Moral Crisis as the Cost of Efficiency
A Tocquevillian Diagnosis of How Market Dogma Gutted America’s Inner Life—and Why Theology Can Salvage Liberty
I. The Spiritual Cost of Materialism: Tocqueville’s Prophetic Insight into Democracy’s Inner Decay
Tocqueville foresaw that democratic materialism would rot the human spirit from within—that without religion or transcendent belief, democracies would devolve into economic machines inhabited by spiritually starved individuals. “Materialism in any nation is a dangerous malady of the human spirit,” he warned, “but it is particularly to be feared in a democratic people, because it weds with marvelous ease the defect of the heart most commonly found in democratic peoples.”
He feared not mere wealth, but a moral economy insulated from the human spirit—a culture where gratification replaces aspiration and life becomes increasingly depersonalized. “Do not attempt to deprive men of their old religious opinions,” he cautioned, “in order to replace them with new ones, lest the soul, in passing from one faith to another and finding itself momentarily devoid of belief, prove so receptive to the love of material gratifications that this love comes to fill the void entirely.”
A century and a half later, the scenario he sketched is no longer speculative but ambient reality. Our culture of unbounded consumption and economic abstraction has razed the inner life of society. Market fundamentalism, when stripped of metaphysical grounding, becomes not only economically volatile—but existentially dehumanizing.
“Metempsychosis is surely not more reasonable than materialism,” Tocqueville concluded, “yet if a democracy were absolutely obliged to choose between the two, I would not hesitate: its citizens, to my mind, would be in less danger of reducing themselves to brutes by thinking that the soul might pass into the body of a pig than by believing that it is nothing.”
Tocqueville feared not merely consumption, but the spiritual submission to matter—the reduction of man to a body to be pleasured, optimized, and discarded. He recognized that even a vague or heterodox belief in the soul—such as reincarnation or absorption into the divine—preserves human dignity.
“Belief in an immaterial and immortal principle united for a time with matter is so necessary to the grandeur of man,” he wrote, “that its effects are still striking even when it is not linked to assessment of rewards and punishments and one believes simply that after death, the divine principle contained in man is absorbed in God or goes to animate another creature.”
In the absence of moral metaphysics, consumerism ceases to be a habit and becomes a faith—a form of worship. As Tocqueville observes, “men may on occasion give up their religion, but they throw off one yoke only to bow to another. The object of faith changes, but faith itself does not die.”
II. The Collapse of Moral Order: How the Loss of Theology Leaves Society Fragmented, Directionless, and Spiritually Hollow
Tocqueville observes that man is uniquely torn, driven by desires the world cannot fulfill: “The incomplete joys of this world can never satisfy his heart.” It is for this reason he writes, “Man is the only creature to exhibit both a natural disgust for existence and an overwhelming desire to exist: he despises life and fears nothingness. These divergent instincts constantly compel his soul to contemplate the other world, and religion leads him to it.”
Therefore, religion, Tocqueville concludes, is “nothing other than a particular form of hope, as natural to the human heart as hope itself.”
Tocqueville sees this instinct as so fundamental to the individual that it is nearly axiomatic; its rejection is so incomprehensible and alien that it amounts to a kind of inner intellectual revolt—a moral cataclysm. He writes that “men stray from religious belief through a kind of aberration of the intelligence, and with the aid of a type of moral violence against their own nature,” suggesting that disbelief is not only irrational but violently self-alienating.
However, for Tocqueville, this loss of faith is not driven by malice, but unfolds as a quiet and sorrowful progression. As he observes, “People do not reject their beliefs; rather, their beliefs forsake them… Swept along by an imperceptible current which they lack the courage to fight yet to which they surrender with regret, they abandon the faith they love in order to follow doubt that leads to despair.”
To Tocqueville, this is not a sign of liberation but of grief—an awareness that something deeply valuable has been lost. Those who no longer believe are not intent on tearing faith down; rather, they are haunted by its absence, unwilling to disrupt the peace it brings to others.
It is a loneliness based in memory—a longing for belief that once gave life meaning. As Tocqueville reflects, “He understands how beliefs can make men live in peace and prepare them gently for death. Having lost the faith, he nevertheless longs for it, and, fully aware of the value of his vanished possession, he is afraid to take it from anyone who possesses it still.”
However, Tocqueville insists that such estrangement is never final, as there is “an invincible inclination [that] brings them back.” The immutable state of the individual is not disbelief but belief—something in human nature inevitably draws us back to it. The return from apostasy is inescapable. No matter how far one strays, an inborn spiritual impulse remains alive, pulling the soul once again toward the divine. As Tocqueville writes, “Unbelief is an accident; faith alone is the permanent condition of humankind.”
Without a theological framework, anything carrying moral weight becomes hollow. Morality turns into a private code—vague, abstract, and unenforceable. It drifts without direction, incapable of commanding allegiance or restraining desire.
To define morality by individualist instinct is a form of self-exaltation—the presumption that one can determine good and evil, right and wrong, and the very foundation of moral truth. It reduces society to a tangled web of ethics—fragmented, conflicting, and ultimately incapable of unifying.
Theology does more than offer an image of the divine—it constructs the moral architecture upon which civilization rests. Even in secular contexts, religious tradition serves not only as personal faith, but as a public moral framework: shaping conduct, restraining impulse, inviting humility, and orienting the human person toward something higher. The sacred, in this sense, is not just personally transformative—it is socially formative and civilizational in effect.
The Ten Commandments are more than religious prescriptions; they are enduring moral boundaries—less an instrument of coercion than a foundation for restraint. The Noahide laws represent a theological transformation to establish universal ethics grounded in divine authority.
This act of moral boundary-setting—resisting collapse and preserving hope—is framed in a theological tradition that seeks to articulate enduring moral order. Outside of that structure, morality becomes fragmented: reduced to cultural preference, shaped by political blocs, and unable to transcend the temporal world theology was always meant to rise above.
It was this very tension that Tocqueville grappled with when he wrote, “Despotism can do without faith, but liberty cannot,” then asked, “How can society fail to perish if, as political bonds are loosened, moral bonds are not tightened? And what is to be done with a people that is its own master, if it is not obedient to God?”
Religion then becomes a prerequisite of humanity itself—metaphysically transcendent, and serving as the heart of a healthy social order. When we strip morality from theology and faith from public life, we don’t find liberation but loss—we grieve, we mourn, we spiral, and we are left hopeless.
There is more in that ethos than a mere “protection plan” against centralized government. There is hope for social regeneration, one that addresses the rising isolation, substance use desperation, technology-induced alienation, and cultural atomization that have transformed liberty into a lonely, dead-eyed brand of autonomy.
Amid this moral crisis marked by fragmentation, loneliness, and ethical ambivalence, the promise of unbounded individualism molded by market orthodoxy has become a slow-burning accelerant of collective despair. What was once revered as liberation now feels like a project of alienation—a gradual unraveling of the communal, spiritual, and moral architecture that Tocqueville recognized as essential to life's coherence and meaning. Increasingly, people feel like they are going extinct in their own communities—present, but no longer seen, needed, or known.
III. The Idolatry of Markets: When Economic Dogma Replaces Human Dignity and National Purpose
Laissez-faire dogma, when treated as sacred, rewards demoralization. It hollows out the very institutions and relationships that once gave people a sense of meaning and uplift—substituting depth with efficiency, and belonging with transaction. In doing so, it serves not the nation, but a transnational market machine.
A rising number of people watch with horror as faceless tech oligarchs track, categorize, and commodify human lives—reducing people to data points packaged and sold to advertisers. They see foreign labor strategically deployed to suppress wages, displace domestic workers, and strip laborers of the national identity once grounded in meaningful, dignified work.
Across traditional left-right blocs, a growing sentiment sees these trends as profoundly dehumanizing—reducing the human person to a disposable cog in service of abstract market metrics like GDP and stock indices, symbols that increasingly signify not prosperity, but the unraveling of cultural coherence and national purpose.
Increasingly, Americans are finding it incomprehensible how post–Cold War Wilsonianism, rather than delivering liberation, has hollowed out their once-thriving communities—transforming formerly sociable, middle-class neighbors into divorced opioid addicts.
They drive down streets nearly entranced by the monotony of homogenized brutalism, unable to pinpoint when exactly the landscape was overtaken by Dollar Trees—bleak gray boxes lit by harsh fluorescent lights, stocked with cheaply manufactured goods assembled by overworked Chinese laborers tethered to assembly lines, building products they could never afford, while Foxconn suicide nets stretch beneath their feet. Inside, exhausted, isolated service workers drift through shifts, trapped in a system that offers no escape and no meaning.
Markets are a tool, not a divine source to be worshiped. To bow to markets as an all-powerful entity capable of curing despair is to depersonalize human life. Economic activity alone doesn’t cause people to collapse and die on the streets from opioid overdoses, abandon their families, or give up on employment. Markets can worsen these problems, but only when they become absolute—when they are detached from any communal, religious, or moral foundation.
And when that foundation collapses, the result is inevitable. Market dogma—whether exercised through total dismantlement or laissez-faire fundamentalism—will never correct for nearly 90,000 annual opioid overdose deaths, broken families, spiraling suicide rates, and the quiet extinction marked by collapsing birth rates. When an ideology prices everything and prizes nothing, even liberty itself is rendered in small change.
IV. Why Liberty Needs Moral Metaphysics: True Freedom Requires a Moral Order Beyond Market Metrics
Engaging in market reductionism treats human beings like balance sheets—nothing more than overhead costs to be analyzed against economic markers. Humans become variables in a model, little economic units to be tinkered with under the framework of an ideology.
The belief is that if the economic system keeps adjusting and the ideological model keeps refining, people will find happiness—it's an impulse that replaces purpose with ideology, material wealth, and endless individual choice.
If people simply have more things at their disposal, despair is supposed to disappear. Flat-screen TVs, new iPhones, and cheap rent become existential antidotes to the void infecting the heart of society. Cheaper goods and more money are treated as the deepest symbols of prosperity—as if fulfillment were just a matter of stockpiling plastic things.
Families are not built for love, meaning, or based in existential vows, but rather designed to serve an economic marker. Happiness is interchangeable with financial comfort. The human soul is dismissed as a spreadsheet. Life’s purpose shrinks down to loyalty to a system engineered from above—like humans exist only to validate a political model.
Paired with an unrelenting accumulation of material possessions is the idea that people should be free to do whatever they want, whenever they want. Personal autonomy, no matter how alienating, is treated as the highest good—measured not by virtue, sacrifice, or belonging, but by a social code that seeks to ruthlessly maximize the number of available choices. More choice equals more freedom. Commitment, duty, and rootedness are no longer seen as sources of meaning, but as chains to be sawed out of the human condition—an aberration to be obliterated, whether overtly or by structural design.
This strips people down to isolated fragments. When the common good and every binding value become optional, people begin to sleepwalk into implosion. Life becomes hopeless—a hollow marketplace of transactions, with nothing left to die for, nothing left to believe in, and no one left to trust. This is not meaning but loneliness in its purest, most brutal, and agonizing form.
People are not economic inputs on a Microsoft Excel sheet—they have souls, they need community, they need faith, and they need commitment to something greater than themselves. Markets can infect and exacerbate the wounds left by the collapse of a shared moral order, but they cannot correct for them in isolation.
This is not an endorsement of economic egalitarianism, a rejection of authority, a fantasy of central planning, or a flattening of hierarchies. It’s not a demolition project. Rather, it is an observation that society has mistakenly reshuffled our highest values—placing economic efficiency above human welfare, at catastrophic social cost. It is merely a plea to restore markets to the cultural and metaphysical foundations they once presumed—not to annihilate them.
Rather than traffic in market abolitionism, this is an appeal to restore social and moral coherence—to revitalize a collapsing “essential worker” labor force, counter the unchecked dominance of the managerial “laptop class,” and slow the relentless automation of meaningful labor and craftsmanship. It aims to protect honest workers from having their dignity, purpose, and meaning stripped away by machines, algorithms, and abstraction.
This is not an objection to markets in principle, but rather to their current form and function. Markets have always existed, but never before have they been so dehumanizing and caustic to human dignity.
V. Toward Moral and Social Renewal: A Pursuit of the Common Good over Economic Abstractions
There is a growing realization—transcending partisan blocs—that the so-called “liberation” marketed today is actually enslavement: to impulse, screens, status, and loneliness. Ironically, institutions labeled oppressive—duty, commitment, vows—are precisely the structures safeguarding us from despair. Commitments once dismissed as restrictive are now increasingly recognized as vital pathways toward authentic freedom.
Russell Kirk emphasizes that liberty and order are not zero-sum but mutually reinforcing: liberty, if unchecked, collapses into chaos; order, if devoid of liberty, degenerates into tyranny. Thus, liberty and order must coexist, balancing each other to protect society from spiritual emptiness. Tocqueville expressed a similar insight, urging democratic peoples specifically to cultivate “a taste for the infinite, a sense of greatness, and a love of immaterial pleasures” as essential safeguards against spiritual decay.
Today, the cost of ignoring these warnings is undeniable. In 2022, opioids killed 81,806 Americans—the equivalent of a fully loaded Boeing 777 crashing every single day for a year, with no survivors. As this crisis deepens, the pressing question arises: what exactly are we being liberated from under a social order governed by individualist orthodoxy and market dogma?
This is the question we must directly confront, acknowledging that freedom without commitment and individualism without community leave us isolated, vulnerable, and ultimately disposable components within a system prioritizing production over human life. Yet, by honestly addressing this reality, we open pathways toward genuine renewal—restoring communities, reaffirming mutual commitments, and rebuilding a moral order centered not on abstract economic metrics but on human dignity and the common good.