The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Ten Plagues to Set the People Free

16 February 2011

Volume 13, Issue 7

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. This column also now appears each Wednesday on Deep Woods Moola, Redux Rendezvous and The Creation Leadership Center.

To make a donation to the Wonder Springs community please do so at the address below, or follow the donation links on the website.

PDF Print

For the last few weeks we have been discussing the geopolitical career of Moses in the wilderness with the people of Israel. We have attempted to illustrate that the people groups of tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands, operating from both the bottom up and the top down, provide for both individual and community freedom.

While we have been doing our thing, something amazing has been happening in the real world — that being the departure of Hosni Mubarak from his post as the head of the Egyptian state. From these events that will change the future of the whole world, it is not all that difficult to imagine the context of Moses asking Pharaoh to “Let my people go!” This time however it is the Egyptian people that are seeking a very similar freedom.

That freedom for the people manifests itself in the opportunity to set a path to a new destiny with the future, by leaving behind the tacit security of the present oppression and venture into a wilderness of new possibilities.

Over the period of this Egyptian phenomenon, there has been a wide spectrum of analogies equating president Mubarak with the dreaded Pharaoh. The comparisons have come from across the western political spectrum, as well has from similar expressions from Islam.

All of these Pharaoh — Mubarak comments seem to be pejorative references to a similarity of personal oppression, but do they in anyway indicate that in the original reality, the Pharaoh was viewed as an earthly manifestation of a god? Of course not, because all of the world’s cultures have evolved to the state that we no longer believe in earthly gods, except for ourselves. And for the big dude in the sky, there we are sort of agnostic, except for those creepy freedom fighting suicide bombers and those who empower them.

This leads to the hand wrenching and bloviating about the potential for Egypt to become a principle part of the reestablishing of a Moslem caliphate to rule over the whole world. If this were a real possibility, we of western European extraction would be speaking a different language today. As best as can be described as the grace of God alone, we have been saved from this potential fate at Tours in 732 and on the plains east of Vienna in 1529. This caliphate will not happen in this age of social media, the Internet and rapidly declining numbers of dictators of any persuasion.

In reality perhaps a better illustration of the future of Egypt may be found in the Bible itself in Isaiah Chapter 19. Put into this perspective could the first part of the chapter be a prophetic illustration of Egyptian rulers up and through Mubarak and from verse 16 on, shows a much different reality for that region than an Islamic caliphate.

However in the broader Biblical context both Egypt and Babylon are used as illustrations of worldliness and world religions, as contrasted with God and his people. Both Egypt and Babylon find the highest perfection of human society in the “collective good.” That good may be a religious caliphate in Islam. The dominant worldview today however is that collective good is expressed in globalism both political and economic.

Back in the Moses model, Moses asked Pharaoh to let the Jewish people go into the wilderness to worship God. It took ten plagues on Egypt before that reality came to pass. In our context of the Moses model being a method of community and individual leadership, letting the people go to worship God, begins with the reality that before that can take place, the people need to be made individually free from the ties that bind them to Egypt; in the broader context Babylon.

If we bring that into the present era using the same Egyptian — Babylonian typology could we need Ten Plagues focusing upon the destruction of our modern geopolitical — religious structures to give the people freedom of self-expression, to choose to serve the God of Abraham and Moses, or to serve the gods of this world?

With that in mind I wondered if I could come up with ten plagues sources to again bring individual freedom to the people of the whole world; hopelessly entangled in a material system that seems to be rapidly degenerating into irreversible chaos. It took but a few minutes to come up with ten plague limits to individual freedom. Once completed, true liberty and the means to restore prosperity will again grow freely.

Those ten world plagues focus upon the following, listed in the order I wrote them down are:

1. National Despots

2. Jihadist Islam

3. Marxist Socialism

4. Excessive Debt

5. Crony Capitalism

6. Baseless Money

7. Commodity Cartels

8. Colonial Globalism

9. Centralized Finance

10. Myopic Investment Bankers

When you look at them you see these plagues are either national or international in scale. While not every region of the world is “plagued” by each plague, everyone around the world is affected by what happens elsewhere. The plagues also work together formally and informally to maintain and expand their power bases.

What is now happening is that the plagues have really become a natural cancer. While they attempt to work together, the natural demands of increased growth in a limited universe are causing them to begin to create a jungle of enlightened chaos. This natural chaos is the manifest destiny of the natural laws of thermodynamics.

Entropy cannot be overcome, but it can be more productively rearranged. That rearrangement can only happen through individual freedom enabled by the grace of God. The collective intelligence and good will of mankind has done nothing but accelerate our problems, simply because of the law of unintended consequences, which we are too stupid to foresee. God however, being God, can convert those unintended consequences for good, organizational diversity and positive energetics.

Before we get to a short reason why the ten plague destructions were added to the list, it would be appropriate to look at the unintended consequences that happened in Egypt as this spontaneous revolution of the people took place.

It wasn’t spontaneous and it wasn’t a revolution, if you heard that in the news media, they were either stupid, misinformed or they lied. Whatever the reasons behind the spin, it too does have unintended consequences.

During the Vietnam era, we probably saw the most potent attempts to not only stop the war, but also to overthrow the American government, since the Civil War. Those protests were supposedly spontaneously organized by small bands of protestors trying to bring about positive social change.

I was in training in the military side of what is now and then the National Security Agency. Since our type of spy work was done overseas, we only had one unit of the curriculum that dealt with these protests. At the end of that section we got to listen to the radio communications from the government side of the protests, and from the so-called rioters. There was essentially no difference. In that school environment we had no need to know, just who was controlling the protesters, but it was quite obvious that they were being controlled from within, just as the government knew what was going on, and controlling the demonstration from the outside.

In the light of the Ten Plagues that Moses brought about on Pharaoh’s Egypt, they were miracles from God. The Ten Plagues that will set the world’s people free will come about through natural law, where people were created to be freely diverse human personalities and elitists and leaders not realizing the unintended consequences of their actions.

1. National Despots: Of course we have seen in the last week this plague in action in Egypt. Monday there were protests in Iran, and these protests will continue in the Islamic world and in other countries, where despots attempt to keep the people in check. There is also a broader application here in more democratic cultures, where the enlightened elite will find that their desires for geopolitical control will be continually thwarted.

2. Jihadist Islam: The attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, became the apparent opening strike of Jihadist Islam to create a worldwide caliphate of an enlightened form of a religious theocracy. To counteract this threat with a War on Terror was an attempt to put these acts into a nation state context when in reality the Islamist goals were much broader, with very limited resources. Hence we have wasted a lot of money and sacrificed human lives; in vain attempts at nation building, when a more frugal and appropriate response would have been to kill the bad guys wherever they tried to hide.

3. Marxist Socialism: The human enlightenment required to create a just universe of atheistic materialism — a world in which God does not exist, is still alive and well in places where the intellectual elite try to establish a nation in which their dreams have merit. Since they have really never done anything but propagandize their dreams and have no true leadership skills, they still provide a negative tension against other plague elements.

4. Excessive Debt: Monday in the United States, president Obama put forth is budget for the next fiscal year. Combined scores of subjective negative adjectives to describe this undertaking; have yet to clear its stated shallowness. As the leader of the world, the United States has prolonged its prosperity for at least a generation, by exporting and monetizing debt. The rest of the world also adopted this plague. We live in a debt driven world and have no historic methods to change the future.

5. Crony Capitalism: Global governance goals lead to global crony capitalism. In many respects nation states have become obsolete. All the wealth of the world is created through the functioning of free markets. When companies become too large to create wealth within market principles, they attempt to manipulate governments to create special niches for their products and services, thereby limit natural human enterprise potential and true wealth producing opportunities.

6. Baseless Money: After World War II a world monetary system was established through the Bretton Woods Agreement that made the United States dollar the reserve currency of the world — where the dollar was somewhat backed by gold. That changed significantly when Richard Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. Now quantitative easing is continuing, not just to debase the dollar with nothing, but now has become the plague to threaten the economic world.

7. Commodity Cartels: What is the true free market price of oil? Energy, especially cheap energy makes the world go round. Our world’s economies are more realistically based upon energy than money, yet OPEC, the world oil cartel, holds production to limits to maintain their profits. But at least they are smart enough to realize their position in the real world. Oil speculators, using baseless money and excessive leverage continually play long and short games; provide profits for themselves and a plague to sustained economic growth.

8. Colonial Globalism: Globalism both in the political and economic sense has been the dream of the power elites since the Tower of Babel. In the twentieth century this essentially became a religion to solve all the world’s problems that their unified world structures unintendedly created. In previous centuries we called it colonialism, but it is in its pure essence an attempt to achieve selfish gain at the expense of those that lack the capital and intellectual resources to achieve their own freedom and independence.

9. Centralized Finance: From the establishment of Bretton Woods, centralized finance has provided the financial stability to provide worldwide economic growth beyond the understanding of those of just a lifetime before. There has always been a golden rule reality however; he who has the gold makes the rules. In a world in which baseless money is the medium of exchange, this plague has begun to create a culture totally divorced from the world it was created to serve.

10. Myopic Investment Bankers: One time in the ancient history of the United States, wise men determined to promote sustainable economic growth, true banks needed to be separated from investment banks. This was a simple truth, because business equity positions in enterprises were too risky to promote a stable means of financing a stable society. When centralization became the only means to meet financial return goals, true bankers became speculators and investment bankers sought cheap bank deposits to fund their ventures. What this has done is limit capital, either through true banks, or through investment banks, to a myopic plague devoid of true wealth creating potential.

So there you have it, ten plagues that when they have destroyed our current ancient Egyptian — Babylonian typology, will allow for individual freedom operating in sustainable communities. This is not all that different than what was envisioned by the founders of the American republic; to find freedom, liberty, to pursue happiness and the opportunity to create wealth within a limited world. We need the demise of these ten plagues to set the people free.