Money Is the Religion Nobody Admits They Belong To

There is a reason you feel vaguely anxious most of the time and cannot quite name why. There is a reason the Epstein files story — no matter how many times it resurfaces — changes nothing. There is a reason you can scroll through three hours of content about how broken the world is and still go to work the next morning without a single thing shifting in how you live.

The reason is not that you are lazy or stupid. It is that you are inside a system so total, so complete, that it has replaced the very thing humans once used to make sense of reality. It replaced God. Not with atheism. With money. And unlike God, money does not even ask you to believe in it. It just makes itself necessary, and lets the belief take care of itself.

Self-Perfected is a free community founded in 2020 by Mitchell Snyder, Cameron Cope, and Drake Pearson — built for people who are done nodding along to explanations that go nowhere and are ready to actually look at what is happening and what to do about it.

The pattern is not hard to see once someone points at it directly. A nineteenth century anarchist named Mikhail Bakunin spelled it out in a book called God and State: the masses are given God so they do not pursue money. The elite pursue money and use God as the pacifier that keeps everyone else in place. The poor pray. The wealthy compound. And both groups believe, at some level, that this arrangement is either divinely ordained or just how things are.

What replaced that arrangement in the modern world is not so different. You have the Protestant anxiety Bakunin described — the nagging doubt that you do not quite believe enough, that you are not saved, that something is off — except now that anxiety lives in your finances. Am I doing enough? Am I earning enough? Am I investing correctly? Is my mindset the problem? The crisis of faith did not go away. It just moved from church to self-help, from confession to therapy, from indulgences to personal development courses.

And TikTok is the new television in the bedroom. The woman who worked at TikTok building their ad sales infrastructure — eating, sleeping, breathing the platform — did not realize she was assembling something harmful until it started dissolving her own attention span and memory. That is not a story about a bad company. It is a story about what happens when the only question you are allowed to ask about your work is whether it pays. As long as it pays, it is fine. That is the religion in practice. The money justifies the act. The act does not need to justify itself.

The game theory dimension of this is worth sitting with. The research on prisoner’s dilemma strategy shows that the best long-term approach is cooperation with punishment — you trust until someone betrays you, then you hit back once, then you return to cooperation. This is exactly how elite networks operate. They are not playing zero-sum games against each other. They are playing cooperative games with each other while the rest of the population plays zero-sum games against themselves. The Epstein conversation is Trump playing that cooperative game. You do not release the list because releasing the list is defecting, and defecting ends the cooperation. The people demanding the list are playing a different game entirely — one where they have no chips and no seat at the table.

This is not a counsel of despair. It is a description of what you are actually dealing with, which is the prerequisite for doing anything real about it.

Bakunin’s solution — and Bernard’s solution, and the solution that comes up every time you actually follow the thread to its end — is education. Not school. Not credentials. The actual development of the capacity to read, to recognize patterns, to see how things connect across time. The Chinese professor in the video they discuss can look at the relationship between the US and Iran and see the inevitable conflict not because he has secret knowledge but because he can read and he processes what he reads. The average person watching the same situation through a screen cannot see it because the screen has been doing the processing for them since they were six months old in a crib with a television.

The point about reading is not nostalgic. It is structural. When you read, you build the scaffolding in your mind that lets you hold a complex idea long enough to connect it to another complex idea. When you consume content — even intelligent content — someone else is doing that work for you, and you are receiving conclusions without developing the machinery to reach them yourself or to question them. This is why the same populations that are most entertained are most easily misled. Not because they are dumb. Because the tool for seeing clearly has been outsourced.

What Self-Perfected is actually about — beneath all the specific topics — is building people who can see. Who can read. Who can sit with a hard idea without immediately reaching for something that makes the discomfort go away. The discomfort is the signal, not the problem. The anxiety you feel when you start to actually look at how the money system works, what it requires of you, what it costs everyone else — that anxiety is not a reason to stop looking. It is evidence that you are finally looking at something real.

Hear the Full Conversation

Mitchell Snyder, Cameron Cope, and Drake Pearson go deep into Bakunin’s God and State, the TikTok ad machine, game theory at the elite level, and why reading — actual reading — is the thing the system most needs you not to do in this episode of the Self-Perfected Podcast. Listen to the full episode here.

Common Questions

Why money is the real religion most people belong to

Money functions as a unifying belief system in ways traditional religion never fully achieved — it requires no theology, crosses cultural lines, and makes itself indispensable through necessity rather than faith. When your access to food, shelter, and dignity is mediated through money, belief is automatic. The anxiety people feel about finances mirrors the Protestant crisis of faith almost exactly: am I doing enough, am I saved, is something wrong with me?

How the system keeps people from thinking clearly

The combination of screen-based entertainment from infancy, education that outsources comprehension to technology, and a money system that rewards compliance over questioning creates people who process less and less of their own reality. The capacity to read deeply — to hold a complex idea and connect it to another — is the specific skill that gets eroded, and it is the specific skill required to see how systems actually work.

What is Self-Perfected and what does the community actually do

Self-Perfected is a free community of approximately 2,500 people in 30 cities worldwide, founded in 2020 by Mitchell Snyder, Cameron Cope, and Drake Pearson. It centers on self-honesty, self-responsibility, and the actual work of changing how you live — not self-improvement as entertainment, but the slower, harder process of building real character. The Friday Night Hangout has run for 200 or more consecutive weeks. The podcast has 280 or more episodes.

How is self-perfection different from self-help or self-improvement

Self-improvement typically means feeling better about where you are. Self-perfection means being honest about where you actually are and changing it — including the parts you most want to avoid looking at. The resistance you feel toward something is usually the signal that it matters, not the reason to skip it. Self-Perfected draws a hard line between the two because self-improvement without self-honesty tends to become a more sophisticated form of staying stuck.

Why the Epstein files debate changes nothing for most people

Even full disclosure of who was involved would not fundamentally alter the system that made it possible — and everyone who participates in that system without questioning it is implicated in its outcomes, not just the people at the top. The real question the Epstein conversation keeps avoiding is what you are actually willing to change about how you live, not what you want someone else to be held accountable for.