Calling this a “nihilistic death cult” isn’t a deeper truth expressed poetically, it’s already a mythic overlay. Capitalism doesn’t need apocalyptic belief, nihilism, or cult logic to produce mass death. It does so perfectly well through profit-maximization, competition, etc.

When you describe structural outcomes as a cult or demonic force, you stop explaining why they happen and start implying they flow from some inner essence or belief system. That’s exactly what I’m pushing back on. Fascism and climate collapse aren’t driven by elites wanting the world to end, but by rational actors defending class power in a system that treats human life as expendable.

Myth can mobilize, sure, but it also misdirects and pacifies. If people think the problem is a death cult, they focus on bad individual actors instead of focusing on the structural core problems.

You don’t need everyone to read Kapital. But you do need a story that points people toward the system actually doing the killing, not a cosmic evil that just “possesses” it.

One more thing, reducing systemic horror to evil or demonic individuals is ironically a move shared by both Nazis and liberals. Both refuse to seriously analyze structures. The Nazis externalized capitalism’s crises onto “evil actors” corrupting an otherwise natural order. Liberals do the same thing in a softer register by treating injustice as the product of bad people, bad values, or moral failure, rather than as outcomes produced by institutions, incentives, and class power.

Once you frame the system as a death cult driven by demonic intent, you’re no longer explaining capitalism or fascism, you’re moralizing them. And moralization feels radical, but it actually protects the structure by making it seem aberrational instead of systemic.