When We Imbue the Stock Market with Religious Properties

“These things seem all too familiar when thinking about a somewhat abstract entity with arguably outsized power over billions of people’s lives when—on a whim—it decides to violently go ‘up’ or ‘down.'”

The Bear and the Bull are the two forms that the god of the modern world takes when it manifests itself to us. It takes the form of the Bull when it wants to signal optimism, energetically charging ahead. But, recently, it has manifested itself in the form of the Bear, which signals dark times. I am, of course, making a reference to the stock market, which has—in the past few days—experienced one of the most precipitous falls in history. This occurred, in no small part, due to the coronavirus pandemic, as well as instability in the global oil market.

Christian teaching tells us that “the Lord works in mysterious ways.” On the most superficial level, this just means that divine actions are difficult for us—as humans—to understand. But, more importantly, it is meant to convey that we can never fully judge the goodness or evil of a particular situation as we experience it—because we cannot, after all, see the bigger picture. Only in retrospect can we truly understand what the divine purpose was behind what we might have perceived as hardship or misfortune. And, I would imagine that this religious outlook is not exclusive to Christianity. Moreover, such an outlook is an important component of what holds religious worldviews together. On one hand, such a view establishes that there is a certain divine teleology or higher purpose to the progress of history. On the other hand, it implies that we, mortals—while having a basic knowledge of what the arc of history is meant to do—can only receive small glimpses of understanding into what particular slices of time represent within this arc. As far as explaining what they’ve meant, that is only possible in hindsight.

In Darren Aronofsky’s 1998 psychological thriller Pi: Faith in Chaos, mathematician Max Cohen—through battling with equations with the help of his home-built supercomputer—comes across a 216-digit number. This number attracts the interest of Wall Street executives, as well as a Hasidic Jew, who does mathematical research on the Torah. The latter claims that the number that Cohen came across is the true name of God. In one particular scene, Cohen passes out after analyzing the number, and, as he wakes up, he finds he is able to predict the movements of the stock market with perfect accuracy before they are displayed on a computer screen.