A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned… The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going.
Wikipedia, Ponzi Scheme
This post is intended to expand on the philosophical ramifications of a sociocentric theology. Whether Christian or not, the only feature required for the applicability of this post is the belief in the happiness of others or of society as a whole as a final moral end.
This is a very common view, both among believers and outside the Church. Among those to whom the question of the identity of God is unimportant, it’s only natural to see the sociocentric portions of all major world religions as more or less identical: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Even those without so much as a philosophical thought in their head mostly subscribe to some form or another of the theory that the goodness of a person is tied to how he treats other people. The vast majority of people who would consider themselves “good” (more than likely the vast majority of people in general) justify the claim with reference to their treatment of other people.
The happiness of other people is thus made out to be an end in itself (that is not to say that it may not be an end at all – for how theocentrism subsumes the goals of sociocentrism and autocentrism see The Ends of Faith). This works in practice – it has worked for the entirety of human history, and as far as we can see it will continue to work: but its working is not a necessary feature of the universe.
The movie Children of Men is set in a world in which it does not – it cannot work: humanity is suddenly infertile, and the human race is dying off. Part of the brilliance of the movie is its portrayal of the existential horror of the collapse of that moral system. A sociocentric morality can abide as long as there is a posterity to bequeath one’s life to: The perpetuation of the rewards that a sociocentric morality promises and pays requires a perpetual flow of people into the world in order to keep the scheme going. It does with our lives and labor what a ponzi scheme does with our money. The investor depends on future investors to pay his financial returns; the social moralizer depends on future posterity to be the beneficiaries of his life and thus pay his moral, spiritual, or karmic returns.
Chaos reigns in the world of Children of Men because their moral referent – other people and posterity – is suddenly revealed in all its mortality and transience. As long as human extinction is not on the visible horizon, we can pretend that posterity is immortal; that the value of our moral referent is absolute in some respect. We can pretend that we are valuable as long as there is an infinite posterity with some continuity to our own.
This is the delusion of sociocentric morality. It tries to rise above autocentric morality by attaching itself to something outside and above itself. But where autocentrism does not have to concern itself with the permanence of its referent (after all if the self was of primary import in life, the death of the self makes further questions of value irrelevant), sociocentrism burdens itself with the necessity of a permanent external referent, even though the permanence of its chosen referent is as illusory as the profits of a ponzi scheme.
Thus sociocentrism, though coming with a high-minded guise, is a necessarily unstable philosophy which must either fall to autocentrism, theocentrism, or if it is stubborn to hold out against either side, nihilism.
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