AUGUST 2 2015
OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, REALISM
Some people don’t like my columns because they find them pessimistic. Especially mothers with children fall into that category because the future I paint is one of threatening scenarios, so they close their eyes and minds to the inevitable bad times the entire world population is facing, especially children and young adults.
Also many others who shares my views on Climate Change, just cannot bring themselves to admit that there really is no cure for Global Warming, and disagree with me that planetary conditions will only deteriorate because of my conviction that human nature will never change, (We are born and conceived in sin, and therefore children of wrath!). I sincerely believe that even if we try (and we must) the capitalistic society has made it impossible to significantly moderate our energy-saturated society.
Preachers like Joel Osteen preach optimism. His motto is “You can be rich too”, just like Mr. and Mrs. Osteen. They bought a disused football stadium in Texas somewhere and preach the gospel of Prosperity, a heresy if there ever was one. With a regular attendance of some 15,000 people, their weekly take, assuming each drop $20 on the plate, is $300,000. The Osteens probably get a good percentage of that. Politicians exactly do the same: always promising growth. Ever heard a politician mention a future of bad times? Yet last year a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll revealed that 76 percent of Americans did not feel confident that ‘life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us.’ This is 10 percentage points worse than the poll had ever recorded. Yes, 3 out of 4 Americans are in a down mood. Almost all of them, if they miss one paycheck, have trouble paying their bills.
Last week the New York Times had an Op Ed article entitled We Need Optimists. That is the last thing we need. We Don’t Need More Optimists: unchecked positive thinking simply is dangerous: unbridled optimism is just another way to ignore real issues, which are Climate Change, uncertain future for many, debts till they die and beyond.
I headed this column with three words: pessimism, optimism, realism.
Which one do I prefer? As a society we don’t have a whole lot of patience for realists because our politics, our newspapers, our visual and audio outlets are dominated by people who tell us what we want to hear.
So what do we want to hear?
People are very insecure. Many of the jobs are subject to outsourcing, either going abroad or to mechanical slaves, such as robots. Driving trucks has become a major source of employment, yet driver-less cars and trucks are now a distinct possibility. We now see entire factories without human bodies. No wonder people feel insecure. A.I. Artificial Intelligence poses a danger to brain jobs too. So we crave security, even though religion, the only real source of security, is scorned.
When I landed in Canada with $200 in my pocket, there were lots of job opportunities. Strangely last week I had a dream. I had finished my schooling and did not know what to do next. In my dream I was totally at a loss what my next step would be, yet in my 64 years in Canada – I landed in New York on July 4 1951 and entered Canada in Fort Erie on the way, by train, to Strathroy – I never have been a day out of work. Yet I still had that scary dream. Somewhere in the past I must have suppressed these feelings of insecurity.
Today is different.
I think society has totally lost its way. Nothing is what it seems. Now that we in Canada officially have an election in October, it will rain promises. Already where I live our own tax dollars are liberally disbursed to buy votes. For a few months optimism will be in the air. No politician will mention that trade pacts will eliminate jobs at home and create polluting jobs in India and Vietnam and China. No politician will mention that China is going down, fast. There they overbuilt, over-borrowed, over-polluted, went overboard on the stock market, used the savings of their extended families in the hope of an easy buck. Chinese are notorious gamblers, and this time the gamble will not pay off. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, all mineral exporting countries, will also be the victims of these high-stake gambles, involving some 64 million unoccupied dwellings, unused bridges to nowhere, airports, harbors, all vacant. That sort of optimism is back-firing in spades. We also will be its victims.
Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of an excellent book on the perils of optimism, Bright-Sided, looks at its dangers. She mentions the Iraq fiasco, how that war was sold on optimistic premises, one of them being that invading Iraq would be a cakewalk, that it would be over in a few weeks, would cost a few million, and within a year would start paying a dividend. Now a few trillion dollars later, the mess there has become unsolvable: American optimism at work! She mentions the book claiming that the Dow would reach 36,000! Where is it now, 20 years later? Not even half- way and declining. Housing prices could never go down! Optimism was not only patriotic but was also a Christian virtue, or so we learned from the proliferating preachers of the “prosperity gospel,” whose God wants to “prosper” you. In 2006, the runaway bestseller “The Secret” promised that you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, simply by using your mental powers to “attract” it. The poor listened to upbeat preachers and took out subprime mortgages.
One of the interesting things Ehrenreich describes in “Bright-Sided,” which is subtitled “How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” is the origins of American optimism. While we typically assume that optimism and the U.S.A. have walked hand in hand from the beginning, the country was founded by Puritans, and it remained Calvinist — with its emphasis on depravity and sin — well into the 19th century. American optimism – Reagan comes to mind – was necessary to pull away from all of that, but the happy talk became a commodity, and was co-opted by the corporate culture and adopted by the election machine to brainwash an increasingly suspicious electorate.
Another look at China
Today China is an excellent example of optimism gone haywire. The Chinese economy is bloated with monumental mal investments and stupendous excesses—–the likes of which have never previously been visited upon a modern industrial economy. Someday soon reality will rush in causing a crash that will resound even in my back yard.
Chinese companies have expanded their debts from $2 trillion to $28 trillion in just 14 years. This will lead to a thundering deflationary collapse.
Stated differently, profits there have already nearly vanished in upstream sectors like coal, steel, aluminum and cement. They are now eroding in shipbuilding, construction equipment, solar equipment, and other capital goods; and will soon be falling in overbuilt consumer industries, especially, automobiles, as well. Like Japan in the mid-1990s, China is heading for an era of profitless deflation as its credit binge comes to an end. The meme of the day—–that China doesn’t have so many gamblers—-is hilarious. From stem to stern, China’s version of red capitalism has evolved into the greatest gambling den in history. The whole thing is a giant farce. It is worth repeating: more than 60 million empty high rise apartments, ghost cities and malls, endless strings of bridges, highways and airports to nowhere. China used more cement in three years than the US did during the entire 20th century.
What does the Bible say about this?
What is needed is a balanced and moderate approach, neither dwelling on the downsides nor a forced jumping for joy: we need a sober, hard-headed realism about our accomplishments and failings, not empty cheer-leading, guided by the Bible.
The Bible is a pretty realistic book. We sing “This is my Father’s World” and that was true and will be true again, but that is not true today. Ownership has, for the time being, been transferred to God`s great enemy. In Revelation 12 it related that there was a war in heaven, (verse 7) and Satan was thrown out of there, and he landed feet first right here on earth. 1 John 5: 19 spells this out quite clearly: We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the Evil one. You can’t pick and choose in the Bible. You either accept it all, or none. That`s why Jesus said that We are not of this world. By that he means that we do not belong to the world where Satan dominates. Jesus repeatedly says that The Prince of this world will be driven out, (John 12: 31) clearly indicating that Satan, not Christ is in charge at this moment.
That is realistic talk. That is not beating around the bush. We better get used to it that at this precise moment not Jesus, not God, not the Christian community, but the Evil one calls the shots. That`s why there is at this point of history no ground whatsoever for claiming that all is well. It is not. All is not well. Satan rules this world. Not believing this is denying the biblical truth, is denying that Christ`s sacrifice was an necessary act: it was necessary precisely because Satan rules the roost here. But also the Bible is quite clear that his ruling the world will come to an end, his rule will have an expiry date. However before that happens, before he is also thrown out of the earth, just as he was thrown out of heaven after a fierce fight, and landed right here in your and my backyard, from here too he will not be go without a cruel struggle, which will affect us all, through tremendous terrors. We may sing Jesus Reigns with hands and arms up in the air but the evidence is entirely to the contrary: Satan still reigns here and now, and is all around us.
Fact is that we are on the way to the ultimate disasters, and, as the Bible tells us without a blush in Matthew 24 `many false prophets will appear and deceive many people`, there will be great distress, but God in his grace will cut short the end times, will return before we all perish.
That is the realistic picture. The pessimists see no hope at all. They have lost the biblical promises and see only a future of increasing hardship, higher pollution, more fraud and abuse, more natural disasters, more heat and drought, more floods and famine. The optimists, most of the church people included, deny that Satan calls the tune, deny that he rules the world for the time being, and believe that somehow all will turn out well. Today even the best church, if there is such a thing as the best church, usually misses the crucial emphasis on `the coming of the Kingdom` the approach of the New Creation when Christ will be All and in All.
Until that time the church – almost all of them – will continue to conform to the world. When I was a small child, more than a few decades ago, there was something like a separate culture for the church people, legalistic as it was, such as strict Sunday observance and abstaining from worldly amusements. That separateness was also evident in schooling, dress code and other facets of life. Today there is none of that. By and large the only way Christians are different from the `world` is that they attend a church service for an hour on Sunday. At least the Amish are consistent. At least some ultra-orthodox Jews are different. At least the Muslim people are recognizable. By and large, not the church people, including me, I am sorry to say.
I am a realist. Not an optimist in the worldly sense, but an optimist in the Biblical sense because I live in the hope, the constant hope of Christ`s return to set everything straight and forever ban Satan, the Evil one from the earth.