materialistic since one rich person can only out-compete others of the same class through more money and power. This is the precondition for greed, which engenders the worship of the money-god. From the ruling elite, the worship of the money-god trickles down to the petty bourgeois, until it becomes the dominant de facto religion.

Much of this describes the modern Western world, by the way. But I will let you connect those dots yourselves as I continue with early Christianity.

Against this backdrop of excess, the natives of broader Syria were predominantly simple country folk. Jesus was speaking to shepherds and fishers exactly because those are not fancy jobs that the parvenu are interested in.

Early Christianity gave the ordinary man, including the slave, a vision for his class-based emancipation from the tyranny of the Romans and their petty bourgeois wannabees. It also equipped broader Syria with a powerful ideological weapon against the wishy-washy worldview of the Roman elite.

We can thus think of the spread of early Christianity as the effective cultural shift of the Roman Empire from the West in Rome to the East in Antioch. Parallel to that ethnic change we have the rise of the lower classes. Christianity was a decisively political project.

The emperors understood they were losing their grip on power, so they decided to use the good old tool of cultural appropriation. Only now they knew that the Pantheon was obsolete. Through ecumenical synods, emperors started to take control of the emerging dogma that they helped forge. The centre of the empire also moved from Rome to ancient Byzantium, then Constantinople (modern Istanbul), as a means of exerting closer control over broader Syria.

The part of the world stretching from Egypt to western Iran is very rich and densely populated. Look up the term “fertile crescent”. Compare that to the rocky and in many places barren Greek heartlands and much of Balkans, for example. The Western empire could only be rich by controlling this part of the world. And to do that effectively, you need to also control the Mediterranean, else your trade routes are in jeopardy. That was true then and remains the case today.

Christianity became state dogma and official religion. One may think this means that broader Syria won the battle it initiated. But they would be mistaken. What actually happened is that Christianity started becoming the religion of the elite and then their petty bourgeois copycats, concentrated in the large cities of that era.

It is no coincidence that the simple folk of the officially Christian Rome on the European continent, who were referred to with the derogatory term “paganus”, literally “villager”, were those who held on to the ancient polytheistic rites. Hence “pagan” became an alias for polytheist, while “Hellenes” (Έλληνες), the ethnonym of the Greeks, was meant as a religious characterisation for Greek polytheist practitioners.

The pagans, literally the villagers, were not following the trends, they were not up to speed with the latest fashions, and instead kept their culture pure through the aeons the way most villages do. They did not have any of the excesses of the petty bourgeois. The Romans never bothered with the remote settlements because there was no money to be made there, no loot to be extracted.

The obsolescence of the Roman Pantheon had to lead to the eradication of paganism, now polytheism, in order to keep the entire project of Christian officialdom under control. Otherwise, the empire would then have to deal with the potential rise of the polytheists, ethnically defined as Greeks, for example, and risk another culture war.

The forced Christianisation of the pagans in Greece under Theodosius and then Justinian was not a mere change of faith through imperial edict. It was also the subjugation of the rural populations to the dominion of the bourgeois.

I see the completion of this process as the effective renewal of the Roman Empire from the decadent Pantheon to a more pure religion. This gave it a new lease of life and invigorated its want for absolute control. Though Christianity could not arrest the greed of the empire and thus could not stop the descent into materialism. Its original revolutionary spirit was contained by virtue of becoming the religion of the elites who imposed their worldview through fire and steel.

Islam as a renewal of the same demands

Functionally, Islam can be understood as the purification of ideas that lots of people already have. The Romans took monotheism and turned it into clumsy polytheism through the ever-problematic doctrine of the trinity.

Islam rejects this in favour of one absolute God (though Islam still has elements of Muhammad as a special prophet, but we will not go there). It also rejects Judaism on the premise that God is for everyone, not some special tribe. Lots of technicalities follow from there.

At its core, however, Islam is the same old demand of broader Syria to assert itself in juxtaposition to the West. It also is class-based in terms of giving a place for a decent life to the ordinary person.

The class-based emancipatory power of Islam is better understood in the east, where it took hold in the Indian subcontinent among those at the bottom of the caste system.

Modern India has close to 200 million Muslims. Add Pakistan and Bangladesh for similar numbers each to complete the picture. Let me remind you that the Greeks are 10 million and rapidly shrinking because we do not have children anymore. I will return to this theme later.

In those countries, Islam gave a place to the ordinary person in the same way that early Christianity did to Roman slaves.

The decline of Islam in places it once controlled is analogous to what I have already described. For example, you can look up the term “odelisque”. Those are Western paintings of concubines or whores, if you prefer, in the Ottoman Sultan’s palace.

Western people, which you can already imagine as bourgeoisie in their usual eclectic mode, were fascinated by the Near Orient and in their mind fancied those women as something to be celebrated. Kind of how the modern girlboss on some porn platform is not a whore to be derided but a businesswoman to be glorified. Of course, this speaks to Western corruption then and now, though it also shows us that the Sultan was no longer a figure of Islamic authority but the effective equivalent of a decadent Roman leader.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire is consistent with this trend of affluence eroding the cultural guardrails of a society. Interestingly, the Greeks who fought for independence were those who earlier eras would have described as paganus. They lived in abject poverty on rocky terrain. They were literally stealing from the landed gentry to survive, hence the term Klephts (literally “thieves”).

There were no Klephts in parts of the Ottoman lands that were wealthy. There was no Klepht movement in Istanbul and the Western coast of modern Turkey, for example, which at the time had plenty of Greeks. The Pontic Greeks in the Black Sea were also not particularly active because they were fundamentally having a relatively good time with the regime.

We see again class playing a key role in rebellion. Where class finds an ethnic basis, it leads to a sustained revolution. Class alone is not enough because there is no organic solidarity between people on the basis of mere ideology. They have to speak the same language and have the same values.

The nationalism of the 18th century can thus be understood as a modern secular theology that galvanised the enslaved masses in the same way Christianity and Islam did under their own prevailing conditions. Though later nationalism turned into the iron fist of capitalism, in the form of fascism at its extreme end, but also of picking so-called “national champions” and of engaging in protectionist practices in the service of vested interests.

The other lesson to be learnt here is that Islam may be austere in principle but Muslims are not immune to corruption. Empires that are nominally Islamic will have the same fate as all other empires, namely, an inexorable turn to materialism. At a smaller scale, this is true for extreme wealth that is concentrated in few hands. Look at the economic model that Qatar was promoting prior to the current war in Iran, for example. Every so-called “influencer” from the West, which I would describe more appropriately as a whore, male of female, was going there to live the materially affluent yet morally bankrupt life.

Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism

I think that Greece historically does not belong to the West, but for our purposes here I will not bombard you with extra concepts. Consider Greeks to be Western throughout.

Let me now turn to the Western world to comment on similar trends therein. In the Easternmost areas we have Orthodoxy which is quite conservative in its doctrine. However, the Church has historically played a key political role in empires as the enforcer of the elite’s will, including during the time of the Ottomans, though it also is a big business nowadays. Still, Orthodoxy is conservative in principle and so could be used as the basis of a fundamentalist reformation.

The Catholics have a more liberal conduct. Their practice is that “all the good ones fit in”. Their various orders emphasise different parts of the faith. In some ways they are all united, but you can always think of different emphases as facilitating distinct modes of living.

You see the “all the good ones fit in” in how Catholicism incorporated the art of the Renaissance. To the untrained eye, the Renaissance is a return to the discipline of the athletic body, as epitomised by the ancient Greek world. But upon closer inspection you will notice boys whose pose is pleasing only to the eyes of a pederast, meaning that they typically expose their ass, and, generally, adult bodies that have no vigour in their stance. They look like objects.

So Catholic Europe took the awe out of Greek aesthetics. Awe, to be clear, is the combination of admiration and fear. You should admire an athletic body, for example, because it is not easy to build it up. And you should also fear it because it is supremely capable and thus potentially extremely dangerous. You cannot have it otherwise. When this is combined with strong ethics you have the perfect match, of course.

Catholic Europe became so corrupt at the ecclesiastic level that Protestantism emerged as a necessary corrective to its practices. In its core idea, Protestantism is a call for purity of varying degrees, of a return to basics, of a rejection of the notion that “all the good ones fit in” so liberally espoused by the Catholics.

Protestantism, however, combined its puritan ethos with dominant elements of individualism. It thus created the conditions for the modern Western brands of individualism, all of which have the same effect of eroding the extended family and the family altogether, undermining the moral guardrails, and promoting materialism.

[ Again, I explain this in the talk in my allusions to “structure”. See the essay I linked to earlier which covers this theme at greater length. ]

Protestantism cannot be the force of renewal that the Christian world may benefit from because individualism is the bane of society long-term. I am of the view that Catholicism is a lost cause as well, unless we are talking about a new order within it that is puritan in spirit. Orthodoxy is the best placed to take on that mantle from a doctrinal point of view. Though we have a practical problem of demographics and overall influence. The Orthodox countries have small populations and relatively weak economies, while Russia is a pariah in the Western world. As such, Orthodoxy will remain limited in its influence.

The next 30 years will have a profound effect on our future. I say “30 years” because I am thinking of demographics. If women who today are young adults do not take motherhood seriously, then the ethnic backbone of our societies is dead. We have an expiry date. I am not even considering the women already in their 30s, even though they are fertile, because ideologically they still live in a fantasy land where they can be princesses without giving anything back to the world.

Extended families and the petty bourgeois

Which brings me to the big topic of the extended family. The extended family consists of parents, children, grandparents, and many relatives living close to each other as a community. I call it “socialism at home”, which warms my leftist heart, because it is defined by interpersonal and intergenerational solidarity. It also is ethnic in its character, owning to blood ties and shared culture.

Until the mid-20th century Greece and Cyprus that I know enough about used to have extended families across the entire countryside. My own clan is the same. This changed with urbanisation in the 70s and 80s to bring us to the modern calamity we are confronted with. Villagers—and again we see the traditional, ordinary folk in action—who used to live in big families moved to the city to become bourgeoisie themselves. There they were ridiculed by the bourgeoisie as “Vlachs” (Βλάχοι) or Pontians (Πόντιοι), here a slur analogous to “paganus”. In the process, they grew individualistic, thus destroying the underpinnings of the extended family and the local community.

Individuals and atomic families in cities cannot raise children. The logistics are too demanding. Childcare costs a fortune and parenting is a full-time job on top of the existing stressful life. Grandparents are consigned to oblivion under the euphemism of “elderly care” and other relatives are nowhere to be seen. In the city, people live in fear because they do not have communities around them. They have a few friends, at best, but they otherwise do not know their neighbours, let alone those further away.

This material reality of modern city life has reinforced the latent individualism of the Protestant West which has, in turn, become the dominant worldview of all Western peoples through their gradual Americanisation. If you live in a city long enough, you understand that you can only rely on your own means. You become an individualist even if ideologically you are committed to some collectivist project like socialism.

The effect is that the average woman does not have children anymore. Plural! This is not the fault of women as such, but a systemic problem, of which individualism, including feminism, is an important part.

A typical young woman nowadays, say one who has just turned 18, is looking into several years of university studies followed by several more years of progressing through some career. By the time she even thinks of motherhood, she already is in her 30s. Generally, women can still have children at that age, but they have to be in good shape. Otherwise there are all sorts of practical challenges involved. So chances are high that those women will not have children at all.

The alternative for such a woman is to marry upward. To find a man with enough wealth so that they can jointly roll over the duties of parenthood to strangers. This ties in to the lifestyle of the petty bourgeois fellow, because now the chance to have a family is directly linked to money and the grifter mindset. Family too becomes a materialistic pay-to-win scheme.

Transferring parenthood duties to strangers has a longer-term impact on upbringing. Those kids will grow up to have daddy and mommy issues. They will also be used to being around servants, which will prime them to aspire towards wealth, thus reinforcing the materialistic bent of their parents.

This woman in our countries typically is a local from a petty bourgeois family. She has lived a comfortable life. Her childhood was dominated by fairytales of princesses and she has generally developed an aggrandised sense of self-importance. Modern men play a big role in this because they prioritise appearances instead of ethos, and thus they reward the girl who is superficially attractive but totally uninterested in the family instead of the girl who has the maturity, leadership, and emotional intelligence to be a great mother.

There are many men, myself included, who have no chance of attracting a woman from this socio-cultural milieu. Those women will not even look in our general direction. And, if they do look this way, we will not be able to have a family together because their expectations are sky-high: meals at fancy restaurants, plenty of vacations, guaranteed education all through university for the children, if any, connections with prestigious people. You get the idea. How do you tell such a woman to live a simple life in the mountains where an extended family can flourish? You do not.

Now let me connect this with Christianity and social class. I challenge you to go to church this Sunday and pay close attention to the people there. It is a parade of opulence. The church itself is so disgustingly ornate, if you notice, but I will not upset your beliefs. Look around you. Expensive cars line up outside the temple. Everybody is clad in luxury. You understand that those people are bourgeoisie who compete with each other on metrics of materialism.

They are not idiots though. A marginalised person, like me, cannot kiss up to them and fool them into thinking that we are all equal. They have a very clear understanding of their place in society. And they are looking to move upward. To their eyes, the poor are to be belittled through pity and, more importantly, to be kept out of sight. Sunday at the church is, in effect, networking for the well-off.

Sure, there is Jesus and all the rest somewhere there, but if you are not seeing the social dynamics then you are not paying attention.

The toxic cocktail of childless men in poverty

Now I will tell you about the new underclass that awaits for an ideology to turn it into the scourge of god. No, I am not exaggerating. There exist in our societies the conditions for a repeat of history.

This underclass is the group of people who are male, single, without connections, and poor. Right now they expend their energy on being conformist, i.e. on kissing up in order to improve their condition. They do so by insisting on living in urban centres, despite rent being prohibitively expensive. So expensive, in fact, that they have no disposable income to meaningfully commit to any of the activities that a city provides.

Their calculus is that they will earn a better income at some point and thus attract a wife to start a family. I think this is a failing strategy because the wider economic trends favour the further consolidation of wealth upward, while the kind of wife they have in mind is the girl I mentioned earlier who is looking for something more comfortable and/or who is not into children anyhow.

Historically, I explained how early Christianity and Islam galvanised the underclass to fight for a different world. I think the same can happen again.

Consider the following from the perspective of such a man. I include myself among them, minus the part of being a conformist for reasons you already know from my lifestyle:

• You are still strong and capable.
• You may have some resources but not enough to attract the modern local woman in your society; a woman who expects to be treated like a princess just because of how important she thinks she is.
• You want to have a family, but you know you are not getting it with a local woman unless you are very rich.
• The local women will not even look in your general direction, while your society treats you with contempt, as they do at the church. Kissing up to them only increases the disrespect they have for you. You are a loser in their eyes and you are not changing that by being slavish. That only makes you more of a loser.
• Muslim communities are largely pro-family.
• Muslim communities are the fastest growing ones in your country.
• Muslim communities are of immigrant background and so they have a better understanding of the same dynamics of marginalisation as you do.

Against this backdrop, my expectation is that for a lot of people of this social profile, conversion to Islam is an appealing proposition. Anecdotally, I already know of white men with no connection to the Middle East whatsoever who have taken that route. It is a rejection of the dominant group’s excesses, an abolition of the need to kiss up, and the path to a possible wife and family.

Not every convert will get this, of course, because there is more to marriage than ideology, though the incentive is there.

You now understand how family, class, and religion coalesce. What is missing from this equation is ethnicity. This you get once you factor in the fact that Muslim communities in many parts are extended families, which are always ethnically defined. So someone who marries into such a group is effectively absorbed into the ethnicity as well.

I will close with this personal example.

Where I live there is a small village nearby. The locals are old people. Every few weeks we learn about another death. Old people do not do culture. Simply none. They have no interest in learning new things. They do not have the fitness for sport. They are too tired to listen to you, so forget about philosophical meetings either. And I will not even mention dancing and singing… In short, a society of old people is culturally dead even though there still are humans around. I call this “zombification”, which is where we are right at the moment in many parts of the West, owning to depopulation and demographic decline in general.

In this village, there are migrants who do all the work. Men tend to the fields and women take care of the elderly. There also are refugees from Syria, of Muslim background, who are growing in number because every woman has multiple children. Those mothers are young, so they may have a few more kids.

Imagine this continues for 15 years, which is not a lot of time, and is the expected turn of events. Today’s kids of Syrian descent will be adults. The old locals will be long dead. Syrians will control the village. The few younger locals who remain will have no option but to convert to Islam or they will abandon their ancestral lands to be Christians or whatever in some other country.

I have given you a very big picture view of topics that can be discussed at great length on their own. My intention is to focus your attention on the dynamics of the underclass versus the dominant classes, of competing ethnic interests within empires, and of religion as the imposition of a new normal for social affairs.

Finally, for the Greeks who are here, but also for the others because your nations are the same, I will repeat: if those 30 years do not bring radical change in mentality the zombification will eliminate us culturally and biologically. Those who do not see it will have the same fate as all other corrupt empires, namely, they will be dominated and annihilated by the more vital and the more austere social groups.

Life is simple in this way.