Joan Robinson, one of the most important economists of the twentieth century, states in her book Economic Philosophy, published in the early 1960s, an idea that has deeply influenced my training as a theologian and scholar of religion in the modern world:

It is precisely the pursuit of profit which destroys the prestige of the businessman. While wealth can buy all forms of respect, it never finds them freely given. It was the task of the economist to overcome these sentiments and justify the ways of Mammon to man. No one likes to have a bad conscience. Pure cynicism is rather rare. Even the Thugs robbed and murdered for the honor of their goddess. It is the business of the economists, not to tell us what to do, but to show why what we are doing anyway is in accord with proper principles.⁹
From this provocative statement, I wish to highlight the relationship between “bad conscience” and sacrifice. In Robinson’s observation that “even the Thugs — a group of professional criminals, devotees of Kali, who robbed and murdered travelers in northern India until the mid-nineteenth century — robbed and murdered for the honor of their goddess,” the term sacrifice does not appear explicitly. Instead, she speaks of murder, which reflects an external interpretation, formulated from the standpoint of someone who does not share the religious worldview of the Thugs. From her perspective, the death of victims is classified as homicide rather than sacrifice.
For the Thugs themselves, however, these deaths were sacrificial acts—that is, they were understood as obedience to the demands of the goddess. When killing is framed as a divine mandate, death is interpreted as sacrifice—something good, necessary, and even holy—not as murder. Death is an empirical fact; the distinction between murder and sacrifice is the result of a theological interpretation.
A similar dynamic appears in Christian history: for many Christians, the deaths resulting from colonization, slavery, and the exclusion of the poor from the economic system were often understood as sacrifices demanded by God or required for the “progress of civilization.” Within this logic, religions and theologies play the role of legitimizing the pathways through which dominant groups pursue greater wealth and power.

Yet why do individuals and societies feel the need to justify such deaths and acts of pillage through the notion of sacrifice? Would it not be sufficient simply to seize what they desire without guilt — just as one eats meat without moral distress? Robinson suggests that justification is necessary because “no one likes to have a bad conscience” and because “pure cynicism is rather rare.” As noted above, pure cynicism represents an anomaly in human evolutionary development. Neuroscientists and evolutionary anthropologists argue that our capacity for empathy is a fundamental component of

The notion of bad conscience presupposes the distinction between good and bad conscience— that is, it presupposes a process of ethical discernment. This raises an important question: how is the criterion for discerning between good and bad conscience discovered or constructed? Is it the result of a revelation of truth and goodness granted by gods or enlightened beings? Or is it merely the product of cultural processes through which dominant groups impose their conceptions of truth and goodness upon the defeated?

The recurring social and personal need for religious justification or for pseudoscientific ideologies in the face of acts of theft, oppression, and murder across different societies suggests that we are dealing with something prior to, or underlying, the cultural and economic-political spheres. However, recognizing this deeper layer does not necessarily compel us to adopt the hypothesis of divine revelation.

In my own intellectual trajectory, particularly in examining the relationship between what is considered “natural,” what is considered “cultural,” and what religions describe as “revelation” or “enlightenment,” a text by the Dalai Lama proved especially illuminating. In Ethics for the New Millennium, he writes:

When I speak of basic human feeling, I am not only thinking of something fleeting and vague, however. I refer to the capacity we all have to empathize with one another, which, in Tibetan we call shen dug ngal wa la mi sö pa. Translated literally, this means ‘the inability to bear the sight of another’s suffering.’ Given that this is what enables us to enter into, and to some extent participate, in others’ pain, it is one of our most significant characteristics. It is what causes us to start at the sound of a cry for help, to recoil at the sight of harm done to another, to suffer when confronted with others’ suffering. And it is what compels us to shut our eyes even when we want to ignore others’ distress.¹⁰

The Dalai Lama’s final statement is particularly significant: it points to a conflict between the desire to ignore the suffering of others and the physical experience of empathy. Perceiving and feeling the suffering of another entails, in some measure, participating in that suffering. It is impossible to understand what another person is experiencing without simultaneously undergoing, in our own bodies, something of their pain or joy. For this reason, we often “close our eyes” in an attempt to deny empathy or compassion and to shield ourselves from the discomfort generated by the suffering of others. We may shut our eyes, but we cannot fully prevent empathy from occurring. This very compulsion to look away reveals that empathy is a fundamental human characteristic.

What individuals can do, however, is attempt to diminish the impact of others’ suffering on themselves by reducing their own social sensitivity. This is precisely what Pope Francis has repeatedly denounced as the globalized “culture of indifference” fostered by neoliberalism. As social inequality and the exclusion of the poor intensify, a conflict emerges between (a) the desire for unlimited accumulation, which defines the spirit of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, and (b) empathy, one of the primary emotional dispositions of the human species.

It is within this context that Joan Robinson’s notion of the bad conscience of today’s ruling classes becomes pertinent. Bad conscience reflects the first moment in which a human being, aware that the pursuit of Mammon will inevitably cause suffering to others — and ultimately to themselves, and even to the future of civilization — nevertheless desires to proceed. This is the dimension of evil to which Chomsky refers. The second moment involves the attempt to suppress within oneself the force generated by empathy. The individual driven by greed must resist the natural pull of empathy and reaffirm a desire that they know, at some level, to be harmful both to themselves and to others. This tension arises between primary empathy and the self-centered assertion of a desire to possess what belongs to others — a dynamic rooted in envy, mimesis, and greed. This theme of covetousness appears explicitly in the tenth commandment given by Yahweh in the book of Exodus.

The third moment is the inversion of good and evil, an inversion often justified through reference to gods — deities who demand the sacrifice of human lives¹¹. In the process of recognizing oneself as a human being, a person discovers their individuality precisely to the extent that they learn to understand what another expresses and feels. Thus, what the modern Western world typically calls an “individual” is, in fact, someone constituted through relationships within a community. This implies that the notion of one’s own dignity emerges only through the recognition of the dignity of others¹². Yet this formative process contradicts greed and the desire for power — spiritual forces that stand in opposition to empathy and compassion. It is at this juncture that the perceived need arises to justify the sacrifice of others in the name of the gods.

As Isaiah Berlin reminds us in his engagement with Kant’s thought, “To what could a human being be sacrificed? Only to something which is superior to, more authoritative, more valuable than that human being”¹³. For believers, both past and present, the gods and their sacred texts are understood as superior and transcendent realities. For Kant, such sacrifices amounted to blasphemy; for liberation theologians, for Pope Franci¹⁴, and for Pope Leo X¹⁵, the contemporary equivalent is the idolatry of money, which exerts a dominant and destructive power in today’s world.

In analyzing Joan Robinson’s statement, I emphasized the psychosocial and intersubjective dimensions of sacrifice and the bad conscience of individuals and societies. I now turn to a thesis formulated by Max Weber concerning sacrifice in the modern world. Addressing the impossibility of science to adjudicate between competing cultural value systems, Weber writes:

Just as the Greek would bring a sacrifice at one time to Aphrodite and at another to Apollo, and above all, to the gods of his own city, people do likewise today. Only now, the gods have been deprived of the magical and mythical, but inwardly true qualities that gave them such vivid immediacy. These gods and their struggles are ruled over by fate, and certainly not by “science.” We cannot go beyond understanding what the divine means for this or that system or within this or that system.¹⁶

First, it must be emphasized that, for Weber, one of the defining features of modernity is the disenchantment of the world. However, this concept does not imply that the modern world has become secularized in the sense of rendering the notion of God socially irrelevant. Weber suggests instead that every society—premodern or modern—requires a “God,” whether personal or impersonal. Thus, in neoliberalism, the “Free Market” operates as a transcendent and unquestionable principle¹⁷; in the former Soviet Union, the “Communist State”¹⁸ functioned in a similar way. Without a sacred principle and its corresponding sacred values, no social system can sustain itself. The ultimate foundation of social order is always something sacred— something in whose name sacrifices, including human sacrifices, can be demanded. Conversely, the transformation of a social system or a social revolution requires the emergence of a new God.

This is why Weber analyzed the rise of capitalism as the emergence of a new spirit, the Spirit of Capitalism. At the risk of repeating what is already widely known, it is helpful to cite Weber’s well-known formulation:

In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, […] appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naïve point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.¹⁹

With the emergence of a new spirit and a new transcendental—indeed, irrational—principle, which requires no rational justification, we encounter a new criterion for legitimizing sacrifices. What we are witnessing in the current political-cultural conflict is precisely a war of the gods.²⁰

In this context, it is crucial to recall that these gods and their promised heavens or paradises are not entities situated outside the universe. As Franz Hinkelammert—one of the most significant critical thinkers within the tradition of liberation theology—observes:

Heaven has a history, just like the earth. When the earth changes, the heaven changes, for the simple reason that the heaven is a human imagination based on the earth. Heaven is, in a certain sense and most of the time, an unconscious human project. This is particularly true of the Christian tradition, in which the projects of human society appear through the anticipation of heaven on earth. […] There are no changes without a projection of what will be. Since what will be is always derived as an anticipation of heaven on earth, the struggle for power on earth is always a struggle for heaven.²¹

This indicates that any adequate analysis of contemporary social conflict requires a deeper engagement with theological discussions concerning the gods and their corresponding images of paradise.