Why Usury is Worse than Monarchy:
A Primer on Why Its Dumb to Keep the Banks once You Cut Off the King
The idea that mankind could abolish monarchs—those crowned embodiments of sovereign authority and final responsibility—and yet retain the parasitic scaffolding of banking as presently constituted is one of the most slovenly-minded stupidities ever propagated in the name of political progress. It is a mental folly so tangled in the shadows of Plato’s Cave that it can hardly distinguish freedom from flickering silhouettes. It is a feat of philosophical gymnastics worthy of the devils themselves: to free man from kings, who must answer to their own conscience and God, only to chain him under the tyranny of interest, algorithms, and debt compounding in the void.
This claim is not romantic monarchism. It is a rebuke of the lie that modern liberty can be maintained under an economic regime more tyrannical than any despot, more faceless than any emperor, and more relentless than any pharaoh’s whip. It is a call to recognize that every civilizational structure must serve a master—and if the master is not flesh and blood, it will be something far worse: a system, a logic, a ghost in the spreadsheet.
Let us begin with definitions.
1. Monarchy vs. Usury: An Honest Reckoning
Monarchy, for all its historical failures, has one feature which no other system, including democracy, has adequately replicated: final human responsibility. A king, for better or worse, is a man. He may sin, fail, or fall. But he stands. And he may fall on his sword. He is the living face of statehood. His decisions affect his own posterity, his name, and his eternal soul. The righteous king fears God and rules with justice; the wicked king is overthrown. Either way, the king is a node of accountability.
Usury, by contrast, is faceless. It is the practice of lending money at interest, not in hope of sharing risk or building community, but in the manipulation of time and desperation. It treats money as a crop that can grow itself, with no labor, no toil, no real risk to the lender. Worse still, it feeds on the vulnerability of the borrower. Usury hides in contracts, digital nodes, and systemic inertia. It corrupts both the one who gives and the one who receives. No man rules over usury. Usury rules over men.
When monarchy fails, you know who to blame. When usury fails, the blame disperses—among economists, among debtors, among markets and externalities. It is the most cowardly tyranny imaginable, because it demands everything and owns nothing. It extracts the fruit of labor without bearing labor’s pain.
2. The Socratic Weakness: Why Questioning Everything Is Not Wisdom
Here we must take a detour into the Socratic method, which has become the catechism of modern secular education. Socrates, the gadfly of Athens, is praised for questioning everything, overturning common assumptions, and revealing the ignorance of those who thought they were wise. Fine. But he rarely built anything. He doubted everything except his own right to doubt. He died for it—but not like a martyr who lays down his life for truth. Rather, like a man who defies the order of his city because he believes the city itself to be beneath the scrutiny of his superior intellect.
Socrates' death is no Christian martyrdom. It is Platonic pride disguised as epistemic humility.
Worse still, his method leads not to truth, but to permanent suspicion. It teaches men not to believe, but to suspect all beliefs. Once faith has been made foolish, all that remains is endless critique, endless dialectic, endless unraveling. And so—out go kings, whose authority cannot be rationally "proven." Out go priests, whose sacred texts cannot be empirically verified. And in rush banks, whose numbers can be modeled. In rush lawyers, whose logic systems appear more orderly than Scripture. In rush the technocrats, the atheists of governance, managing risk, allocating capital, worshiping Mammon by calling it “economics.”
Socrates started with a good point: wisdom begins with admitting what you don’t know. But he forgot the second point: a man must eventually believe something or he will die hollow. The Socratic method became the breeding ground for Plato’s idealism, which was then weaponized by modern finance to build a world of pure form: numbers without men, algorithms without compassion, growth without purpose.
3. Plato and the Perfect Lie: When the Ideal Destroys the Real
Plato saw that the world was a mess. He believed behind every messy chair was an ideal “Chair” in the heavens. Behind every corrupted government was a perfect “Republic,” waiting to be rationalized. And behind every flawed human society was the possibility of a philosopher-king—someone who could ascend above it all, behold the Forms, and return to rule with enlightened precision.
This is a lie. No man ascends to the Forms and comes back sinless. Only Christ has come down. Every man who tries to rule by pure Reason brings with him the stench of bias and the weight of self-justifications.
Plato gave us a vision of politics that has haunted every revolution since. The French guillotined their kings in the name of rational order. The Bolsheviks executed their czar to make way for the dialectic. The Americans rebelled against King George only to find themselves ruled, eventually, by hedge funds and data brokers. Every time a monarch is overthrown in the name of Reason, he is replaced by something colder, still more sinister, inhuman.
In place of a king who fears God, we statesiders now have a beastly “Federal Reserve” that fears inflation but does not give a rip about your soul. In place of a prince who weeps over his people, we have corporate boards managing “shareholder value” in the interests of transhumanity. In place of royal courts dispensing justice, we have credit scores, compound interest, and global-gobbling apps with no phone number to call when your identity is stolen.
And all of this came with the blessing of Plato’s ghost, who whispered in our ear: “The immaterial is what matters. The ideal is superior to the real.”
“You won’t even need books anymore!”
Let the man you has a fantasy, chase his fantasy. Republican forms are a fine, fine fiction with great rhyme and reason. But the political legacy is fire every time….
4. Usury as the High Temple of the Platonic Error
Usury is the practical application of the Platonic ideal. It believes in the growth of money without the labor of man. It treats time as a commodity to be owned and sold. It turns every relationship into a ledger and every future into a liability.
Where Plato saw a perfect world behind this one, the usurer sees a perfect profit behind every contract. “Did you save money today?” “Was it a deal?” “Did you at least have fun?” Blind to the incarnate nature of reality, ideal profits forget that justice is not a number, but a man’s nature turned right; that growth is not a graph, but a garden bearing enough fruit to share; that time is not an abstraction, but the gift of Today ever being of and from God.
To say we can remove kings but retain the banks is to say we can have body without soul, power without person, justice without judgment. It is to believe the lie that systems can govern better than men, that finance can replace fatherhood, that liquidity can replace loyalty.
5. A Final Rebuke: The Mind as Noose
Let us pun with purpose—to win the race and gain the prize. Etymologics, though they often appear as jest, are not frivolous games. They are keys. They are swords. Consider the Greek word for “mind”: νοῦς (nous). It is not, technically, related to the English word “noose,” except—of course—it is. Not by academic etymology, but by the Spirit of Babel’s long war on clarity. Sound shifts are the tectonic plates of meaning, and if you know how to listen, you will hear the fault lines crack.
This is how language reveals its ghosts. Babel did not destroy speech—it multiplied confusion by making meaning sound the same when it no longer was. That’s how the mind became a noose. That’s how reason became a gallows. That’s how the Logos, when cut loose from His flesh, becomes the very rope by which the soul hangs in abstraction.
A mind ensnared in ideals forgets the smell of bread and the warmth of blood.
A mind drunk on possibility ignores the simple weight of an honest loan.
A mind in love with Reason alone will always, eventually, crucify the Logos.
This is not about cutting off the banks. Good luck, patriot. This is about repairing the home altars of reality. This means finding rulers with names and faces—men who can bleed, and who know they must, wherever they may be in your reality. This means being such a judge, who fears God, not interest rates, in your daily choices.
This means walking on a currency of labor as the value of a man, not a laboring enslaved to currency of the moment, which is futility. Whenever the moneychanger is in the temple, it is high time—again—to drive him out.
It means dethroning Plato in your heart first. Not deleting him from the canon, but casting him from the throne. Reading him not as a master, but as a warning. The man who thought the world could be saved by the ideal failed to understand the corruption within the idealist. His Republic, left unbaptized, becomes the handmaiden of tyranny by abstraction. It’s wreckage is the western disaster so often blamed for being “Christendom.”
Flee the noose of the nous unbound and return to the incarnate Logos—the Word made flesh, full of grace and truth. Where the mind finds rest not in forms but in the form of a man, crowned with thorns, reigning from a tree.
6. Conclusion: Toward a Real Kingdom
The Christian tradition has no quarrel with good order. But order must be embodied, accountable, humane, and above all, subordinate to Christ. Monarchy, for all its risks, at least acknowledges this. Usury does not. Usury knows no love, no homeland, no Sabbath, no child. It knows only numbers. And it multiplies itself through cowardice.
If you must have a tyrant, let him be a man you can see. Let him fear death. Let him tremble at the Psalms.
Do not grant your heart to a spreadsheet, lest the mark of the beast show itself in your eyes and in your words, lest those you love be cursed as well by such a spirit of greed and animosity.
“Forgive us our debts,” is no empty, daily request….
