Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

November 10 2013

John 3: 16: For God so loved the world….: houtoos gar ègapèsen ho theos ton kosmon

The Greek original is there for a particular reason. That sentence contains two words in the Greek that we all know: agapè and cosmos. The verb ègapèsen has agapè nas its root. It means “unconditional love”. My 2000 pages Webster dictionary defines cosmos as “The world regarded as an orderly harmonious system”.

I am always extremely puzzled that the church only pays lip service to John 3: 16. Tell me: if God unconditionally, without a grain of reservation, with everything God possesses, loves the cosmos, do not we, who claim to his followers, have that same holy duty?

We know the words of John 3: 16: they have been set to song, they are among the most quoted in the church and also the most misinterpreted. Of course God loves us, but his loving us is included in the totality of the cosmos. God equally loves the trees, the soil, the air, the birds, everything that lives.

Something else that never fails to astound me: how can we say we love our neighbours when we poison their air, contaminate the water, etc. etc. which we do all the time. We sing in church “’This is my Father’s world” but once out of church we drive away without ever given a thought that by slamming the door of our vehicle shut, our minds are equally shut to the air pollution we generate in God’s harmonious divine order. “Sin bravely” said Martin Luther, and I agree, but should we not at least pray for forgiveness because we have painted ourselves into such a corner that our entire existence depends on driving a car?

I guess the sad truth is that we, all of us, are in the grip of money: you, me, basically everybody. This is not because we want that but because we have allowed ourselves to become so entangled. We have become victims of a system that has been devised by the Satan whose aim is diametrically opposed to God’s. Where God wants harmony and cosmos, Satan wants destruction and chaos: his sole aim is to destroy God’s well-ordered system.

The more perceptive among us are discovering that money, far from being harmless, is actually the great destroyer. Because of the subdivisions we live in, we are forced to own one or more automobiles. To be able to drive from our far-flung residences and work-places we have paved the woods, mined the mountains, eaten the seas, eliminated species, causing all the large land and sea animals of the earth and most of the birds to become extinct. Money is at the root of all this.

Yes, we live in a society obsessed with money, an infatuation that equally applies to all religious institutions. Money is the most important rule in today’s society and the acquisition of it is seen as its highest goal. Money makes the world go round and goes around the world with a velocity equal to the speed of light and in torrents unequaled in history: the daily flood amounts to Trillions of Dollars. Because of Money the global economy is like a jet plane, fast, comfortable and when it crashes, its fall is also spectacular. And fall it will.

And what has all this to do with Jesus?

When Jesus came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a human being of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century:

It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay,

And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay.

 No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jesus is appearing not just as God, but as a pauper. Curiously the fastest growing Protestant movement in the USA preaches the theology of prosperity, which promises material success as well as eternal salvation. With such a complete reversal of what Jesus portrayed in his life, we do well to investigate the relationship between Jesus and money a bit closer.

I am convinced that Jesus had some basic misgivings about money – just as some of us do at times- because we all know that wealth and its acquisition makes people do crazy and often dishonest things. “The love of money is the root of all evils,” is Paul’s warning to Timothy and this probably was one reason why Jesus did not like money. I think that with Jesus there also was a deeper reason, something very personal. I get the impression that Jesus went out of his way to avoid contact with money and was even loath to touch the stuff. Why do I make that assumption? Well, Jesus has a perfect recall of everything, past, present and future and so had perfect insight, hindsight and foresight into everything. We will recall that his betrayal, his suffering and death was directly associated with money. How would we feel – how would I feel – if I know that money would eventually kill me? Well, I think that this view governed Jesus’ attitude towards money and perhaps even towards economic theory.

Jesus and Money

Here are some concrete examples. Take the feeding of those thousands: Jesus knows that if these people had gone off to buy bread and fish in the neighbouring stores, the merchants, being good businessmen, would have suddenly increased the prices of these basic food items because of greater demand. The law of supply and demand is certainly not a latter-day invention: it has existed as long as people have traded. That’s what economics is all about: charge high when everybody needs it. It happened in Ontario and Quebec with the prolonged blackout during the ice storm: the few candles available tripled in price overnight in the disaster areas. So what did Jesus do to forestall this price-gouging? He simply by-passed the economic law of supply and demand and created bread and fish ex nihilo- out of nothing- well, almost out of nothing.

Then there is that so uncharacteristic incident where Jesus almost went berserk when he chased the money changers out of the temple, upsetting much more than the tables. After all having these business people do their work in the temple was an age-old tradition and necessary to keep the Jewish house of worship functioning properly because only certain kinds of money were accepted in the temple. How else would the pious supplicants obtain the proper animals for sacrifice? I think it was money and its abuses that made Jesus so angry. Another, more indirect, indication: I find it curious that Judas, the unredeemed among the disciples, carried the purse and handled the finances: Judas, who loved money more than Jesus. In the end he ended up with thirty pieces of silver and then discovered that money as an idol wants our very lives. In that sense we are much closer to Judas than to Jesus. With ‘we’ I include all people in the over rich West. Also to me a tip-off was Jesus’ great disdain for the nominal value of currency, evident when Mary spent perhaps a year’s income on that precious oil. “So what,” Jesus remarked, “So what if such a large sum was spent. It is only money.” Or consider the occasion when Peter was asked if Jesus would pay the temple tax. “Of course,” is Peter’s immediate reaction, “of course Jesus pays.” But for Jesus this was not such a straightforward matter. Why this reluctance to pay the temple tax? Well, I have my theory about this. I think Jesus knew that perhaps this very money given to the temple was going to buy his life and ensure his death.

And then, in an ironic twist, with almost a touch of black humor, Jesus shrugs his shoulders and says: “OK, not important. Let me not major in minors. Go to the lake, catch a fish and there you’ll find a silver coin enough for the both of us.” I like that. Jesus is never skimpy. And, of course, with this gesture, he shows that all the fish in the sea and- by implication- the cattle upon a thousand hills, are his.

Here we see Jesus’ royalty coming through. Queen Elizabeth never carries a wallet. Wherever she goes on an official visit, she goes free. Jesus is the same and much more so. Here he shows that he is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, but people do not recognize him that way.

Dualism exposed

Remember that familiar encounter with the Pharisees who were out to trick him? They asked Jesus whether Jews should pay the Roman head-tax. The story is well known. Jesus calls for a denarius (No, he does not carry money on him) and asks; “Whose image?” They dutifully answer, “Caesar’s.” Jesus replies: “Give to Caesar what belongs to him and to God the things that are God’s.”

Here is a story we have grown up with in the church. On it we have based the separation of church and state and have interpreted this to mean that there are two important divisions in society: God- religion – and the State. Well, we live in times where all automatic responses need to be questioned, so let me try another angle. In the first place Tiberius, the then emperor, could not possibly have owned the coin any more than the heirs of George Washington or Queen Elizabeth have the legal right to the bank notes which carry their images. In his compact answer Jesus touches upon two important segments of society: the political-economic reality represented by Caesar and money on the one hand, and the eternal as expressed in the Kingdom of God on the other. He implies in the political part that, no, he would not support an armed revolt or even passive resistance to Rome, and in the economic sector Jesus asserts that the tax and the coins themselves are simply a human device and that all of life, including money, is a matter of faith. That the latter is becoming more clear every day with Mr. Bernanke, the great money wizard, fabricating $85 Billion every month, $1 Trillion a year. Jesus then already implies that the value of money is sheer fiction. The only matter that counts is the eternal – God’s kingdom- which is at hand.

So here is a curious twist in the historical explanation of this incident. Where Jesus, by his life and in this particular instance proclaims an almost puritanical and revolutionary renunciation of the world of money, today we explain this passage to mean exactly the opposite. Where Jesus saw only the Kingdom – which includes all things, also money – as the dominant factor of his life and his followers, and money at best a minor player, today, based on this very text we believe that there are two realms of equal importance: Caesar, the State, represented by taxes- money – and the Church- God- Religion- in charge of the sacred. Here we are face to face with a dilemma: where Jesus abhorred money by all indications because it contributed to this death, we adore it. Where Jesus lived without money, our lives are centered on it. Jesus once made a radical statement: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” In our Western world everything is about money: the stock market, the strength of the dollar, the price of gold, three items mentioned in almost every newscast. Let’s not kid ourselves: Mammon is God, the Dollar is King in the world and its possession a holy grail. We now put a price tag on everything. First on Jesus – 30 pieces of silver – and now also on the rest of creation: indeed money has become the great destroyer. We all participate in that criminal act, even as we drive to and from church. Jesus was sold for the price of a slave: we are selling creation to serve us as a slave. We, as 6 percent of the world’s population cause 40 percent of the world’s pollution, in perfect accordance with the aims of Capitalism which defines itself as Creative Destruction. I am more and more inclined to think that Capitalism and its exponent, the global money economy, is the Anti-Christ, focused more and more on credit-debit-pin numbers such as 666, the almost perfect number, never to attain ‘7’ the perfect one. I think that’s why Jesus feared money because he foresaw how destructive it would be for him, for his creation and for us.

He died so that we too could be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better life than we can ever live in a money society. If we want to share in that life then we must regain a new sense of value; we must reset our priorities to have our treasures expressed not in money but in love, in genuine compassion for all God’s creatures, humans, animals, trees, flowers, air, water.

In the final analysis, what does John 3:16 really mean?

The text means that God loved the cosmos so passionately that this love even surpassed the love he had for his son. For us this means that we too must love the cosmos also above the love we have for our spouse, our children or grandchildren. Think about that when mounting that carbon-fed iron horse. At stake is eternity.

Next week:

Is it time for the church to change its focus?

Two of my readers sent me an article, published last week in

De Groene Amsterdammer a Dutch periodical in print since 1877.

Frank Mulder, a writer-journalist was the author.

I found the article of such value that I have, to the best of my ability, translated it, also, of course, because it fits in with my views on both religion and economics.

Since the Dutch version is more than 3500 words, I will present it in two parts.

Money is our God.

Part One.

Summary:

Capitalism is more than a model. It is a religion according to a growing number of independent thinkers. “Is it possible that theology can teach something to economists?” asks Frank Mulder.

Here it is:

I am looking for Mammon! Theologians: take note!

Haven’t you heard of that crazy human who, for all to see in pure daylight, grabbed a gold bar, carried it onto the trading floor and kept on yelling “I am looking for Mammon! I am looking for Mammon!”

Never heard it before? It’s Nietzsche’s famous parable about the fool who declares that God is dead. However “Being dead”, according to the explanation of the scientist Phillip Goodchild, “now means that this time it’s money’s turn to die.”

Why? Picture the stock market today. Because there are so many floor traders who don’t believe in Mammon they started to ridicule the man. Some wondered whether “He has been bought out”, another person suggested “Perhaps he went bankrupt”; somebody else asked. “Maybe he left for China, where people don’t pay capital gains tax.”

While all these money-men crowd around the besotted man and poke fun at him the fellow jumps up and down, looks straight at them and, totally bewildered, yells: “Where did Mammon go? I know what happened! We killed him – you and I! We all are his murderers! And how did we do that? How were we able to rob the world of her treasures? Who pushed the delete button to wipe out those crazy calculations? What’s going to happen now that we have exposed all our possessions to all possible risks? Where in heaven’s name are we going? Are we gambling it all on the throw of the dice? Are we venturing into the Great Unknown, into the Infinite Nothingness?”

Comments Philip Goodchild: “Yes, the god of money is dead and we have killed him,” in his essay on the debt crisis. He wrote this in a periodical not read by economists but by theologians. So theologians take note! That is not a random event because, according to Goodchild, economics belongs to the realm of theology. Economics also has everything to do with crisis and redemption, with promise and debt. Therefore economics is a power worth listening to because we cannot exist without it. And that means that it resembles a god. That’s why, in order to analyze this, we must involve theology.

Here is another voice

In a restaurant in Prague we find Tom?š Sedl?cek busy drinking a ginger lemonade. The 36 year old economist with Attention Deficit Hyper Activity symptoms races through life as a writer, producer, university lecturer, advisor to the Prime Minister and chief macro-economist with the Czech bank CSOB.

He caused quite a furor at home and abroad with his book The Economy of Good and Evil. In it he borrows, seemingly at random, those economical and theological snippets he finds interesting.

Economics is more than mathematical formulas, asserts Sedl?cek.

Economists often act as if markets are rational, as if suspended above us there is some sort of intelligence making sure that the outcome is rational. But that is a myth, just as the homo economicus, always on the alert to maximize utility, is a myth. “Mathematical models are beautiful but they exist only in our imagination” so says Sedl?cek. “People often say that they work in theory but not in real life. Actually the opposite is true. It functions well in real life, but it is difficult to reconcile this with our theories: that’s why we wrap them in all sorts of concoctions: myths in other words. “Nothing wrong with that” says Sedl?cek, “as long as we realize that they are pure inventions, but, of course, contemporary economy never admits that. Let’s face it: it also takes place in many other sciences. Before you criticize our models, they say, come and study with us for five years: only then can you grasp our methods of validation. Well, that was precisely the way the monks in the Middle Ages reasoned. In my opinion they exactly resemble each other. In those days, monks studied, wearing black clothes; now these people are dressed in white.”

Economists presume that the economy is like a machine, something easy to grasp. “But no, that’s not the case at all. The economy is not something tangible. It cannot exist without the state. It is not a machine: the economy has a soul, so to say.”

Sedl?cek wants to know how that soul comes into being. “It’s a matter of ethics, a product of our culture, the end result of age-long discussions about good and evil. It goes back all the way to ancient Greek wisdom, to the Judeo-Christian theology. Without that heritage our economy would have never assumed its current form.” Only when we recognize this basis, according to this Czech citizen, is it possible to reveal the myths and the religious background of the modern economy.

Goodchild and Sedl?cek are only two persons out of a growing body of people who look at the economy with theological eyes.

Take money. Money cannot possibly be reduced to a material phenomenon. Here’s an experiment: place a Hundred Dollar Bill on the table during a meeting. Every few seconds our eyes focus on that piece of paper. It exercises a power by its very presence, independent of time and context. It possesses magic. Theologians call that spirituality. Two Thousand years ago Jesus spoke words which were difficult to digest for his followers: “You cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve God and the Mammon.” The Mammon – a word that carries with it the meaning of money, of security, of authority – strives to attain divine status. Indeed, it is an idol, an idol of the unjust sort, says Jesus, an idol who blinds people.

How is that possible? How can money cause visionary distortion? In other words, how can money impose its own value system? That becomes plain when we observe the two functions which form the basis of money, so say the money experts. In the first place money is a means of exchange. We trade, exchanging goods for money, because in that way we can create more prosperity. That makes money the great symbol of mutuality, of reciprocity. By means of money we are able to suppress evil and scarcity. Our society which cannot function without money, substitutes traditional values, such as benevolence, with this win-win standard, while traditional vices, say envy and greed, are more and more regarded as positive.

Money can also be used as a means to add and subtract. In that way too money can influence our outlook on the world. It’s impossible for money to express everything in dollars and cents. Take love for instance or nature, or community feeling. Basically money is only concerned with tangible items, it’s purely utilitarian. It cannot possibly measure pain and enjoyment, yet even there, money structures society.

Our economic system uses money as the preeminent building block to structure Capitalism. This allows money to have an even greater impact on society. Money does not only colour our values, it also needs our trust, so says Simon Critchley, a British philosopher. In a telephonic interview he explains: “We cannot regard the economy merely as a tool because it is much more than that. Capitalism is an ideology. We regard ourselves too modern to have superstitions, but capitalism is a faith structure, and the crisis in our economy is a crisis of faith. It was for valid reasons that the Romans, at times, featured the goddess Fides – Faith – on their coins. Money is based on faith.”

Critchley – himself an atheist – acknowledges that money tends to assume a dominating position, something in line with what Jesus suggests. Critchley states: “We assume that we are taken in by the goods we buy, but that is not true. It’s money that we worship. Financial markets bank on that. That’s the reason why our entire economic order acquires a religious structure. It’s strange that we hardly give that a thought.”

Although Capitalism has a religious structure this does not mean that it has a religious dogma. All it has is a religious worship structure. Already in 1921 the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamins wrote this in his essay Kapitalismus als Religion (capitalism as religion). Willem Schinkel, sociologist and philosopher, explains what he meant with that. “Capitalism is the worship of debt. That concerns all of us because we all have debt. The word ‘credit’ has as root the Latin verb ‘credo’ which means ‘I believe.’ In Christianity there is the concept of redemption but in the Capitalist type of religion the debt is never repaid. Debt is the basic ingredient. We have to go into debt in order to maintain consumption. In short: debt rules, and because we are part and parcel of this structure, it is difficult to offer criticism.”

Just as in the ancient religions, so too capitalism has its own fetishisms with their peculiar features. Schinkel again: “Just as animistic shamans promote fetishes in the form of images, the credit agencies capture the chaotic financial world out there by means of easy to understand graphics and tables. These acquire authority, a spiritual weight that supersedes the tangible.”

Look at the current Greece situation where the credit agencies devalued its financial situation, blindly following the computer systems, and so brought an entire continent to the brink of bankruptcy. Or look how the Central Bankers, the High Priests of the Capitalist Religion, with a single out of place word are able to cause currencies to tumble.

This comparison with the priests of primitive cultures has already years ago been made by Bob Goudzwaard, economics professor emeritus of the (Amsterdam) Free University, a person who has never been afraid for a bit of theology. According to Goudzwaard all modern ideologies contain at a certain moment traces of theology, including Capitalism, of course. According to him this has to do with a primitive mechanism, that is to say the reversal of goal and means. As individual or as society we pursue legitimate goals, so he explains in his book Hope in Troubled Times (Wegen van Hoop in tijden van Crisis). “We pursue Prosperity or Peace. But when these goals are threatened, we grab every possible means or instrument to get to these goals regardless of the cost. Take economic expansion, a means that in 1957 in the Treaty of Rome is mentioned by name as the necessary road to Prosperity and Peace. A later further development was the deregulation of financial markets. After that the ‘Lisbon’ requirement expressed it even more concretely by mentioning annual three percent economic growth. Everybody, from government minister to banker, claims of course that: “Growth as such is not the goal: our real aim is prosperity and peace for the sake of national wellbeing. But, yes, growth it is the necessary tool.”

According to Goudzwaard this sort of reasoning makes us directly dependent on these provisions. What is really happening is that we put blinkers on, narrowing our vision, which religion tends to do. Goudzwaard asserts that the same thing happened in primitive cultures. People, in times of national distress, ceded part of their authority to what they perceived as higher powers, their idols. Consequently this led to actual worship, complete with certain norms and values. Even human sacrifices were made.

This same assimilation of values Goudzwaard also notices in the modern economy but then on a more rational and systematic level and therefore much more pervasive. “That’s why it has become a virtue in the name of dynamism to break up functioning businesses and sell them piecemeal,” according to Goudzwaard in an interview prior to the credit crisis.

Next week: How do we get rid of the devil?

P.S. Readers of this blog come from more than 25 countries. The largest block of visitors comes from the USA. The second largest group is from CHINA.

Commercial:

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By Bert Hielema

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Preview

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Oct.20 -13

(If you have trouble reading this, click on ‘home’).

Collapse?!

We have three bird feeders. In the past month no birds came. No, that’s not correct:  one lonely chickadee fed on my feeder, a far cry from years ago when I routinely spotted sparrows, juncos, wood peckers and many others. We have lots of crows, however: their screeching wakes us up in the morning.

Monarch butterflies, you wonder? Well I saw one. For all practical purposes this beautiful butterfly has disappeared, another victim of our greed for speed. Now that most people live in urban areas, city people do not notice these changes, but we, some 5 km from the built-up area of the Village of Tweed, population 1800, see this and are dismayed and worried.

Are these disappearances omens of collapse?

Yes, they signify collapse of some sort. Apart from the lack of birds, it has been a fabulous year for growing. I have never had such an abundance of everything as this season: my root cellar is filled with apples, potatoes, cabbages and carrots. We had to buy an extra freezer to accommodate the apple sauce, apple-carrot juice, kale, leeks, beans, beets and other produce.

Each year I try something new. This year, for the first time, I made sauerkraut. Now that I have done it – it is so easy – I will do it every year from now on.

Collapse is not a popular topic, just as talking about preventing heart attacks is a taboo subject. Several friends of mine have had one: totally predictable, of course. It usually is the result of lack of exercise and fatty diets, resulting in expanding waistlines and clogged arteries. I was at a banquet a few weeks ago, sitting at a table with an overweight older man who was putting layers of butter on his bun: a perfect candidate for trouble which, out of the blue, hits: chest pains and a rush to the Emergency Room. Fortunately these people there are pretty good. After a bypass doctors recommend a totally changed lifestyle with daily walks and a different diet. In my book prevention is better than a cure. Prevention prevents the excruciating pain as well as the immense expense to society in Canada, and possible bankruptcy in the USA where a heart operation cost $100,000.

Just as a coronary is often the result of wrong habits which can result in some sort of collapse, our economy too suffers from faulty behaviour. Collapse there too is preventable but there too our living habits ensure that collapse is in the cards, and when it happens it means death of the economy and with it the death of many. Just as a heart attack is the result of undisciplined  living so economic collapse too has its roots in discarding common sense, often the result of allowing spending and polluting to continue without regard for the consequences.

Our Golden Decades

As a Western society we have become slaves of the past. The half-century, from 1950 to 2000 were the golden years with 3+percent economic growth. It was a perfect period for politicians capable of promising the cake and delivering it with icing: bountiful support for retirement after 60 or 65; generous disability benefits; excellent support for medical problems and all sorts of extra help such as free prescriptions and subsidies for hearing aids and walkers. A growing Gross Domestic Product made that possible.

Today all we hear from governments is that their first aims are to engender economic growth. No politician can expect to win on a platform of cutbacks and reduced pensions and benefits. Yet these days are here, and have already come in many parts of Europe.

Growth is down to a level less than the rate of inflation, which means reduced tax income and greater deficits because the opposite is happening on the expense column: there more money is needed for food stamps in the USA and welfare in Canada. Higher unemployment places greater pressure on the health-care system as uncertainty and discontent are detrimental to one’s health and also causes more domestic violence.

I once was unemployed in my first year in Canada in 1951-52. My most miserable memories go back to that week when my brother and I lived in a room in downtown Hamilton: he sick, I no work. Fortunately it only lasted only a few days: a caring couple took in my brother until he was healthy again and I soon found work.

The plight of politicians

Politicians are caught in a real bind, evident in the situation in the USA. The recent last minute agreement there means nothing and has solved nothing because the Tea Party’s religion founded on theocratic theories of government exposes insoluble problems, not of a religious nature. What has developed over the last 50-60 years, ever since World War II, will not be solved in one session, actually will never be resolved: the era of extravagance is over. We are dealing with a total new economic environment since that post-war period was completely exceptional in human history. What is coming is a reverting to the normal: living within our means, economically and environmentally but that will not happen before there is a disastrous overshoot: a total or near total collapse, not unlike a heart attack in a person’s life.

In the 1930’s the new oil driven machinery made farmworkers redundant and threw a lot of people on the street for which there was no work and no other source of income. Then many still had roots in the farming community where they were fed by their relatives. Now farmers are mostly mono-crop producers. Only the cessation of the armistice of 1918 and the 1939 resumption of hostilities between Germany on the one hand and the World War I allies – France, Great Britain and Russia- on the other hand, created enough economic activity to soak up all available idle hands to ensure prosperity for the next 60 years. We now face a number of different challenges: where in the late 1920’s cheap oil furloughed thousands of workers, today, with at least four times the number of potential workers, robots and smart software are one important obstacle to rewarding work, potentially making untold millions of willing workers superfluous. The other drawbacks are environmental depletion, global pollution and massive population growth. These factors are setting the stage for a disastrous reversal, the real reason why we see political turmoil in the USA and Europe. People sense this intuitively. Rather than less government we need more, as the obstacles are so great that even universal action cannot reverse this predicament, made worse by our reluctance to face the truth.

The Disappearing Middle Class

Take robots. Robots pay no taxes. Robots also need no medical insurance. Robots never go on strike, never complain. Robots and software are taking middle class jobs in the name of efficiency, making the rich richer and the poor poorer, leaving unemployment and low-wage jobs in their wake. No work is disastrous in many fronts: psychologically, economically and physically. “Idleness is the root of all evil,” says an old proverb.

Don’t believe the official line. Governments face the impossible task to secure money for idled hands while at the same time forced to fund extra support for physical and psychological problems at a time when tax income is drastically reduced.

Just as a heart attack takes place when a person lives beyond his or her physical limits and so experiences a possibly fatal collapse so too the entire economy may experience a complete economic stagnation when too many simultaneous malfunctions cause monetary mayhem, resulting in total stoppage of normal life. A heart attack involves a small part of the body: clogged arteries leading to decreased blood flow, preventing the heart pumps from providing blood to the rest of the body, so too blockage of the money flow from taxpayer to government and back to where it is needed can lead to economic cataclysm. Had in the USA the debt ceiling not been extended, global chaos could have been the result. And someday soon this will happen. “You shall not live by debt alone”. Debt is financing much of our lifestyle, increasingly consisting of environmental debt as well.

By and large the reigning media fail to report the true picture in the world. Bad news does not sell, so they keep on repeating that technology or ‘fracking’ or ‘the tarsands’ will save us, fostering false hope. As a species, Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed by hope.” Absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.

Infinite Growth is Infinite Insanity

Infinite growth is infinite insanity. Just as patients after a by-pass must change their lifestyle or else, so we too must go back to simpler ways. The anthropologist Joseph Tainter in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” looked at the collapse of civilizations from the Roman to the Mayan. He concluded that they disintegrated because they finally could not sustain the bureaucratic complexities they had created. Obama-Care is a good example. Layers of bureaucracy demand more and more exploitation, not only of the environment but of the laboring classes. They become calcified by systems that are unable to respond to the changing reality around them. They, like our elite universities and business schools, churn out systems managers, people who are taught not to think but to blindly service the system. These systems managers know only how to perpetuate themselves and the system they serve. They have no clue that by doing this we collectively are killing the planet ruining everything we hold dear.

Final times are upon us. As a human race we are racing toward the end, but deny it by frantically believing that what worked in the past will also work tomorrow and beyond. We insist that continued reliance on fossil fuel and speculations will sustain the empire. We promote extravagant and senseless projects and imperial adventures. The predominant view is that economic growth can continue indefinitely, without slowing down or stopping. Last week Prime Minister Harper, in the Throne Speech has again pronounced the pursuit of economic growth as Canada’s national religion. In the USA Bernanke bombards the system with $85 billion each month. It is like a patient who needs constant blood transfusions to stay alive.  Our current monetary system is built on Infinite Growth: it must work that way because debt and the repayment of debt depend on it. Only Infinite Growth makes it possible to have liberal state pension plans, Social Security, and the many wonders that our financial system can deliver. Only Infinite Growth makes more and better technological innovations possible because there is always an infinite supply of the resources available to make these innovations.

We all are victims of a false religion. All false gods are an illusion. My paternal grandfather started his prayer at meal-time with the words of Psalm 115: “Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory.” That same Psalm relates something to us today: “their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands…..Their makers will come to be like them and so will all who trust in them.”

Our idol is Infinite Growth fueled by borrowed billions. Our society, constructed on the idol of Infinite Growth, will collapse as soon as infinite borrowing stops. We are rapidly reaching the point where the costs of increased debt and the expense of extracting oil and other minerals are so high that in total, society is worse off, in terms of the total amount of goods produced by society. We already are reaching diminishing returns with oil which is a major reason why world economic growth is slowing. It is also a major reason that many of the heavy oil consuming nations have been struggling with recession-like symptoms. These symptoms are mostly being covered up with deficit spending, ultra-low interest rates and Billions in Quantitative Easing. If this stimulus – new blood – stops, the economy – the body – collapses. Our collapse will take the whole planet with it.

Lord’s Day 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism comes to mind. “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer to that question is our only hope.

 October  6 2013

The March of Folly is becoming a Run toward Ruin.

 On May 27 1985 I bought a book: The March of Folly, fresh off the press. The author, Barbara Tuchman, started it with: “A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.”

She cites in some 400 pages, plus notes, four examples starting with “The Trojans take the wooden horse within their walls”, jumping a few thousand years when (1470-1530) “The renaissance Popes provoke the Protestant secession,”  then relating how “The British lose America,” and ending with “America betrays herself in Vietnam.” The USA was involved there from 1963 till 1975, losing almost 60,000 men.

America has one overriding obsession: oil. No wonder. When I travel in the USA, I am amazed how dispersed the population is. When the fire season was at its height- fire doesn’t seem to have an off-season anymore – thousands of homes, situated in the most remote areas, are at risk. People love to be ‘out there’ far away from everybody. But this is only possible when we have wheels, and a combustion engine to move these. All of this means that public transportation is impossible in most areas.

If we really tote up the price of fuel, then we have to include America’s Armed Forces, its Air Force, Navy and Army, almost solely busy protecting the life lines from the global oil fields to North America.  Of course, occasionally its roaming flotillas help out when a natural disaster strikes, because, wherever in the world there always is an American aircraft carrier task force nearby ready to help out, but they are everywhere not for that reason: our world is a dangerous one and we never know where there is a threat to American interests – meaning oil.