"I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics"
About this Quote
Hillman’s jab lands because it treats modern misery less as a chemical imbalance than as a theological problem in disguise. The line turns “economics” into a jealous god: not a neutral tool for distributing resources, but a ruling story that decides what counts as real, rational, and worthy. By calling it “only one god,” Hillman isn’t nostalgically arguing for church attendance. He’s diagnosing a psychic monoculture, where value collapses into price and the good life gets reduced to “growth,” “productivity,” and “return on investment.”
The subtext is a critique of a culture that medicalizes unhappiness while refusing to interrogate the worldview producing it. If your supreme deity is economics, then every other human register becomes secondary or suspect: grief is “unproductive,” contemplation is “inefficient,” beauty is “nice-to-have,” community is “networking.” Even moral language gets absorbed into cost-benefit talk. People feel spiritually underfed, then blame themselves for not optimizing harder.
Context matters: Hillman came out of depth psychology (Jung-adjacent), where symptoms aren’t just errors to eliminate but messages from the soul, from imagination, from neglected meanings. He spent years pushing back against the late-20th-century drift toward technocratic solutions and market logic as default common sense. The line’s intent is provocation: to make the reader notice the altar they’re already kneeling at, and to suggest that a pluralistic psyche needs plural gods - multiple sources of purpose, reverence, and measure - if it’s going to be anything other than miserable.
The subtext is a critique of a culture that medicalizes unhappiness while refusing to interrogate the worldview producing it. If your supreme deity is economics, then every other human register becomes secondary or suspect: grief is “unproductive,” contemplation is “inefficient,” beauty is “nice-to-have,” community is “networking.” Even moral language gets absorbed into cost-benefit talk. People feel spiritually underfed, then blame themselves for not optimizing harder.
Context matters: Hillman came out of depth psychology (Jung-adjacent), where symptoms aren’t just errors to eliminate but messages from the soul, from imagination, from neglected meanings. He spent years pushing back against the late-20th-century drift toward technocratic solutions and market logic as default common sense. The line’s intent is provocation: to make the reader notice the altar they’re already kneeling at, and to suggest that a pluralistic psyche needs plural gods - multiple sources of purpose, reverence, and measure - if it’s going to be anything other than miserable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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