I’m sitting here at my desk, much too early on election day, 2012. Thinking about the elections today, how meaningless they seem to be, pointless really; and wondering aloud in my head about what is really important. God is foremost in the answer of what is important, family comes second, everyone else is third. Note that I say everyone, not everything. And all of these, everyone and family, must lead to glorifying God, without whom we would not even exist.
I look at our society today, affluent beyond belief, immoral beyond excuse, and deliberately deaf, dumb, and blind beyond forgiveness. If we consider the thousands of years of human history, from Mesopotamia and ancient India, through Greece, Rome, the Ottoman empire, various Chinese dynasties, Mayans, Incas, the affluence of the Western civilizations of Europe and North America are a blip on the graph. An anomaly. In statistics, our affluence would be considered an “outlier”, something that is clearly an exception to the norm. Outliers need to be addressed and investigated, they can not simply be ignored. Questions must be asked as to why they occurred, and their significance. Oftentimes we find outliers are the result of bad data collection, but sometimes that are a black swan, indicating a major change. Over time, however, things always return to the mean; in this case the affluence and character of society as it has been over time before the rise of Western Civilizations.
As a Christian, in fact and ordained priest, I know that God has a plan for us, Christ died for our sins, and he will come again to judge the dead and the living. WHEN he will come is a matter for debate in another place; it may be today and it may not be for another thousand years. The bottom line is that we are called to do certain things as disciples in the meantime. Every generation of Christians since the time our Lord walked on the earth have thought that they saw the signs of His imminent return and our generation is no different. What is clear is that “no one knows the hour of the master’s return.” This being said, I differ greatly with those who think that they need not do anything special with their lives because Christ is coming soon. Hogwash.
Likewise, those who think, arrogantly, that their generation is better than previous ones, has more power to improve and fix things, and can continue as they are while they work for change is likewise a Pollyanna. Everything is not “kumbaya” and ok, its not about finding a cause. Our society is broken; beyond repair.
Do not think me to be a doomsdayer; I am not saying “Oh woe is me.” I do not say to hide in a hole, nor to shout into the face of a storm. I see things as they are. I say things as they are. Which brings us back to our current election, and the question at hand, “Does the election really matter?” To that point I have to emphatically answer, no. Not a whit. Because all that we are doing in Western society is dancing around the fire, playing with the scraps, keeping the ravenous dogs of history at bay. We are trying to work within our current system which is broken. Broken not because it needs to be fixed here and there, or even that it needs a complete overhaul. Our society is broken as a house built on a bad foundation. Whether dirt, sand, or crumbling stone, a house built on a bad foundation will eventually crumble. We have seen pictures of barns decaying on the side of the road, of old houses held up with buttresses, and third world shacks simply falling down on themselves. This is the picture of our society, and our faulty foundation is immorality in all of its forms.
Since man was first cast out of the garden, or for those who do not believe in the bible, since man first walked on the earth, he enjoyed the fruits of his labor. He hunted, and the family ate. He tended crops, and that family ate. He forged as a blacksmith, cooper, or baker, sold his wares, and his family ate. He worshiped his God, cared for his family, and they survived. Over time clans and kingdoms rose and fell like the tide, but always on the basis of their efforts. Sometimes the king gave away lands for arms at war, other times they traded salt and spice, silver and gold for the things their people needed. There was even a modicum of credit extended, but always, a value was given for a value received. Always.
Then in the middle of the 19th century largess and immoral values were enabled. Large, easily obtainable reserves of crude oil were discovered and exploited starting in the 1870s. Shortly after that at the turn of the century, financial leverage compounded the problem. Crude oil was known, and used since the dawn of the last millenium in China and the Middle East. But that oil was either on the surface or shallow. Once the large reserves were discovered and tapped, society changed. Oil was now available cheaply to lubricate manufacturing equipment and vehicles, power engines, and be processed into the many “miracle” materials we enjoy today from plastic and solvents to medical equipment and weapons. Oil powered the equipment that allowed the exploitation of coal and minerals, drove the engines of transportation, and drew the masses into the city, where their paltry manual labor was magnified through the new technologies driven by cheap, abundant, oil.
Liberated from the need to hunt and grow to feed a family, technology and cheap oil brought families off the farm and into the city. But cheap oil, and the cheaper products that it made possible had a much more sinister byproduct. Just like the poisons that come from processing oil, societies have been poisoned by artificially cheap products. Society was no longer working to grow food to feed their families, hunt to put food on the table, or make a product with their hands to trade for a value of food. Instead we were eating, and enjoying leisure as the result of cheap oil. We were enjoying a value for things in which we did not put in the commensurate effort.
We no longer had to be responsible for tending our garden, lest our family starve. We now just go to the corner to pick up meat butchered hundreds of miles away, and raised thousands of miles away. We don’t raise and butcher the chicken ourselves, through cheap oil we have a car to drive to the store, where we pick up refrigerated meat, that has been treated with preservatives, in plastic packaging, that was transported over hundreds of miles, after processing by machine driven butchers, whose stock was brought from further still, having been raised with machinery and artificial feed and medications, made from crops that were harvested in mass by five ton tractors belching fossil fuels, running on synthetic tires that were manufactured across the ocean. However the convenience of cheap food, and all it took to make it possible comes at a price. You have given up your integrity, your honesty, your value put in for a value received. And all because the world now exploits a finite resource in oil.
I will not go into details here, the information is readily available on the internet. Suffice to say that oil is finite; the amount in the ground will continue to decrease, production levels have stagnated since the 1970s, and the cost to bring a barrel of oil or cubic foot of natural gas to the surface continues to increase. This artificial leverage, the use of oil that made the 19th and 20th centuries, with their affluence and lack of honest production, from a historical standard, will come to an end.
The other factor powering this immoral blip of productivity that is the modern world was financial leverage. It used to be that if you wanted to borrow $1,000 from the bank, they would extend that credit, take some collateral from you but would also have actual deposits and assets on hand equal to the $1,000 they lent to you. If you wanted to buy $1,000 of stock in a company, you had to first deposit $1,000 with your broker, who would then purchase the stock on your behalf. But at the turn of the 20th century, as production was increasing from the power or oil, so did the velocity of lending through a similar, more sinister mechanism. Fractional reserve lending and banking. Banks were now allowed to extend credit, not give actual cash, for a loan in excess of the amount that they actually had in their vaults by counting the value of loans as yet unpaid as if they were cash in hand. So the bank that had $1,000 and loaned it to you on terms where your repayment with interest was, $1,100 could now loan out the additional $100 even though you would not be paying it to them for a number of years. They were loaning money they didn’t have. This wasn’t limited to private borrowers and banks, but was extended to corporations and government lending (bonds and treasury notes) in numbers that started in the hundreds of millions, grew to billions, and eventually trillions of dollars. The creation of the Federal Reserve banks in the United States and Europe, and elimination of currency values based on gold reserves, now meant that countries were in the game of having their money valued at a stated amount, backed by nothing more than the fact that people, companies, and other governments would take it as valuable.
Stocks and bonds were then purchased with loans instead of cash, and the house of cards, values based on nothing more than a promise, grew. Even today, the US Treasury issues billions of dollars in notes, that the Federal Reserve “buys”, with money they created with an electronic ledger entry. They now have these assets of US Treasury notes against which they lend money to the banks at 0% interest, so the bank can then invest in stocks, or make loans; all from money that never existed. It is madness. But you and I do no less when we use a credit card or take out an auto or student loan. We are using those instruments to buy something that we have not yet earned. This is not right.
But it is worse, the banks and governments some years back started realize that if a company went under, or a loan wasn’t paid, or oil prices dropped or rose from the commodity price they agreed to pay a year earlier, or the weather changed, they could lose it all since it was based not on real money, but leverage. They started to take out insurance against a possible loss. If you agree to purchase a stock in a bank for $100 a share in a year, and in a year the price is $90 a share, you’d lose $10 a share. Multiply that times your million share contract and you’re looking at losing $10M. So the investor (bank, mutual fund, pension) would buy an insurance policy for the possible $10 per share loss, a derivative contract. The problem is the companies issuing the policies, which are oftentimes divisions of the same investment firm, don’t have any assets backing up their promise to pay, just other investments and insurance contracts, so they buy insurance on their insurance. So a house of cards is built and very little is ever actually paid out, it’s just counted as another asset to loan against. In fact as of election day 2012, it is estimated that the global value of all of the co-insurance and derivative contracts is over One Quadrillion Dollars. That’s $1,000,000,000,000,000. A one with fifteen zeros, a number we cannot comprehend. In school we would use scientific notation, 1x1014. To put it in more understandable terms, this is twenty times the value of all goods and services produced in the entire world in a year. If all of these contracts were to be settled, paid out and we went back to a zero starting point and ran our economies with sanity, it would take the value of everything produced in the world for twenty years. No one would eat, no homes would be heated, nothing would be purchased, all the money and value produced in the world for two decades would be credited to zeroing out all of these house of cards investments.
So just as oil gave us more than we earned, fractional lending and its ilk have created wealth and value for which an effort was never given. A tree cannot grow without taking in sunlight, nutrients from the soil, and water. The squirrel cannot be born, grown, and have babies without eating, drinking and taking shelter. A bear can not grow to 800 pounds if it just eats four pounds of berries. In science this is the Law of Conservation of Energy, which states that you can not get anymore energy or mass out of something than is put into it. A cup of water contains no more than one cup of water. It is the moral imperative in the world as God created it that an effort must be put in for something to happen. You can not get something from nothing. Yet this is just what has happened since the 19th century.
Our moral decay has followed the same lines. It used to be that the poor and destitute were cared for by the community and church. The local community and church helped those in true need, and the people participated in the community and church. You put an effort in, you get an equivalent effort out. If someone was disabled, everyone in the church and community put in a little more effort, so this person could get something out. Or they died. Today people throughout the United States and Europe expect the state to take care of them, whether they put anything in or not. They feel entitled. This is wrong, they have not contributed to their family or community, or society at large. It is wrong for the government to take from those who produce, generate more fake money, and then give it to people who scam the system, do not participate, do not appreciate, and otherwise are taking without putting anything in. They should not be owed their survival simply because they exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide.
Our society is broken. Immoral. Selfish. We seek “friends” through facebook, tweets, likes, and comments online. Our interactions are through online games of destruction and violence with friends whose faces we do not know, and lives in which we do not participate. We have gaming “communities” that are nothing more than groups of people wasting their time in the same manner. They are not a community. A community shares each others burdens, contributes to one another's’ welfare, and works to a common good. Communities do not exist with members who leech off of others, take without giving, and expect more than they put in.
In due course, perhaps a couple of years, perhaps a dozen or two, the cheap oil will run out. The financial house of cards will fall. The takers will find there is no more to take. And what then? Society will devolve and local communities will rise up again. But history has shown that societies do not go quietly, we need only look at the decline of Rome, the fall of the Ottoman empire, and the slow decay of the British empire. There will be war. There will be disease. There will be starvation and death, because over the course of hundreds of generations this blip of prosperity will have to return to the mean. This is biblical and it is scientific.
So what to do? Build a true community. Get out of the city. Have faith in God and His provision. Care for one another. Keep your priorities straight; God, family, community. Do not fear the change that comes, but know that it is inevitable, but you can do something about it. Go out and vote today or not. But do not go through life thinking all is well, the government will take care of things, and it will just work itself out without pain. We need to understand the moral and biblical imperative that you cannot take out more than you put in, individually or collectively. You must set aside your seed for the next crop, as well as some grain for a rainy day. Its OK, trust God, teach and care for your family, and encourage your community to work together and not expect more than the sum of what everyone contributes.
No comments:
Post a Comment