Exclusively Inclusive: All
Noise on the Western Front
25 February 2009
Volume 11, Issue 8
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As I was listening to some
of the discussions of our current financial crisis, one of the commentators
began listing some of the impressive creations of literature that came out of
financial hardships, wars, and similar stupendous change events. One of the
books mentioned was ÒAll Quiet on the Western FrontÓ chronicling the events
that brought about the end of WWI, the war to end all wars.
Shortly thereafter I was
treated to both far right and far left pundits interrupting each other with
pedantic talking points, none of them showing any civility to each other or to
the host. Since this financial catastrophe finds its roots in the material
crusades of Western Culture, I mused that what we were all hearing was ÒAll
Noise on the Western Front.Ó
Human beings are unique in
all of GodÕs creation, in that we have some cognitive understanding of life.
Yet we have developed or fallen to such a desperate condition that we have
become completely hostile to others who do not share our appreciation of dead
stuff in the way we suppose is the proper way that stuff and money should be
acquired. The noise is deafening, almost like artillery attacks, but we have
completely missed the fact that we all share a tremendous transcendent gift and
that is life itself.
The talk for the last few
months is that we have to save the financial system. The current
AdministrationÕs conscience is that somehow, someway, throwing enough money at
the problem, we hope, we can fix it.
There is one truth in all of this; we are throwing money at the problem,
definitely not wealth. Eventually wealth will again surface and money will
again become worthwhile, but the way things look now, there needs to be a
significant change in attitude and policies.
Tuesday Fed Chairman Ben
Bernanke said he hoped that the recession would end this year. This hope gave
the stock market hope and it regained much of what it lost last Friday. Later
that evening President Obama gave a similar speech to a joint session of
Congress. Today and following we will find out if those words, just words, will
change the perception of economic realities. It seems from my perspective that
he is intent on growing government with little understanding on how to pay for
it.
We canÕt take our stuff with
us. Yet through all this financial noise we have never asked three important
questions.
The first is stuff the prime
goal of human life?
Is there another worldview
that can provide important human civility?
Finally, do we really have
the where with all to act as our own messiah?
Last week we looked at fear
as the prime motivator for human actions. By that we mean when faced with a
series of choices we almost always choose the one that says the future is
modeled by the past and the present, because they are always known quantities.
Essentially this means we lack the imagination to quantify all the
alternatives. Hence history repeats itself again and again.
FDR made famous the
quotation ÒThe only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.Ó That is pretty
slick politics, but is also logically circular reasoning. We truly fear the
unknown, because as much as we would like it not to be true, we do not control
the future. But there are some things we can do which will make the future much
worse, such as taking the easy course, because it is politically expedient.
On January 14th
in ÒWalls of fearÓ we used the term Ònoise and toys.Ó What has transpired since
that date is essentially a bunch of noise, generating a gargantuan bunch of
money, so that we can maintain our affluence to buy a bunch of toys we really
have little or no use for. Especially when we put this into the big picture of
the wonder of life itself.
Think for a minute of all
the things you really want to do in life. Many or most of those are quality of
life issues, like travel, doing fun things, meeting and knowing interesting
people, it is a long list. Granted there is a certain need for material to be
able to make these events happen, but most of the time the things are very
subservient to the doing itself. If we eliminated a lot of the drive for a lot,
we would have the time to do a lot we now only consider in our dreams.
The problem is that the
current world financial system could not and cannot function in such a world
for a number of reasons. Primarily with stuff subservient to life, it is
difficult to know how many iPods and iPhones to build. More to the point is
there is not an endless, increasing demand, for inflating high value things.
Two principle examples are houses and automobiles. Businesses now in the most serious
trouble all deal with the building and finances to buy houses and cars.
In the last half century the
useful life of an automobile as increased from about 50,000 to about 200,000
miles. That means driving 10,000 miles a year a car is good for about 20 years.
That car new will cost you let us say $25,000. If you kept that car for that
lifetime it would cost about $1,250 per year, which would mean a per mile cost
of about $ 0.125. However you can probably by a 10-year-old car of around that
original sticker price for about $5,000 with 100,000 miles remaining. That
means your yearly cost comes down to $500 per year and $ 0.05 per mile. Buying
a new car for economic reasons, especially in hard times, makes no economic
sense.
The same is pretty much true
with real estate, for while real estate historically does not depreciate, it
historically has never been a true money making investment. If people realize
that the cost and hassle of buying a home for just its home value, it will be a
long time before the housing market bottoms.
I personally do not think
all this financial noise currently in the works is going to be all that
effective. Furthermore as sad as it may seem I donÕt think that this is the end
of it. If you look at it logically all the attempts to save a bankrupt debt
system with more debt money is going to fail. That is when you have something
to fear if you really think it will work in the first place. We all need to
look seriously at action alternatives before fear overcomes our rational human nature.
Historically nations have
failed when the rulers have debased the monetary system in order to maintain
their grasp on political power. The problem is that this power grab fails for
the very reason it attempts to maintain the elite power positions.
Civilization, culture and
trade need sound money in which everyone can believe. There is nothing that is
happening in the United States, or the noise in other countries on the Western
Front, that should give one a morsel of optimism that any current leadership
understands what is really happening, or at least has power to quiet the noise
by doing something truly valuable. That would be to make everyoneÕs money worth
something.
If we continue to beg and
cry for sound money however, we miss the true cause of the problem. That is
that the true energetics, biological, physical, and human, are all out of
synergism with what all the Western Front Noise is trying to do.
Just as water runs down hill
from the mountains to the ocean, money is not going to move back to creating wealth
just because some people turn on all the fountains in New York, Washington DC,
London, Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong, Beijing, or Tokyo. We could demonstrate that
if we had the financial resources to do the energetic research, but until that
time you will just have to take my word for it, or rely on your common sense.
This is where the noise gets
overwhelming, because in a country without civility all that is generated from
these fountain programs is increasing noise. The noise deepens our fear and
most importantly increases personal isolation. With all the talk about
government coming to the rescue of the folks, the cost of working the
increasing bureaucracy will cost more time and heartache than most people have
the ability or the patience to endure. Hence without a return to civility,
which is not a governmental program, you are pretty much on your own dude. That
is a fact, a cold, a deep, and foreboding fact.
There is beginning across
the country and the world however an understanding about the reality of the present.
No one currently alive has much experience as an adult in what is slowly
unfolding. Hence even if we can read our history, the present and the future
are much more complex than they were historically. That complexity is a form of
diversity, which will eventually rise above the noise and the chaos. As
individuals we need, as we stated last week, to move toward that diversely
unified civility.
That civility recognizes
that human beings are not now and never were consumer or manufacturing units.
That means that basically we are aware of our lives, and we want to deepen that
experience, whether government or human enterprise recognizes that reality.
Governments and enterprise that do not recognize true human humanity are going
to fail. They will go down kicking and screaming, and make a whole lot of noise
in the process, but they will fail nonetheless.
Religion has been part of
all human activity throughout time. The Bible says we are created by God for
His glory. That is probably the best definition, but other religions and
religious experiences have always sought some form of deity to help with life,
both the struggles, but more importantly the wonder of human and all life
itself.
Militant Islam exists, for
example, to destroy the Great Satan, Western Culture. Obviously they lack the
discernment to understand we are really good people doing good things for
humanity. Or perhaps it is that we lack the discernment to understand they have
a very valid point. Militant Islam is very specifically and radically
exclusively exclusive. Hence we who are part of the exclusively inclusive have
a much more viable survival quotient.
Loneliness or human
isolation plays a bigger role in all of this than we can currently understand.
The concept of divide and conquer really is a reality that has caused much of
this economic turmoil. It allowed bad people to do bad things and restrained
good people from doing good things. That really is not a fault of regulation,
that is a fault of lack of civility working through diverse human communities.
The current world situation
means that those true communities are again beginning their ascendance. They
may be hard to find in all the noise on the Western Front, but as the
alternatives become eliminated from the gene pool, the noise will decrease and
we again will find that our greatest hope and aspirations lie by working with
each other.
Then and only then will we
again hear ÒAll quiet on the Western Front.Ó We will begin there next week.
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