A lot of people such as Mormons manage to bear capitalism just fine without caffeine. I like to have a little coffee most days but let's not exaggerate it's necessity.
(we live near a de facto Mormon college and pester our neighbors, who are largely Mormon professors, about such things)
Kinda interesting being somewhat immersed in what's effectively a conservative subculture that's supposed to not shun folks who aren't part of it. We have some weird conversations.
As a (anec?)data point, I had a Mormon friend growing up and they drank caffeine-free Coke for this reason.
Perhaps Mormons have in their belief system a strong motivating stimulant? I am trying to avoid use of the word drug here as it is pejorative. Perhaps, Coffee is just what we need to overcome the ennui and pointless of modern existence and a set of religious (or cultural) beliefs helps us do the same.
This would also imply that Caffeine consumption is lower in societies that are religious and have strong belief systems - religious or cultural, which can be tested!
The Republican coalition of religious conservatives and business has its origins in the Civil War, where northern industry joined forces with fundamentalist Christians who opposed slavery. A quarter of all union soldiers were immigrants, mostly poor German immigrants. Iowa sent more volunteers (per capita) to fight for the union than any other state. What motivated all those people to fight and die in a war between British people? They had no personal stake in the war—they didn’t have industry powered by southern resources like cotton, nor were any battles fought anywhere near their homes. For them, fighting for the union was about vindicating a religious opposition to slavery.
It was the confederates that portrayed themselves as being on the side of “science” against religious “zealots.” https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto.... To make sense of that, put yourself in 1861. That was more than a century before we had the technology to determine that humans are genetically all the same. If you were someone who looked at the world—what people had built in Africa and what they had built in Europe—and said “these people are all the same,” that was a statement of faith.
What a comically false thing to say.
I assume that reference was to Lincoln Cathedral, the tallest spire of which is indeed 520 feet tall.
> This argument of yours projects onto the past an opinion that nobody actually held.
Agreed.
As for Iowa, there had never been slavery in what we think of as the Midwest--north of the Ohio River and of Missouri. However, the Dred Scott decision put it into question whether the states could maintain that status. I imagine that to have been a motivator for Midwesterners who did not wish to compete with slave labor.