Systemic materialism operates through willing individuals who unknowingly reinforce their own captivity.

Evidence

Accordingly, with its capitalism and attendant cultural value system, materialism ab initio precludes the possibility of understanding, much less appreciating, the manner in which other civilizations and cultures articulate, and live in, the world. This is why Guénon never questions the “sincerity” of the intellectuals he collectively subjects to vehement criticism, because in effect he sees them as thinking and operating within a regime of truth dictated by what he would probably have called a discursive formation beyond their comprehension and control. Yet, this tolerant judgment of the individual should not amount to the exoneration of the aggregate group that subscribes and contributes to materialism as a collective moral agent. The modern Western individual, though an unwitting contributor, is both object and subject of this performativity, for “he himself is one of the factors intervening actively in the changes affecting his world.” The dialectic involved here is then progressive, between the individual and his human grouping, on the one hand, and mass culture and systemic structures, on the other. Once formed, the materialistic mind-set is disseminated and “cannot help but contribute to reinforcing” the same materialism that “made it possible in the first place.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 287

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘unwitting contributor who is both object and subject’ maps onto the structural-racism debate about individual vs systemic responsibility — and onto Foucault’s productive power.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that a thinker can simultaneously exonerate individuals as sincere and condemn them as collective agents — while locating individual agency inside the very regime it reproduces — is a genuinely difficult position to hold together.
• ADDENDUM: ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ treats moral panics as class/identity signaling; here moralism is reframed as the necessary complement of materialism, giving dress-and-morality panics a structural-economic explanation.