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Spinoza and the Unrest of Capitalism

(A statue of Baruch de Spinoza in Amsterdam)

“To succumb to pressure to suppress or disguise his true beliefs would have been, for Spinoza, a concession equivalent to defeatist self-abnegation.”

In previous essays, I have explored in some detail how the dread of a pink slip in contemporary capitalist society exposes not only the anguish of anticipating financial hazards after losing a job, but also the existential self-doubts of losing the status that comes with having a “respectable” occupation. These vulnerabilities, however, are often accompanied by a profound ontological disorientation that suddenly comes to light when, except perhaps for the “fortunate few” who love their work so much that they never work a day in their life, we reckon with the anomie in which we have been living by equating freedom and happiness with the size of our bank account.

To be sure, we all need to pay the bills, and we should all learn how to manage our finances to ensure that we can weather the storms of life and enjoy some of the comforts that life in a capitalist society has been known to offer. But if we are to take seriously the cost-benefit mindset of homo economicus, the reified handmaiden of capitalism, then we would be remiss to ignore the costly bad faith of occupational choices that turn a being-for-itself into a being-in-itself. Or, in other words, how surviving the selective pressures of capitalism empties the mind and soul of the self-assurance and optimism that we once cherished in our youth that our thoughts and actions would be those of an authentic and autonomous self that feels at home in the world.

In all the hustle and bustle of life in a dynamic and disruptive capitalist economy, serenity of the soul is not something that can be bought and sold, no matter how many billions of dollars the self-help industry filches from the pockets of unsettled souls exiled in this land of heteronomy. Aplomb is a byproduct of internal harmony that comes with mature reflection and reconciliation, if only we can learn how to harvest this perspective from the gift of reason with which we have been endowed by nature. But this is undoubtedly hard, if not impossible, to do when reason itself has been eclipsed or, rather, stripped of its full powers of perspicacity by the distractions of trying to survive in a world of fetishized technology and unbridled commerce. Then, there is the daily grind of making the donuts, nine-to-five cubicle life, graveyard shifts, or cacophonous commutes to stifling corporate beehives where well-paid, imperious executives and managers regulate the rules and routines of our working lives to serve the bottom line. And when we spend our time worrying about a dressing down from the boss, we do not spend our time interrogating whether the boss is berating us with a deserved comeuppance or infantilizing us into meek submission. We live a life of perpetual unrest in which the only way to avoid exile from society is to be exiled from ourselves.

The root of this enigma can be unearthed from the mediocrity of inauthentic lives that easily germinate in domesticated adherence to a capitalist Weltanschauung in which we naively associate freedom and happiness primarily, if not exclusively, with transactional acquisitions in the marketplace, where jobs, commodities, ideas, brands, creeds, fads, eyeballs, and so on are bought and sold like bric-a-brac in a bazaar. But self-exile in the interest of avoiding social exile is not unique to the one-dimensional denizens of 21st century capitalist societies. In fact, it has been a common motif of human civilization seemingly for time immemorial. Where there is ideology, there is idolatry, and where there is idolatry, there are the illusions of success without the illumination of failure (at least until the pink slip arrives). Every now and then, however, we encounter a visionary who offers a way out, reminding us that, as Bob Dylan might have said with a twist, there is no success like failure, even if failure does not necessarily guarantee success.

Baruch Spinoza: Visionary of Virtue

On July 27, 1656, a brilliant young philosopher named Baruch Spinoza received news that he had been banished from the Sephardic-Jewish community in his native Amsterdam. The religious leaders of the Sephardic-Jewish community of Amsterdam had issued a writ of herem, or excommunication, against this 24-year-old man who had gained a reputation as an iconoclast, at least in part due to his affiliation with a group of free-thinking intellectuals who adopted heterodox ideas about God, the soul, and the law. These ideas likely influenced Spinoza’s own disbelief in the immortality of the soul and the idea of a transcendental God. He also doubted the literal truth of biblical text. Later writings reveal that Spinoza believed the Bible was a human creation riddled with errors, full of stories that should be regarded as rhetorical parables rather than unvarnished history.

Spinoza had not yet published his heretical ideas, but what seems to have caught the attention of authorities is that Spinoza ceased to engage in the customary activities of a fully observant Jew. For a young man who had already distinguished himself as an intellectual avatar and may have been prized as a future rabbi, Spinoza’s drift away from “orthopraxis” signaled ideas that, even if in preliminary form, posed an existential threat to Jewish religious authorities in Amsterdam. Heresy was too disruptive for a Jewish community that had been exiled from the Iberian Peninsula, where the reigning Catholic orthodoxy had forced Jews to migrate to the relatively more tolerant Republic of the Netherlands. The leadership of the Spanish-Portuguese diaspora feared any deep fissures in a set of beliefs that held the community together. It also sought to avoid alienating a relatively tolerant Christian society that had been hospitable to the Jewish community. Indeed, this community’s right of residence in Amsterdam depended in part on “inner control of heresy and heterodoxy.”

The Portuguese-Jewish community had experienced exile once. It had little interest in courting it again, especially since few other European societies, in the wake of rampant religious wars, were as liberal and tolerant as the Dutch society in which these Jews had found a home. Spinoza, however, chose not to placate the ruling authority to protect his high standing among Jewish contemporaries in Amsterdam. He challenged institutional orthodoxy, and when confronted with exile, accustomed himself to banishment with the attitude, if not with the equanimity (he was presumably susceptible to the anxieties and self-doubts of youth), of an ancient Stoic.

The analogy is not coincidental. The scholar Harry Wolfson has said that Spinoza was the first modern philosopher, but his ideas had much in common with the ancient Stoics. Like the Stoics, Spinoza equated human flourishing—i.e., happiness, which he equates with self-preservation—with the poise and equanimity we obtain when we learn how to acclimate to the vicissitudes of life in a way that is consistent with a clear and distinct understanding of why things happen the way they do, as well as how we should act accordingly. The Stoics described this achievement as living in accord with our nature—i.e., a life of internal harmony that becomes accessible when we cultivate, embrace, and harvest our innate potential for virtue rather than bend to the sway of influences that do not emanate from our own inherent powers of thought and action.

These external influences might include the lure of power or wealth, which is intrinsically worthless to us as a means of self-contentment (“the highest good we can hope for”) because the mere possession of power and wealth does not guarantee that we will not abuse them. The lure of immediate access to wealth, for example, might blind us to the crude and fallacious reasoning of utilitarian appeals that persuade us to undertake a murder-and-robbery plot, and all we get for our troubles is to end up wallowing in the miserable paranoia and incorrigible unrest of Roddy Raskolnikov’s crime and punishment after he murders an old woman and her half-sister in a desperate and ill-conceived plan to steal her money.

Soul-crushing outcomes do not only occur in the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s imagination. In the 21st-century of unbridled commercial capitalism, the misuse of fame, power, and wealth has left music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs in custody and placed on suicide watch after his arrest on charges of racketeering, sex trafficking, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice, abandoned by fans and groupies, and languishing in the squalid conditions of a notorious Brooklyn detention center to reckon with the sins of his “freak offs.” In these deviant sexual escapades, Combs allegedly exploited his “vice” grip on power, fame, and wealth to manipulate women with promises of romance and an invitation to dens of debauchery in which they were drugged and coerced into acts of prostitution, while being recorded on videos that could be subsequently weaponized to blackmail and silence victims.

If the charges are true, one can only guess at the spiritual carnage and desolation that reigns supreme across the scorched wasteland of Combs’s disfigured soul as he sits in his cell. This is certainly not the self-contentment of a man who has put his possession of power, wealth, and fame to good use. It is the predicament of a man who has utterly failed to channel harmoniously the passions that flow from what Spinoza deemed our conatus. This refers to our instincts that stem from our core human impulse to pursue self-preservation, onto the path of virtue that guides a man to the cultivation of poise, equanimity, and peace of mind. Spinoza equates this process with human flourishing.

The destinies of Combs and other formerly powerful and famous men like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and R. Kelly are among the most gruesome and abhorrent. But rich, old men who are otherwise innocent of such crimes against humanity can also find their souls in disarray even if they “merely” deploy their power and wealth to court young, attractive women who are digging for gold rather than love. Such self-deceit is—at best—a rather circuitous path to self-contentment. Perhaps these rich and deluded men might manage to discover that power and wealth can be used to advance virtue—in which a soul is healthy, harmonized, and happy in the renunciation, or at least moderation, of pubescent lust—rather than vice, in which a soul is ill, disaffected, and in disarray in the insatiable lechery of its penultimate years.

The same goes for anyone who would seek contentment in any other passion, e.g. ambition or humility, without a clear and distinct understanding of how these emotions might be properly channeled, e.g. as initiative or modesty, and thus conducive to the harmony of the soul that the Stoics, and Spinoza, associated with virtue. Virtue, however, remains an unrealized aspiration without the aid of reason, which facilitates our ability to understand the universe and our proper role in it.

As the Stoic-like Spinoza wrote in his Ethics, which was published posthumously in 1677, “…true virtue is nothing other than to live only by the guidance of reason, and so weakness consists solely in this, that a man suffers himself to be led by things external to himself and is determined by them to act in a way required by the general state of external circumstances, not by his own nature considered only in itself.” For Spinoza, “[t]o act from virtue is to act by the guidance of reason, and whatever we endeavor to do in accordance with reason is to understand.” To succumb to pressure to suppress or disguise his true beliefs would have been, for Spinoza, a concession equivalent to defeatist self-abnegation.

The alternative, however, was not to succumb to passions such as regret, revenge, or rebelliousness, especially not as part of a political or rhetorical effort, underground or in public, to displace prevailing authorities. Spinoza described self-preservation, or what he technically called conatus, not simply in terms of whether one’s heart continues to beat or not, or whether one’s beliefs hold sway on institutional authorities, but in terms of the desire of human beings to “strive to persevere in their being.” This notion is certainly subject to interpretation, but the basic idea for Spinoza is that we persevere in our own being when we are happy, and we are happy when our thoughts and actions are “free” from the bondage of passions such as regret, revenge, or rebelliousness.

We are “free” when we are virtuous, and we are virtuous when our thoughts and actions, guided by reason, reflect an “adequate” knowledge of how we should conduct ourselves in the aftermath of what has happened in the world around us; how it has happened; and why it has happened. It is, of course, to be expected that we may feel sadness after the death of a loved one, but when we recognize that the causal chain leading to death could not have been avoided, if only because it is a fait accompli, then we can avoid the emotional unrest of continuing to believe we can do the impossible, i.e., bring back the dead. Our accurate assessment of the loss of a loved one as the result of a sequence of casually connected events, which explains how he or she died, helps to moderate, or lessen, the affections of sadness that arise when we fail to appreciate that death does not discriminate. It comes to us all, and there is no reason to take it personally.

Just as we need not dread death as exile from the life of a beating heart, we need not feel terror at the prospect of exile in the land of the living. Unlike Jewish religious authorities, Spinoza was willing to challenge institutional orthodoxy not at the expense of his own self-preservation but, instead, in service to it. To suppress ideas and beliefs, which are the fruits of one’s own rigorous reasoning, is to go against one’s nature. It serves to impede one’s progress in relieving the sickness of a mind that would be enslaved to an affection for public acclaim. The Jewish community in Amsterdam and its leaders may have been able to lay nominal claim to survival because they were left alone by the Christian government. They avoided exile. But was this “see no evil, hear no evil” positioning conducive to their own “spiritual” preservation? Was it, in fact, a kind of exile from themselves?

Spinoza might have seen it that way, and he would not be exiled from himself. But the result was exile from his community, an ancient form of retribution in which existing authorities ostracize eccentrics, rebels, and political thorns from polite society as a blunt force measure to coerce social conformity among anyone who may tacitly or openly support challenges to the status quo. But conformity would be to violate the virtue that comes with adequate knowledge of one’s place in the world, and how and why one has arrived in that place, and thus not to persevere in his own being.

Virtue, then, was Spinoza’s means of self-preservation. As he wrote, “since virtue is nothing other than to act from the laws of one’s own nature, and since nobody endeavors to preserve his own being except from the laws of his own nature, it follows firstly that the basis of virtue is the very conatus to preserve one’s own being, and that happiness consists in a man’s being able to preserve his own being.” How does one arrive at this state of mind? “Since reason demands nothing contrary to nature, it therefore demands that every man should love himself, should seek his own advantage, should aim at whatever really leads a man towards greater perfection, and, to sum it all up, that each man, as far as in him lies, should endeavor to preserve his own being.” Reason gives us the ability to understand nature, as well as to understand how to act in accord with nature rather than against it. Reason, then, is the path to virtue, which is the path to self-preservation, understood as aligning one’s thoughts and actions with what our true nature demands.

If exile is the only way to do so, then so be it.

One key phrase, however, is “as far as in him lies.” Earning a modest income as a lens grinder and perhaps cushioned by (unconfirmed) bequests from his merchant father as well as the comfort of loyal friends who supported him in his exile, Spinoza was not without means that made possible a quiet, contemplative life in solitude. In exile, he developed his burgeoning views into a comprehensive framework that would be laid out in the Ethics, which articulated a pantheistic metaphysics that rejected the notion of an anthropomorphic deity who exists apart from a universe he purportedly created and oversees. In contrast, God and nature are one and the same substance, conceived as a total reality in which all happenings are deterministic results of unchanging mechanical laws rather than arbitrary decrees by a transcendental sovereign.

Putting aside the rigorous Euclidean-style proofs that Spinoza employed to argue his case, the practical result was a moral egoism that is constituted to help people harvest their inborn capacity for freedom. This freedom was not synonymous with free will, if the latter refers to choices made independent of any causal impetus. It is rather, learning how to be at peace with acting in accord with one’s nature. To employ reason in pursuit of virtue is to strive for the harmony in the soul that comes with doing exactly what one’s true nature is meant to do and thus, if guided by reason, “wants” to do.

Whatever one may think of their underlying arguments, the ideas of the ancient Stoics and the modern philosopher Spinoza have long outlasted the authorities with which they came into conflict in their lives. Some observers might object that the Stoics and Spinoza were naïve, masochistic, milquetoast, or otherwise unjust in their focus not on political action to overturn an unjust status quo but on fostering their strength of mind in an adequate understanding of their inability to control the totality of forces working with or against them—essentially, not worrying about what was beyond their control. But it is precisely because they did not worry about what they could not control in the short term that they committed themselves to virtue, i.e., excellence of character—which they believed to be the key to eudaimonia, or human flourishing. They believed their ideas would win in the long-term on rational merit alone.

In contrast, it is hard to believe that Sean Combs, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, or Harvey Weinstein—formerly invincible brands who likely regarded themselves as icons of aesthetic achievement in the annals of 20th and 21st-century entertainment—will confront their day of passing “into the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” secure in the belief that their legacies have not reserved for them a special place in hell, where their penance is for them to be denied eudaimonia for eternity, forever exiled from themselves and from the gates of God’s glory.

Virtue and the Culture Wars of Capitalism

Eudaimonia, or human flourishing, is a notion that comes to mind when one entertains the question of whether the world of capitalism in which we live is well-suited to the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration of Independence of the United States claims that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are among the inalienable rights of man. It was the intention of the newly conceived United States government to establish institutions that would secure these rights for its citizens. Coming in the same year as Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, its vision of a government set up to secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was conceived in an era when capitalism was coming into its own as a dominant economic system prevailing throughout the Western world.

Capitalism presented many challenges and opportunities for the modern world, among which included the pros and cons of an acquisitive culture and a creed of possessive individualism that tended effectively to exile anyone uninspired by the idea that our happiness is crucially connected to the accumulation of monetary wealth. We have discussed the self-contentment of the 17th century philosopher Spinoza in terms of his conception of virtue, which helped him persevere with the peace of mind of an ancient Stoic philosopher after being exiled by his Jewish contemporaries for his belief in ideas that ran radically counter to orthodoxy. The triumph of secular liberal democracy in subsequent centuries has long since institutionalized religious freedom. Spinoza would be safe in our world. But this world has also seen the institutionalization of capitalism. Thus, by no means has it eliminated the potential for being ostracized from one’s community for ideas that run radically counter to orthodoxy—in this case, ideas that strongly suggest that all is not for the best when wealth is the essential test of self-worth.

In our own time, the threat of exile comes in many other forms. Cancel culture, for example, often targeted public figures perceived to be right-of-center during the reification of Critical Social Justice orthodoxy in the 2010s. Then, instead of making the case (as I have) for a more tolerant society that welcomes heterodox ideas or at least gives them due consideration, conservative activist Christopher Rufo and his upstart gang of right-wing culture warriors weaponized cancel culture in an concerted campaign to dethrone and deplatform Establishment figures like former Harvard president Claudine Gay. This is in service of promoting conservative principles, which include eudaimonia.

In Rufo’s world, the New Right must see that heterodoxy per se results in a milquetoast capitulation to the prevailing institutional hegemony of left-wing ideology. If it is to avoid permanent exile after America’s cultural revolution in which the radical Left conquered everything, the New Right “needs to move from the politics of pamphlets to the governance of the institutions.” The “question is who will lead [society’s institutions] and by which set of values,” and “[t]he New Right must summon the self-confidence to say, ‘We will, and by our values.’” In other words, if one does not seize and assume control of society’s institutions, exile is inevitable.

How to do so? “Reason,” Rufo writes, pilfering the words of 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, “is the slave of the passions.” The agitprop of rhetoric, not the diligence of dialectic, is the way to ensure that conservative principles survive and thrive, among which includes the “pursuit of eudaimonia, or human flourishing.” Rufo’s transparency, however, may shed light on his Machiavellian political strategy for the pursuit of eudaimonia, but invoking eudaimonia as he does in the name of conservative agitprop makes for an especially apt irony for someone who clearly has a low opinion of the most famous critic of capitalism, the economic system and ideology that dominates global commerce.

Returning to the civilizational sprawl of contemporary capitalism, a deeper and more encompassing form of exile becomes apparent to anyone who finds himself reading the works of Karl Marx self-consciously on the commuter train to work. In this world, it almost feels like a sin to signal disenchantment with a culture industry in which best-selling books are like those that teach us how to win friends and influence people rather than how to escape the vice grip of a grueling “work ethic” in which, for example, Nvidia employees and Wall Street analysts sacrifice their mental and physical health on the altar of long hours, sleepless nights, tight deadlines, and toxic workplace relations with people who are paid like kings to be ferocious competitors rather than cooperative colleagues. It is better to acquire wealth by putting on the “golden handcuffs” and crowning oneself, as if like a king, with the one-dimensional mindset of bourgeois lackeys who are “sucked into the eddy of the they,” even if it means that one is then practically ill-equipped to walk away from the earnings that they have no time to enjoy, while pushing the frontiers of fetishized technological progress that further entrenches a culture of burnout.

Bob Dylan said that, rich or poor, you gotta serve somebody,, and there is little doubt that, despite Rufo’s dystopian claim that the radical Left has conquered everything, we all still serve the regime of global capital. It is not socialism that enjoys what Italian neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci called cultural hegemony but a conservative ideology that convinces the stewards of corporate behemoths that they are the supreme benefactors of society because they reward the faithful with Prime days that are mostly good for Amazon rather than for the vaunted consumer, a celebrity culture in which “[t]alented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in,” and a potpourri of job promotions, equity payouts, and clients with expense accounts that imply the Nvidia or Amazon work-life imbalance is the only viable way of life. We spend our lives looking under the hood of headline macroeconomic data releases in search of speculative financial bets, and we do not bother to glance through the looking glass into the soil of our own besotted soul, which corporate capitalism long ago debased by putting a price on it and convincing us that we had to sell it with a glistening smile.

If saving capitalism is an agenda item in Rufo’s crusade to remake conservative activism, it hardly sounds like he is offering a path to eudaimonia in his hard-won utopia. But what is eudaimonia? This term from ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and the Stoics can be hard to pin down by way of translation, but it is usually invoked to denote human flourishing and well-being. The Stoics identified the grounds of human flourishing in one’s adherence to virtue, a state of harmony in the soul achieved by integrating wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice in our thoughts and actions. In this holistic conception of a life that flourishes by incorporating virtue in thought and action, reason is not a slave to passions. It is a faculty of judgment by which we learn to tame, comprehend, and productively channel our passions by properly assessing our reactions to them.

In other words, emotion is not the same thing as passion. The philosopher William James argued that it is not that we cry because we are sad but, rather, that we are sad because we cry. This nifty inversion illuminates the nature of emotion as a value judgment at which reason arrives to make passion work for it rather than against it. If our first reaction is to cry after a death in the family, do we fall into a despair of prolonged sadness that handicaps our subsequent ability to live our lives, or do we grieve for a time as it is in our nature to do, and then pay our respects and move on in the recognition that death is an unavoidable part of life that we must learn to accept?

As Margaret Graver describes it in Stoicism and Emotion, which was published in 2007, we need to distinguish “between what it feels like to be afraid and what it is to be afraid.” This is the job of reason—to know not what it feels like to flourish but to know what it is to flourish. Or, in simpler terms, what it feels like to be happy and what it is to be happy. Fans of Mad Men may recall the Lucky Strike pitch in which Don Draper rescues a $25 million account that almost walked out the door in part by falling back on one of the first principles of capitalism: “advertising is based on one thing…happiness.” What is happiness? It is “the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing, it’s ok. You are ok.”

Of course, nothing is okay in the life of Don Draper, whose whole identity is wrapped up in a lie that was conceived ad hoc in a desperate attempt in the fog of war and its aftermath to escape his former life. What was Don Draper afraid of? You will have to watch the series to find out, but suffice to say that while Don Draper is a master of his profession as (m)ad man, he is hardly even an amateur in mastering the art of eudaimonia in the depths of his own private life. The same is true for every character in a show that won four Emmy awards for best drama and can rightfully claim status as the great American novel of television. As such, we can be forgiven for inferring that the show tapped into a profound malaise at the heart of an American society in which, for example, one is likely to lose friends and alienate people if he cannot name a single hit song by Taylor Swift.

Lest we go further adrift, it is probably safe to say that most of us can agree that, even on the best of days when we drive out of a dealership in a shiny new Tesla, we feel unarmed and hollow when reminded that the car loses 10% of its value as soon as we drive out of the lot, and 50% of its value three years after the purchase. Not the vote of confidence we need on the first of the month when we receive an expensive new bill in the mail. But it is not the end of the world. Unless, of course, we also receive a pink slip during a recession.

What happens then? Surely the billboard will be of no help. Where do we turn then?

Concluding Remarks

The true Stoic would be imperturbable even in dire poverty, but there is a reason that the Stoics also believed the virtuous man is rare as a phoenix and that our aim in life, if virtue itself is unattainable for many, is to aspire toward virtue. It is the blight of capitalism that the feeling of exile we experience when the pink slip brings to light—in a paycheck-to-paycheck society where personal identity is so deeply attached to a “respectable” occupation—how close we immediately are not only to being unable to pay for that new Tesla but also to wondering how remarkable it is that we ever believed that our happiness depends on the kind of car we drive. We also failed to appreciate the irony of Amazon truck warnings that their contents may cause happiness, even as we recognize that the dopamine hit will only last for a short time after purchase.

It is the sin of capitalism that this cloud of anxiety impinges on time and the material security most of us imperfect beings, lacking the fortitude of a Spinoza or an ancient Stoic philosopher, need to sufficiently cultivate reason. Only then might we aspire to virtue and find peace of mind not in the size of a bank account, which can come and go as fortuna wills, but in an ethic of virtue that dissolves the dichotomy—and, thus, the tension—between mind and body. Only then might we recognize passion not as a recalcitrant voice within us to be controlled or repressed but as a flow of energy within us, in response to environmental stimulants, that can be channeled toward equanimity that comes with understanding of—and reconciliation with—the vicissitudes of life.

Almost two and a half centuries after Spinoza took his courageous stance, can any of us say the same? We find ourselves in a world in which capitalism seemingly reigns supreme while, at the same time, we often find ourselves asking why so many people feel like they are not thriving or even managing to get by. Why is it, as many of us often find ourselves asking, that so many people feel like they are not flourishing? Why is eudaimonia seemingly so elusive? Is it something about the human condition? Or is there something about capitalism that gets in the way?

More and more people seem to be asking the second question.

Jonathan Church is a contributing editor at Merion West.

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