What is Babylon?

What Is Babylon? A Rastafarian Examination of Power, Consumerism and Modern Captivity What if Babylon is not simply a place, government or ruling elite—but a way of organising human desire? Rastafari has long used Babylon to describe systems of domination, exploitation and spiritual captivity. But in the modern world, Babylon has become increasingly sophisticated. Its influence can be found not only in institutions, but in consumer culture, debt, status, economic dependency, manufactured desire and the quiet colonisation of human attention. In What Is Babylon?, Stephen Ebanks examines the Rastafarian understanding of Babylon through the lenses of economics, psychology, capitalism, colonial history, elitism, labour and modern consumer society. Rather than reducing the world to oppressors and oppressed, this book asks a more difficult question: What allows systems of domination to reproduce themselves inside ordinary human consciousness? Explore how consumerism transforms dissatisfaction into demand, how status becomes social control, how economic insecurity creates dependency, how power distances itself from consequence, and how even resistance can reproduce the very psychology it seeks to overthrow. Most importantly, discover the possibility of a quiet exodus. Not an escape from civilisation, but a deliberate reduction of Babylon's authority over your attention, appetite, finances, identity and definition of success. This is Rastafari presented not merely as protest, but as a philosophy of sovereignty. Babylon asks how much you can acquire. Zion asks how much of yourself you can reclaim.