Theologies without Gods & sandcastle of reason: Hegel, ideology & the modern mind

The grand Western experiments of capitalism and socialism, for all their claims to rationality and moral superiority, are ultimately unworkable—not because they lack systems, but because they are scaffolded upon a myth. This myth, secular in appearance but theological in structure, is the Hegelian vision of history: a teleological arc stretching toward perfection, culminating in what Hegel called the Age of Reason.

Hegel, that high priest of modern historicism, carved history into three epochs: the Age of the Orient, the Age of the Greeks, and the final act—our supposed present—the Age of Reason. In his schema, the world was moving inexorably toward rational freedom, and he believed, with stunning arrogance, that this culmination found its clearest expression in his own mind and moment. Western ideologies, both capitalist and socialist, have since inherited this progressive dogma, each imagining themselves as the final vehicle for history’s fulfillment.

For over a century, capitalism and socialism have clashed with ferocious conviction, each claiming to be reason’s true emissary. The capitalists anoint themselves the stewards of rational liberty and individual enterprise, dismissing socialists as nihilistic, collectivist, and irrational. The socialists, in turn, present themselves as the harbingers of justice and equality, branding capitalists as exploitative, imperialist, and irredeemably bourgeois.

But both stand on sand.

The very notion of an “Age of Reason” is itself a fiction—an Enlightenment-era gospel that mistakes abstraction for truth. The human mind, for all its brilliance, is not a beacon of pure reason but a fog of impulses, myths, intuitions, fears, and desires. We do not choose our ideologies with the precision of philosophers; we inherit them, feel them, absorb them through culture and trauma and convenience. At the individual and civilizational level, it is nearly impossible to distinguish where reason ends and myth begins.

And so, what masquerades as history’s march toward rational perfection is often nothing more than the clash of competing irrationalities, each wrapped in the robes of logic. Hegel believed himself to be the apex of reason—yet his own philosophy, when stripped of its pomp, reveals the bones of mythology: a secular eschatology promising salvation not in heaven, but in history.

To see the world clearly, one must first renounce the illusion that it is fully knowable. Neither capitalism nor socialism has a monopoly on truth, for truth—if it exists at all—does not reside in systems. It resides, fleetingly, in doubt.