The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Our enlightened elusive world.

17 November 2010

Volume 12, Issue 45

Access now the fresh insights of “The Wonder Springs Chronicle” Front Page. Be sure to check out the grizzly times wisdom and fresh insights of Brute’ Griz every Friday and our Monday Cult Football series article was “Natural reality trumps human desires.” This column also now appears each Wednesday on Deep Woods Moola, Redux Rendezvous and “The Creation Leadership Center”.

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As humans, created in the image of God, we inherit as part of God’s initial gift of grace, the ability to create, within natural limits, a world fashioned from our personal desires. When we overstep those natural limits we move beyond that gift of grace and enter a world in which through our limitations we throw off those natural checks, and that eventually leads to an artificial reality, in which were are masters of an illusion enforced through fear.

Perhaps one of the most famous quotations of all time is Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” From his First Inaugural Address given in 1933, this fear concept sets the stage for the New Deal, the basis of almost eighty years of attempts to abolish, circumvent, or ignore those natural checks on human enterprise.

In those intervening years we have attempted to build a great society, a shining city on a hill, a world of global peace and harmony. While many still believe that this great hopeful leap is possible for mankind, the signs around us everywhere point to the reality that we have overstepped our limits, and fear has not been eradicated. Now fear again comes to the fore because we have built this world on a faux reality of baseless dreams, leveraged debt money, and prosperity based upon nothing but ever increasing material consumption.

The solution to this fear is not to wish it away, but to replace it with the hope of real opportunity. This time that hope cannot be based upon “what your country can do for you, or you can do for your country,” a country we attempted to create and failed. Rather how you touch other people with the gifts of a community we have received, but have failed to acknowledge, is the source of regaining a fearless focus. The fruits of that community are love, joy, peace patience, kindness, goodness and faithfulness.

This fruit continually brings us back to the reality that what separates us, is relatively insignificant to what binds us together. That community cannot exist in the abstract, but only through personal contact as we share this gift of life.

As published in Monday’s “Natural reality trumps human desires,” I made the comment about how George W. Bush in promoting his book “Decision Points” the president stated that he did not see the financial meltdown coming. I mentioned that I thought this was odd, because the worldview that increasing real estate values couldn’t continue forever were part of my talking points in the 1980s; some twenty years before this real estate reality finally became apparent, but is something we still continue to punt down the wishful thinking Interstate.

Contemplating other talking points of mine from that era, they all focused upon the true reality that you can’t create unlimited growth in a limited world and expect it to last indefinitely. A few examples were:

Mergers and acquisitions, where one company buys another, consolidates and reduces jobs, is called growth in the economy.

We could export manufacturing to cheap foreign sources and expect that a service worker society could continue to purchase virtually unlimited goods forever.

That same irrationality continues today in the belief that central governments, that are always net consumers of wealth, can in someway resurrect a defunct entrepreneurial system by making it easier for people to borrow money to create jobs.

On the international scale is the belief that China can continue to produce increasing state corporation goods forever — to a world where America’s corporate state is totally shackled by debt driven leverage fiat money.

It may seem as normal human logic, but it just became apparent to me that the earth has become two parallel universes. One I would call reality, governed by the science and natural laws of creation. The second is the world of progressive delusion, or more precisely “Our enlightened elusive world.”

Not too long ago we would have defined these universes as worldviews, but now probably a better illustration is a world of matter, contrasted with the reality of dark matter. However in this case in this enlightened elusive world, the dark matter is what we used to call reality — even in economics and business.

Can we perform a miracle and bring these two universes together again? That is the question of this second decade of the twenty-first century.

The major positive developments of human civilization have taken place through increasing global commerce. But to say that continually increasing trade can continue unabated forever, especially when much of it is no longer free in the classic sense, denies the reality we live in a limited world. Just because we think we have created an economic system free of the interferences of natural reality however, isn’t really a viable worldview or religion, but more so a form of insanity.

As I pointed out in “Natural reality trumps human desires,” the study of ecological energetics will readily point out the fallacy of this foolhardy pipe dream. Call it a primitive throwback to a bygone era if you like, but it is still a primitive natural world that changes very slowly in our human perspective, all the time, by mechanisms we have only a even more primitive understanding.

Many years ago I purchased a book in a very progressive bookstore on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. For those unfamiliar with Seattle, to call Capitol Hill the region’s most elitist, liberal, progressive neighborhood is truly a gross understatement.

The book dealt with primarily the stark distinctions of rural poverty and urban affluence in third world countries. Essentially the emphasis is how are you going to keep them down on the farm, where you might truly starve to death, contrasted with eking out an existence in a disease ridden urban slum.

What the book did a good job of pointing out was that the major reason for the disparity between the rural and urban regions basically came down to bankers and access to capital. Bankers were born, bred and trained in urban cultures and hence were afraid to venture too far outside their comfort zones. This urban bias was enhanced by the world’s financial system that was even more urban elitist than the desire for true national development.

Put in even more relevant perspective of today, what we are experiencing is the lack of enterprise, either in the sense of governance or business, to care about anything but the continuance of essentially this colonial-imperialist approach to world economics. Now if you grant me, at least intellectually, that this colonial model needs to change, at least to conform to natural law energetics, where do we go from here?

In baseball terms, let us begin by saying that strike one, of the current economic stress, was the financial meltdown and TARP that occurred during the latter days of the presidency of George W. Bush and described in his book as the second crisis of his presidency. Following along that analogy, strike two quickly followed in the Obama presidency with the total reliance on a trillion dollars of Keynesian economic stimulus to create jobs. Could strike three and you are out, be Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing?

As I read somewhere, this bet of the Federal Reserve move by the chairman, simply follows in his 35-year career of studying the Great Depression and his model that he believes is the right template to keep this from happening again. Disregarding any politics or even his easing decision, it all points to the seriousness of our current situation; that he if anyone should understand. Even if he lacks the tools to either ask for a mulligan, or a do-over, what is the alternative?

I would submit that the American constitutional model is the solution. However getting back to that place where individual freedom and liberty through limited government, is going to be a tough road to again construct in a wilderness of an economic wasteland. The very interesting thing is this process is now already in motion.

There are any number of places on the Internet where you can view the results of this year’s midterm elections in the common red and blue states scenario, where red stands for Republicans and Blue for Democrat Party victories. In presidential election years those results are sometimes shown as county-by-county results. In these midterms the best available data show results of the House of Representatives. What these results show much of the American heartland has again turned red and this red includes many of the congressional districts, in the generally acknowledged blue states on the right and left coasts.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan we have been forced to fight counterinsurgency wars. What that means is that we (defined as the good guys) generally control the population centers and al Qaeda and the Taliban (the bad guys) control the rural areas. What is not commonly reported about counterinsurgency efforts is in the long term they are generally not successful. In that illumination, a decade or more into the future, if Iraq and Afghanistan still exist with some true form of representative government, they will be exceptions to the general rule.

If we look at the election map results of the United States, especially over the last two years, you see a significant increase in the red conservative insurgency. The cool thing about this increase, was that it was not accomplished with guns, blood, and chaos, but rather with votes, ideas, and organization; focused on traditional American constitutional values. What this shows is not only an increase in natural area, but also the increasing capture of the common moral high ground.

So will these results continue and to what end?

To understand that potential you must look not at wishful thinking, or even the potential or actual reality of civil unrest. We are generally led to believe that civil unrest is some type of spontaneous generation of protest among the masses of the folks. As was true with civil unrest during the Vietnam era, all mass demonstrations are highly organized on both sides of the confrontation.

However you want to look at the problem, chaos is really just noise and accomplishes nothing of lasting value. To think otherwise is just a warm fuzzy trip to virtual reality and for the most part that virtual reality turns out to be a fantasyland.

So why is Glenn Beck so concerned with George Soros and the rise of the progressive intellectual elite?

Probably because his staff thinks that these elitists can collapse the governmental system (and they can add some noise and chaos), but they really are just a small band of the intelligentsia that have never really accomplished anything beyond high, but unjustified, personal regard.

What about the Russian Revolution?

I had a discussion a few months ago in which we came to the conclusion that most American knowledge of the Russian Revolution comes to us through the 1965 movie Dr. Zhivago. Sadly a brief Internet search doesn’t seem to improve significantly upon that epic, in a video format. There is a free 25 minute clip on Lenin’s rise to power and a “Russian Revolution in Color” that runs 90 minutes.

The fundamental difference of the United States from all other revolutions (especially Czarist Russia) and other countries is our revolution was based upon Divine Providence and the importance of individual inalienable rights given to us by our Creator. Those have been and will be the weapons that will bring about an American redux and the ultimate success of this arising traditional insurgency of idea driven results.

The problem with the United States is not that we have yet to embrace enough of this revolution of government control of the creation of wealth, but rather we have embraced too much of it already. Individual liberty is the foundation of American opportunity. But contrary to what we will call the Social Darwinism of Ayn Rand atheistic libertarianism of laissez-faire scoundrels, or their collective elitist brethren, we need to embrace the natural laws of creation that provide the framework for true wealth creation through individual initiative and opportunity.

At the present time however, established leadership thinks that the twenty-first century will be just a bigger and better spin of the prosperity of the twentieth. The old saying “if it ain’t broke don’t fixit,” no longer applies. Things are broken, when it comes to world economics and enterprise — the people have begun to elect a new type of political leadership. They, along with a citizen army of enterprise opportunity seekers will begin not just that fixing process, but also to reorganize, reform, and built anew upon the crumbling of the industrial age.

It is a great time to be alive and to join the new American insurgency.

In the last few weeks we have been discussing our current situation in the context of the Biblical Tower of Babel found at the beginning of Genesis Chapter 11. Yesterday Glenn Beck also did a show on this experiment in mankind’s desire to live without God. This whole context got me to thinking about one of my oft used Bible verses from earlier times and has a direct relationship to the insurgency discussed above; only the metaphor changes from insurgency into a spiritual dwelling. It also relates directly to the importance that it is not what we do that makes all the difference, but what we are willing to receive.

As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in Scripture: "Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame. 1 Peter 2:4-6

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