‘Max Weber, and The Nightmare of The Industrial City’

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Extended version (3,100 words)

PART I

‘Max Weber’

Or

How My Grandfather Escaped Poverty in South Texas

I was born in Chicago, Illinois to an abused, but brilliant woman. Her father, who I harbour feelings towards that might best be described as simply “neutral,” grew up in South Texas. Her father was different than his brothers. His brothers were often caught up in gang activity, and violence in his community. What her father could see that his brothers couldn’t, was that this life often ends in prison or death.

My grandfather’s family experienced segregation and poverty ever since they had arrived in Texas, continuously, almost as though they could’ve been read as resigned to the systems of oppression that stopped them from truly experiencing their moment of class ascendancy promised to them by America.

So, when her father made the incredible decision to attend San Antonio College, or SAC, it came as an incredible surprise to his brothers.

Except it didn’t.

My grandfather’s family had only found themselves in South Texas in the first place after the Mexican Revolution, when the minority protestant population in Tamaulipas fled northward after continuous oppression from the Catholic majority, which Mexico still retains.

And my grandfather, or “Mr. Bryand,” was the most religious child of his family.

So: Mr. Bryand had a decision to make. One that might even occur to us, even though as individuals we may lack his religious affinities. Mr. Bryand could either accept his circumstances and make his ambitions subordinate to his responsibilities to his community, or he could amass capital to liberate himself from it. What would he do?

Mr. Bryand, over the course of his adult life, would come to find himself liberated. He now lives on the north side of San Antonio, in Stone Oak. If you visit Stone Oak, one of the first things you may note is that it is not very diverse. Although it is diversifying. You might also note the presence of large signs advertising a “church” but, somehow, it doesn’t look like any of the churches you’ve imagined. It’s big, complex, and confusingly: it probably has no denomination.

As I’ve begun describing a slightly sinister version of Stone Oak, a place where crime is generally low and neighbors do look out for each other, you may say, “Ariel, hold on. Put yourself in his shoes. What other option did Mr. Bryand have but to follow his ambitions? Poverty is not a virtue in and of itself. And a bachelor’s degree was, at the time, a way that many people escaped poverty.”

And you would be right. Poverty is not virtuous in and of itself.  

But neither is capital.

And what you may not know is that you are likely under the same spell that Mr. Bryand was. That spell is what Max Weber would describe as “The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism”.

Two generations later, his grandson faced a similar dilemma, but this time, markedly different. Having chosen to self-study after the pandemic hit, I left high school. It never challenged me to the extent my elders had promised it would. And it failed to deliver the experience that once thrived in the American imagination: everyone, to the person, was obsessed with their phones. The scripts that once existed for social interaction I found had broken apart, and I quickly found myself in a state of deep mental unwellness. I first read Marx’s Capital at 16, uninterested in The Communist Manifesto and not yet old enough to be interested in Pre-capitalist Economic Formations.

And in my two years in High School, I saw something that made me sick. As I walked out the door on my last day of school before the pandemic hit the U.S., which was approximately two weeks before almost all states in the continental U.S. ordered schools closed, I had only one thought I could synthesise: “this will kill us.”

My grandfather's religious migration from poverty in Tamaulipas to Stone Oak exemplifies the broader phenomenon Weber identified: Protestant culture provided uniquely fertile ground for capitalist development. The “spirit” Weber described doesn't require conscious commitment to religious doctrines, rather, it persists as an ethos that shapes behaviour long after its theological foundations have faded from view.

 (…)

Two years later, I found myself in different circumstances. I had become a bit intimidated by the scenery around me, but I had also found refuge in literature. For the first time in my life, although I cannot truly say that I was happy, I was at least fulfilled.

Then came time to apply to university.

PART II

‘The Industrial City’

Or

How The Protestant Ethic Defined Where I Found ‘Virtue’ in Western Europe

I was in Milan when I sent in my application to NYU in early 2022. I can even tell you the hotel name: The Square, at Milano Duomo. By this time, I had become disenchanted with the Northeastern U.S. (or so I thought) and had found my recent travels to Western Europe genuinely eye opening. But before I found myself in Milan on the deadline for university applications, I had first arrived in the Old World via Spain. I had arrived via Barcelona, and bizarrely, unlike cities like London or Berlin, in the few days I spent there, I had a strange feeling that I somehow had more time in the day. In Barcelona, people stayed out longer, seemed less bothered by their jobs, and seemed… fulfilled. Their wages were certainly not as high as the average persons in New York, but it didn’t seem to bother them. It didn’t make sense to me. Where was the ambition of a city like New York, or London?

After I left Barcelona, I then found myself in Rome. My parents had, up until this point, often described a college trip they went on together, and would identify a moment in their relationship in their first trip across the Atlantic, in Rome, where they describe first knowing they wanted to be together, which was a narrative that for some reason, never really seemed plausible to me. Was it really Rome itself, at this time in the 90’s, that catalysed their marriage and my eventual birth, or was it simply a mythologised version in the American imagination? And when they took me to see St. Peter’s Basilica for first time, a site that should have catalysed my (by this point) deeply intellectual mind, I found myself with a stunning feeling of boredom.  

In fact, I ‘knew’ from the very moment I arrived at the Trevi Fountain, mere metres away from where I would rest my head at night during my time in Rome, that I wouldn’t like it. I’d already read about the process of mythologisation in the collective psyche and understood how and why Americans often have the impulse to romanticise Western Europe.

So, I had never truly entered Europe with intellectual honesty. My own hubris had already answered a question that I was hanging over the trip unconsciously. Is any of this real? Barcelona certainly seemed real, but it started to become ‘less real’ when placed next to Rome. Time was fundamentally different in the Old World: particularly in the secular, post-Catholic countries of Western Europe.

And my conclusion? None of it was. But why did I even have the impulse to ask if it was real in the first place? It surely must have been, for it has such a rich history: one that I could see with my own eyes. People often talk about it in when discussing travels abroad, and if we reject Descartes’ radical skepticism that helped begin the Enlightenment, then it surely must follow that the word ‘Rome’ itself is a name that must refer to some place on Earth, does it not? But for reasons I could not understand at the time, in the mere twenty minutes I spent looking at beautiful works of art before me, by any cultural metric, with histories particularly relevant to me, the son of a sociologist, the question that had remained in my unconscious mind up until that point manifested itself under in a much darker way than I could even realise then. I had entered the Vatican City with a question catalysed through the veneer of a historical analysis of the Catholic Church in the twenty-first century compared to the sixteenth.

What does the Vatican City actually produce?

PART III

‘The Nightmare’

Or

The Cognitive Dissonance that Calvin Engenders

My conclusions? Nothing. It no longer had the forms of capital that allowed it to essentially be a rouge state with an arbitrary hierarchy that it once was during Martin Luther’s time. And so, after only twenty minutes in one of the most famous UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and one of the most beautiful structures human beings have ever built: I actually wanted to leave.

So, after having been intellectually dormant in Rome (with the exception of my return to Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962) for the third time), in Milan, I was stimulated once again. I had buried my face in Vogue Italia on the train there, and read about, what was at the time, a scandal hundreds of kilometres away in Paris: Hedi Slimane had taken over Phoebe Philo’s cult fashion house ‘Céline’ and done the unthinkable. He had removed the accented ‘é’ in “Céline’ and replaced it with the standard ‘e’. 

‘What a tragedy,’ I thought. His domination of an elite fashion house created by women, for women, had resembled conquest. But although the house did have a rather large ‘anti-Slimane’ constituency, curiously, it still brings very large amounts of money to the corporate behemoth that is LVMH: Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy. So, at the same time the women of Paris who could afford to wear Ms. Philo’s garments were effectively disinherited from one of the few brands made with their bodies and agency in mind: Bernard Arnault could not care less.

But it was at The Square, in the early hours of morning on the day my applications to university were due, where I suddenly entered a state of melancholia.

Reality had finally hit my adolescent mind: my grandiose ideas about attending Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Columbia were clearly not going to materialise, and therefore, it was as if I had spent the last four years of my life preparing for an arena that I was clearly not good enough for. My mother worked near 116th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and I’d often walk right across Columbia’s campus, dreaming of the day that I would finally be accepted into a group of people that could understand me. And so, in the early morning hours in Italy that day, I spent so much time in my state of alienation, that at the very moment I’d imagined I would send dozens of applications to the country’s most elite schools and would surely get accepted to at least one: Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, UChicago, UC Berkeley, Stanford even, or UCLA if that’s what it took…

I sent just two applications.

The first was to Amherst, where I’d done an independent study with my mother’s friend. I had tried and succeeded in giving him the work he wanted. He had challenged me, and I’d risen to the occasion. When he received my final paper, he said to my mother that it read better than anything his undergraduate students had produced thus far. When my mother communicated this to me, I felt euphoria. It was everything I’d ever wanted: to produce a piece for scholar at Amherst, someone credentialed, someone important, someone ‘serious’ to me as they had received their doctorate from Stanford and be taken seriously? I could’ve died right there and been happy.

But in my application and spiral into a deeper state of melancholia as the sun began to rise, what did I do?

I neglected to answer the ‘personal statement’ section. I had missed it, entirely.

The second? An unusual choice. One that I didn’t even really make. My mother knew about NYU’s ‘Gallatin School of Individualized Study.’ And of course, I wasn’t really interested until she mentioned that it allowed for a greater depth of academic freedom and so was popular with actors such as, wait for it: Timothée Chalamet (I later found that Mr. Chalamet is quite a lovely person in real life, but that’s neither here nor there) and Mary-Kate Olsen. Even more absurd was the fact that I expected an acceptance letter before I even sent my application.

I got to go, honestly, probably due to pure luck. There are very few things one can say in a personal statement that will take away from the fact you have no serious transcript. And to be sure, there are far more intelligent students than me at NYU. For all of my ‘intelligence,’ I assigned virtue to incredibly asinine things and nearly destroyed my life.

So, had I been as religious as my grandfather was all along?

PART IV

‘A Secular Age’

Or

How To Repair Meaning and Find Fulfillment under Hypercapitalism

The contradiction I faced: seeking meaning through ‘achievement’ while criticising the very systems that defined what ‘achievement’ meant: revealed the central tension Weber identified in modernity. His analysis of ‘value-rational’ versus ‘instrumental-rational’ action.

I don’t recall when I first had the urge to leave Manhattan. In the short period I spent at NYU in the fall of 2022, I found that the city itself began to engender an intense feeling of psychosis deep in my unconscious. But I remember the exact moment that I made up my mind.

In my first two months at NYU, I began to feel the same, uneasy, and sick feeling that I had when I left high school. But the climax?

I spent ten minutes looking into my own eyes in the early hours of a Tuesday morning: on the floor of my dorm room, shirtless, feeling nothing. My roommate, Ryan, had caught a flight to DCA the night before for a family emergency. Ryan’s family was almost certainly involved in elite circles in Washington, and so after ten minutes, I entered a fugue-like state, wandering into our shared closet and checking the tags of his clothes. What was he wearing?

His clothes were modest. He didn’t own Saint Laurent or Dior: And I’d like to believe I’ve always erred on the side of modesty, but after telling you this anthology, Dear Reader, I’m not sure either of us could agree that’s true. I spent two years out of school after I finally made my need subservient to my desire, only to spend it involved in the ‘underground music’ scene – aka ‘music for those who believe in the virtues of elitism.’ I was talented and made high profile friends quickly in New York. It was only on a train from Warsaw to Berlin that I truly understood how I’d fallen for the protestant ethic, and the degree to which I was cognitively dissociated from my body. No: alienated. I’d like to tell you that I had some kind of intense experience that woke me up from the nightmare of the industrial city, but retrospectively, it was arbitrary. I had only found myself in Poland in the summer of 2023 in the first place to appear as a guest at my friend’s show in Warsaw. And when he started to talk about his dislike for Geneva, and how he would never perform there…

I realised.

Not only had I fallen for the virtue of the ‘protestant ethic’, but John Calvin of Geneva, Switzerland, had infected my mind. I was never seriously ‘curious’ about much of anything that couldn’t deliver me the kinds of social capital I’d so often critique to my girlfriend. And of course, I could never be the subject of such critiques. Because I was too comfortable where I assigned virtue, what I assigned it to, and in the ‘reasons’ why I did.

This moment of clarity illuminated Weber's concept of the ‘iron cage,’ rational systems that imprison us in structures of our own making. The secularisation I embodied: pursuing cultural capital while identifying as a “Marxist” strengthens rather than undermines Weber's theory. Weber never claimed one needed to actually believe in Calvinism to participate in capitalist rationality. Rather, he argued that once established, these behavioural patterns would persist independently of their religious foundations. Calvin's doctrine of predestination, which led believers to seek signs of salvation in worldly success, had transformed into my secular pursuit of markers of ‘achievement’ in my unconscious mind.

When I visited Mr. Bryand’s home the following month, it now felt incredibly sinister. In the months since I’d seen him, having amassed as much capital as he felt he ever would, he’d become apocalyptic about the world. And my grandmother, still as abused as my mom ever was, noted that the pastor he’d often fall asleep watching: was a true Calvinist…

For the first time, I broke down in tears over what I’d become. I was a ‘Marxist’ but still assigned virtue to capital (although the form took different shapes over the years). And of course, if you said this to me at the time, I might retreat and instead say I was still intellectually ‘honest’ … but refused to consider the idea that I might have been making the same mistakes my grandfather had two generations earlier (even as I started to become apocalyptic in my imagination as well).

But my grandmother had gone to Trinity, and in the course of her marriage to Mr. Bryand, had her intellectual life completely destroyed by his rejection of it. But every so often, I’d catch glimpses of her brilliance that was surely fostered there. To this day, although she married into the protestant ethic, she lights up when I engage her on almost anything intellectual.

New York could not have produced my grandmother, I concluded. And although she does not remember very much of her early adulthood as a result of my grandfather’s abuses, to this day she is still proud of Trinity.

So, the following year, I applied to become a visiting student for the semester.

‘And what did you find, Ariel?’

Fulfillment.

I love every one of my peers. Each and every one of them. And I found a professor in his last semester, teaching, simply because he just really seemed to love it.

Capital may not be virtuous, but one certainly needs to subsist. What defines “subsistence” however, is not the amount of money you have, or how much political, social, or cultural capital you amass. It’s defined by fulfillment, something incompatible with modern life under hypercapitalism. So, what makes for the good life? The same things that always have.

Community, subsistence, fulfillment and happiness.

‘Fin’

Reflection: this was written in March 2025, and was a brutal takedown of my adolescent ‘person.’ It was not easy to write, but I’m glad I did.