The diagnostic framework introduced in Why Nothing Is Working makes a specific claim: that the consistent outputs of civilisational decline in Britain are not accidental. They are the product of powers operating at the structural level, whose characteristics are documented in the oldest literature of the Western world.
Those powers have names. What follows is the case for identifying them.
Mammon
You cannot serve God and Mammon.
The name Mammon appears in the oldest texts of the Western tradition. A first-century teacher elevated it to the status of a competing sovereignty — not a bad habit, not a tendency, but a rival lord making a rival claim on ultimate loyalty.
This is a precise distinction. It means Mammon is not greed. Individual greed is a symptom. Mammon is the system in which financial value has displaced all other value as the organising principle of a civilisation. The system in which a community’s worth is measured by its GDP, a person’s worth by their productivity, a child’s worth by the cost of raising them.
The characteristics of Mammon’s territory:
Housing becomes an investment asset rather than a home. The primary question about property shifts from “where will my family live” to “what will it be worth.” Family formation becomes contingent on financial position. Children are delayed or foregone as economic calculations.
Institutions are converted from services into markets. The NHS, the universities, the public utilities — each progressively reoriented around financial metrics rather than the purposes for which they were built.
The language of value becomes exclusively financial. A forest is worth its timber. A river is worth its fishing rights. A community is worth its labour pool. Everything else is sentiment.
And crucially — this operates across party lines, across ideological changes, across generations. That is the diagnostic signature. Mammon does not require one party. He requires only that the framework of financial primacy remain unquestioned by all of them.
The threshold moment for Britain:
1986. The deregulation of the London financial markets — the Big Bang. The City transformed. The principle enthroned: that the market’s verdict on worth is the final verdict. What followed was not merely economic policy. It was the formal installation of a sovereignty.
Every government since — Conservative, Labour, Coalition — has governed within the Mammon framework. None has challenged the primacy of market value. That is not political failure. That is territorial capture.
Molech
Molech is the more ancient and the more disturbing name. He appears throughout the oldest texts of Western civilisation, associated with child sacrifice — passing children through fire in exchange for security, prosperity, national blessing. These texts treat this practice with a severity reserved for almost nothing else. It provokes the strongest language of revulsion in the entire tradition.
The structure of the worship is important. It was not cruelty for its own sake. It was a transaction. The death of the child purchased something: security, prosperity, national blessing. A cost-benefit calculation carried out at the altar.
The transaction has not changed. The altar has.
Molech as downstream consequence:
The important diagnostic point about Britain is that Molech does not operate here as the dominant principality. He operates as the consequence of Mammon’s reign. When financial security becomes the organising principle of a civilisation, the Molech transaction follows naturally — without ritual, without priests, without anyone intending it as sacrifice.
The language surrounding abortion in contemporary Britain is almost entirely economic. Career. Stability. Housing costs. The impossibility of managing on a single income. The inability to afford another child. These are Mammon’s conditions. Molech collects the outcome.
This sequencing matters. Molech operating as primary produces cultures where the sacrifice is visible and contestable — where society can see what it is doing and argue about it. Molech operating as downstream consequence produces something more stable: a culture with persistent unease, ongoing political contestation, but no disruption of the underlying system that generates the outcome.
Britain fits the second pattern precisely.
The record:
Since 1968, England and Wales alone have recorded 9,799,731 abortions. The following is the official government data, year by year. Each number represents a human being.
| Year | England & Wales | Year | England & Wales |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1968 | 23,641 | 1996 | 177,495 |
| 1969 | 54,819 | 1997 | 179,746 |
| 1970 | 86,565 | 1998 | 187,402 |
| 1971 | 126,777 | 1999 | 183,250 |
| 1972 | 159,884 | 2000 | 185,375 |
| 1973 | 167,149 | 2001 | 186,274 |
| 1974 | 162,940 | 2002 | 185,385 |
| 1975 | 139,702 | 2003 | 190,660 |
| 1976 | 129,673 | 2004 | 194,498 |
| 1977 | 133,004 | 2005 | 194,353 |
| 1978 | 141,558 | 2006 | 201,173 |
| 1979 | 149,746 | 2007 | 205,598 |
| 1980 | 160,903 | 2008 | 202,158 |
| 1981 | 162,480 | 2009 | 195,743 |
| 1982 | 163,045 | 2010 | 196,109 |
| 1983 | 162,161 | 2011 | 196,082 |
| 1984 | 169,993 | 2012 | 190,972 |
| 1985 | 171,873 | 2013 | 190,800 |
| 1986 | 172,286 | 2014 | 190,092 |
| 1987 | 174,276 | 2015 | 191,014 |
| 1988 | 183,798 | 2016 | 190,406 |
| 1989 | 183,974 | 2017 | 197,533 |
| 1990 | 186,912 | 2018 | 205,295 |
| 1991 | 179,522 | 2019 | 209,519 |
| 1992 | 172,069 | 2020 | 210,860 |
| 1993 | 168,714 | 2021 | 214,869 |
| 1994 | 166,876 | 2022 | 251,122 |
| 1995 | 163,638 | 2023 | 277,970 |
| Total 1968–2023 | 9,799,731 | ||
Source: UK Government official abortion statistics. Scotland not included. The total across Great Britain exceeds ten million. 2023 was the highest year on record. The number is accelerating.
The Relationship Between Them
Understanding the relationship between Mammon and Molech in the British context is the key diagnostic insight.
Mammon is the dominant principality. He has been enthroned since 1986. His logic pervades every institution, every government, every conversation about value. He does not need to be consciously served — he operates as the default framework within which everything else happens.
Molech is downstream. He does not operate independently. He operates where Mammon’s logic has already converted children into costs. In that environment, the sacrifice requires no ritual and no conscious choice — only the application of financial logic to the question of human life.
This coalition is more stable and more resistant to challenge than either principality operating alone. You cannot address Molech without addressing Mammon. And Mammon is so thoroughly embedded in the institutional architecture of Britain that challenging him is routinely described not as resistance but as economic illiteracy.
Their Weaknesses
The same framework that names the powers names their limits.
They cannot create. They can only corrupt and redirect what already exists. Every institution they have captured was built for a different purpose. The memory of that purpose has not entirely gone.
They cannot withstand being named and exposed. The camouflage is the primary defence. When Mammon is described as an economic system, he is invisible and inevitable. When he is named as a principality — as something operating through the system — the inevitability breaks. People begin to see what they were participating in.
They require human participation. They have no independent material agency. Every act of deliberate withdrawal — however small — is a real cost to the system. Multiplied across individuals and communities, withdrawal is the only thing that has ever actually dismantled a principality’s hold on a territory.
And they are already defeated. The cross — whatever your view of it — was understood by the earliest followers of this tradition as a cosmic event that publicly disarmed the principalities. They continue to operate. But on borrowed time, under sentence, knowing the outcome.