Stupendous Change Leadership Series: The Dark & Light Sides
28/March/2007 07:46 Filed in: Weekly Column
28 March 2007; Volume 9, Issue 13
PDF copy
I was planning this week to take an interlude from the Stupendous Change Leadership Series and develop within the context of Business Ecology how life on this earth operates, and how our current models for human enterprise do not, but alas, alas, I fear with the stupendous changes now evident, most readers do not have a context from which truly to contemplate what is really happening in this world. So like ostriches we stick our head in the sand, and hope that the bad things will go away. Actually, I don’t know if ostriches really do that, but it seems that human beings sure have evolved to that level of metaphor.
Hopefully, next week we will begin that Business Ecology, interlude which if first utilized in 1981. For those interested in funding the book and the video series, it will be called the “Garden of God.” If you might like a head start, except for a relevant update to the current state of the world and the reality of stupendous change, the basic material is in the Archives section of the website. The three series that are the most applicable are Ruminant Covenant from 1999, Enterprise Symbiosis from 2000, and Metis Economics from 2005.
Last week we began with the headline: Breaking News: Sin, not global warming, not terrorism, is the greatest and very eminent threat to a worldwide economic catastrophe! Lengthy report follows.
Throughout that lengthy piece I just assumed that readers have some concept of the God of the Bible, and some concept of what the Bible has to say about sin. I also learned that when I began this series on stupendous change, I thought I was going to write about how to handle an acute event like an earthquake, storm, or something similar. What I am now beginning to see, probably until the end of this age, stupendous change events are chronic and are going to be playing not an abnormal role, but will be come more the norm. That means more than the stuff you need to survive a particular happening, you need to either evolve into an ostrich, or learn to adapt to the changes that are now beginning to happen much more frequently.
The 10 Commandments, first taken out of the church, then out of the schools, and now out of the public places of America, are stated in the Bible beginning in Exodus 20, and will give us our context this week. This week and probably hence forth we need go no deeper into them than Commandment Number 1.
And God spoke all these words, saying: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me. (Exodus 20:1-3)
So what can we infer from this passage? First of all we must begin with the radical concept that there is a God and He in some way allowed human personalities to write down His words for posterity sake. Since it begins with the concept of “your God,” there is some sort of context of personality. In fact in the Old Testament LORD stands really for the name of God. So in the truly human context it means something like, “I am John your friend.”
This God then goes on to state that he brought the Jewish people out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. This of course is put into context within the preceding chapters of Exodus. Why in God’s name would anyone want to leave the wonders of Egypt to go out into the desert wilderness? God seems too think that the people were not happy being slaves to the Egyptians. But at least in Egypt you knew what you were going to do every day, get up, eat breakfast, go to a meaningless job, sleep, and repeat it over and over. Some were really good at it also, but that demanded a 24/7 commitment. Man what a life, too bad we really don’t want to look at bondage other than as an ostrich.
“You shall have no other gods before Me.” Now as we have said these are really not words for today. Case in point, they are not used in church, in school, and now they no longer are over the doors of the Supreme Court of the United States. Those tablets contain the Bill of Rights, the First 10 Amendments to the US Constitution, just because they look like 10 Commandment tablets etched in stone doesn’t really matter in our culture. That just goes to show how evolutionarily enlightened we have become. Furthermore, gods are like spiritual beings, that sort of belief system is really just superstition, I’m too busy worshiping my job, my possessions, and my retirement plans.
In this context of the reality of today, sin just doesn’t exist any more, except in some philosophical sense. Especially when we can get all the reality we really can handle on our 60 inch plasma TV, man life is good. Even better I just got an email from Costco, if you don’t have one already, you can get your very own for just $2,599.99, plus tax, shipping, and handling. But you better hurry because the offer is only good through April Fools Day (seriously).
So just how free are you? Are you debt free? If something were to happen to your house of cards that you so craftily keep precariously balanced, how quickly would the flood waters over flow or breach the security of your levy system. In that respect, maybe a desert wilderness is not that bad after all. At least out there, if you want to stick your head in the sand, you won’t drown.
If there is anything absolute in life, there must be an absolute God. That is basically what this First Commandment states. You can accept that concept or not. However, situationally if God does exist nothing else really matters. It is from God that all goodness must flow. Evil does not come from God, but from other personality creations, elevating self within the universe. That means fallen mankind, the devil, and his angels. Evil exists solely so that people will know that God is gracious, and forgiving of transgressions (sin) provided you take it on His terms, not the terms which you think are good.
So we come to the light and dark side of what? Of evil. What is evil? Everyone and everything that does not acknowledge God as God, it is that simple. It is worth repeating, everyone and everything that does not acknowledge God as God is evil.
Contrary to what you might have been taught in church, natural things by themselves are not evil by their nature, it is only when you carve a stone into an image, or a log into an idol, that they become evil. In that sense, your Lexus isn’t evil unless you worship it, or use it as a prop to worship yourself.
Evil is still evil, whether it is on the light side or the dark side. White witches and black witches are still real witches. America is today the home of the greatest storehouse of light side evil the world has ever known. Why do I know that? Because everyone in America is basically a good person, just ask us. I have met a few truly dark side evil people in my life, but only a few. As a consequence we think that there might be someplace on earth, a place where dark side evil exists, but we really don’t know for sure. Furthermore, if we just all think good thoughts, evil will retreat, like it is currently doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Well, I have to admit things are not going as well there as we had hoped, so I guess we should just pack up and go home. Surely then the evil will go away, or at least respect our sovereignty. Just think of all the ostriches we could raise with all that money.
The thing about the Bible is that it does speak the truth about evil and God’s response. God will destroy it. Evil exists for God’s ultimate good purposes, as we touched upon in “Death in the City” last week. Once evil’s effectiveness of bringing sinful people to find futility in their own sin and seek God as their only hope in life, both in this world and the world to come, then and only then will that evil be destroyed. At that time evil will not be tolerated, it will be destroyed.
I have a different perspective on this light side versus the dark side of evil than pretty much any leader in America today, for I spent my early adult career as a spy. I was on the far light side of the spy business, but never the less you can not spend a few years in that line of work until you understand that what is really happening in the world is not all that it may seem on the surface. As a naive young man from the fields and forests of Eastern Washington it was a tremendous eye opening experience. As a consequence I have chosen to continue to seek the lightest side of this life that I can find in the world, but always be cognizant as my now defunct intelligence agency motto stated, “Vigilant Always.”
You only need to meet a few dark side spies of any genre and it should, or will scare the hell out of you, because they have been covert for so long they really don’t know what overt reality is anymore. There are a lot of generally evil places in the world, but to be truly evil, it takes specialized training by experts. One place that stands out in that role is the former British colony of Burma, now Myanmar, there the evil of the Japanese and the Communist insurgents were defeated by first American and then the British special forces. In this world, dark doesn’t get any better than this. But in contrast we have tried to fight the war in Iraq until now like the British fought the American Revolution and lost. Rule 1 in winning an insurgency war, no matter how light or dark the country or the insurgency. That rule is to kill the insurgents, all the insurgents, wherever they may hide. There is no need for other rules.
For the remaining space in this week’s installment we will look at this light side - dark side of evil tension from a Christian Biblical perspective stated in Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?”
In the 20th century we have seen a number of totally materialistic regimes rise to prominence. Many have ceased to exist but a couple of them are worth noting, because of their effect upon the whole world stage. By materialistic I also mean naturalist in the sense that nothing exist in their world or the universe that is not material. That means only stuff, there is no God or gods, and man is nothing more than a sum of evolved random consequences. The first that we should focus upon is the rise of Communism in Russia, the second is the Rise of National Socialism before World War II in Germany. Both were repugnant in the evil sense in the eyes of the good and the lightly evil world.
It should be noted however, that the now President of the Russian Federation is Vladimir Putin and that his life before the fall of the Soviet Union was in the far dark side of spy enterprises. There is also Rule 1 when dealing with true spies, that rule states, governments may come and governments may go, but spies and the police go on forever. (Because their specialties are required to maintain order in chaotic societies). The absolute truth is that only order and freedom can coexist under the rule of God. Therefore to maintain order in atheistic cultures the only way this can be achieved is by the suppression of individual and community freedoms.
So what makes Germany and the Soviet Union, that different from the rapidly developing anti-God atheism in the United States? Save the grace of God alone, about 50 years. However, what makes this demise even more frightening is that God ordained national sovereignty of all the world’s countries are now relegated to necessary but worthless status, by global feudal corporations that have created their own monetary systems, essentially pay cursory taxes to the countries in which they operate, have no regard for the natural environment, view people other than their elite managers as serfs, animals, or machines, solely as a means of production. These corporate feudal states have made money and power their true bottom line, their true gods.
Do these organizations believe in the God of the Bible and the First Commandment of God’s law? Absolutely not. As a consequence when you read about “Babylon the great” in the book of Revelation it is not hard to understand what John’s revelation of the Apocalypse is talking about.
In “The Road to Serfdom,” F.A. Hayek writes about the evils of national socialist monopolies in Europe before and after WW II. This book served as the basis of much of the American free market emphasis in the Reagan Revolution of the 1980’s. However we did not settle for Hayek’s economics, it just wouldn’t do to import that lowly European “Austrian” model to such a grand country such as the United States of America. American economists sought to improve upon Hayek’s free markets by removing all restraint from corporate expansion, bigger is better, all the time. Monopolies are only outwardly damned because covertly they will make us rich also, especially if we spin it, calling it global free trade, then they will promise to sell us cheaper stuff for a time.
But Hayek points out in “Road to Serfdom” that markets can be only free if the market structure is free from all government interference. To be put bluntly, enterprises must pay the full cost of the goods and services that they produce. That was never part of the Reagan Revolutionary model. This eventually leads us to the Bush doctrine towards everything from starting the Iraq war, to stating Monday that ethanol is really part of America’s energy future.
The fact of the matter is that if the energy markets were truly free, ethanol from corn would never amount to anything, because even with the best funny money economic numbers, the energy gain is only marginally positive when you look at energy in, versus energy out. In other words the ethanol hype is a model of national socialism without national return or without nationalization of industry. However, it is not all that different than what Hugo Chavez is trying to do to oil companies in Venezuela, which is controlling markets for the benefit of an elite.
If this “Republican” strategy was not bad enough the Democratic proposals are nothing but the same big government centralized planning type of measures that led to the down fall of the Soviet Union and current economic stagnation in Europe and other planned economies around the world. While Democrats seem to be attempting to micro manage military commanders in Iraq, on their watch gasoline prices have risen say fifty cents a gallon, while the price of crude oil has slowly decreased since they came to power. What is really happening is that oil companies are taxing the American people, without representation, so that they can control the markets and development of all alternative fuel and energy supplies.
Therefore, on the one hand we have a mutant lap dog, wagging his tail and slobbering all over his master, and on the other you have this oxymoronic amorphous blob of jelly trying to find intelligence where there are no nerve cells. “Death in the City,” is the writing on the wall?
A couple of months ago I tuned across c-span, there a spokesman for one of the Washington, DC, Neocon think tanks was giving a presentation on our economic future. As he moved down the points on his PowerPoint presentation it was quite a good summary of where the country has been and where it might be headed in the future. What caught my attention however, was one of the upcoming points on entrepreneurialism. What I found shocking was when he got to the entrepreneurial slide he basically said, “This is where the true hope for our economic future lies, we really don’t know at all how it works!” and he moved to the next slide.
Business Ecology will shed some light upon that subject, because quite simply you can’t have a harvest without good seeds, water, and laws of descriptive observational science that govern God’s created universe. You cannot produce continued economic prosperity without good ideas, financial liquidity, and the knowledge that only a jealous God holds the future of mankind. God’s plan for His people is much more diverse and rewarding than a world based upon the worldview that all there is in the world is material stuff, money, and political power.
As we ended last week, we shall state again:
Stupendous change has always been used by God to get people to take their focus off themselves and to look to Him as the source of all truth and all that will continue beyond this world. The times have been short, only thousands of years, because it doesn’t take all that long for the sins of man to completely lose sight of God’s truth.
Tune in next week for our first Business Ecology interlude in this stupendous change series.
PDF copy
I was planning this week to take an interlude from the Stupendous Change Leadership Series and develop within the context of Business Ecology how life on this earth operates, and how our current models for human enterprise do not, but alas, alas, I fear with the stupendous changes now evident, most readers do not have a context from which truly to contemplate what is really happening in this world. So like ostriches we stick our head in the sand, and hope that the bad things will go away. Actually, I don’t know if ostriches really do that, but it seems that human beings sure have evolved to that level of metaphor.
Hopefully, next week we will begin that Business Ecology, interlude which if first utilized in 1981. For those interested in funding the book and the video series, it will be called the “Garden of God.” If you might like a head start, except for a relevant update to the current state of the world and the reality of stupendous change, the basic material is in the Archives section of the website. The three series that are the most applicable are Ruminant Covenant from 1999, Enterprise Symbiosis from 2000, and Metis Economics from 2005.
Last week we began with the headline: Breaking News: Sin, not global warming, not terrorism, is the greatest and very eminent threat to a worldwide economic catastrophe! Lengthy report follows.
Throughout that lengthy piece I just assumed that readers have some concept of the God of the Bible, and some concept of what the Bible has to say about sin. I also learned that when I began this series on stupendous change, I thought I was going to write about how to handle an acute event like an earthquake, storm, or something similar. What I am now beginning to see, probably until the end of this age, stupendous change events are chronic and are going to be playing not an abnormal role, but will be come more the norm. That means more than the stuff you need to survive a particular happening, you need to either evolve into an ostrich, or learn to adapt to the changes that are now beginning to happen much more frequently.
The 10 Commandments, first taken out of the church, then out of the schools, and now out of the public places of America, are stated in the Bible beginning in Exodus 20, and will give us our context this week. This week and probably hence forth we need go no deeper into them than Commandment Number 1.
And God spoke all these words, saying: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me. (Exodus 20:1-3)
So what can we infer from this passage? First of all we must begin with the radical concept that there is a God and He in some way allowed human personalities to write down His words for posterity sake. Since it begins with the concept of “your God,” there is some sort of context of personality. In fact in the Old Testament LORD stands really for the name of God. So in the truly human context it means something like, “I am John your friend.”
This God then goes on to state that he brought the Jewish people out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. This of course is put into context within the preceding chapters of Exodus. Why in God’s name would anyone want to leave the wonders of Egypt to go out into the desert wilderness? God seems too think that the people were not happy being slaves to the Egyptians. But at least in Egypt you knew what you were going to do every day, get up, eat breakfast, go to a meaningless job, sleep, and repeat it over and over. Some were really good at it also, but that demanded a 24/7 commitment. Man what a life, too bad we really don’t want to look at bondage other than as an ostrich.
“You shall have no other gods before Me.” Now as we have said these are really not words for today. Case in point, they are not used in church, in school, and now they no longer are over the doors of the Supreme Court of the United States. Those tablets contain the Bill of Rights, the First 10 Amendments to the US Constitution, just because they look like 10 Commandment tablets etched in stone doesn’t really matter in our culture. That just goes to show how evolutionarily enlightened we have become. Furthermore, gods are like spiritual beings, that sort of belief system is really just superstition, I’m too busy worshiping my job, my possessions, and my retirement plans.
In this context of the reality of today, sin just doesn’t exist any more, except in some philosophical sense. Especially when we can get all the reality we really can handle on our 60 inch plasma TV, man life is good. Even better I just got an email from Costco, if you don’t have one already, you can get your very own for just $2,599.99, plus tax, shipping, and handling. But you better hurry because the offer is only good through April Fools Day (seriously).
So just how free are you? Are you debt free? If something were to happen to your house of cards that you so craftily keep precariously balanced, how quickly would the flood waters over flow or breach the security of your levy system. In that respect, maybe a desert wilderness is not that bad after all. At least out there, if you want to stick your head in the sand, you won’t drown.
If there is anything absolute in life, there must be an absolute God. That is basically what this First Commandment states. You can accept that concept or not. However, situationally if God does exist nothing else really matters. It is from God that all goodness must flow. Evil does not come from God, but from other personality creations, elevating self within the universe. That means fallen mankind, the devil, and his angels. Evil exists solely so that people will know that God is gracious, and forgiving of transgressions (sin) provided you take it on His terms, not the terms which you think are good.
So we come to the light and dark side of what? Of evil. What is evil? Everyone and everything that does not acknowledge God as God, it is that simple. It is worth repeating, everyone and everything that does not acknowledge God as God is evil.
Contrary to what you might have been taught in church, natural things by themselves are not evil by their nature, it is only when you carve a stone into an image, or a log into an idol, that they become evil. In that sense, your Lexus isn’t evil unless you worship it, or use it as a prop to worship yourself.
Evil is still evil, whether it is on the light side or the dark side. White witches and black witches are still real witches. America is today the home of the greatest storehouse of light side evil the world has ever known. Why do I know that? Because everyone in America is basically a good person, just ask us. I have met a few truly dark side evil people in my life, but only a few. As a consequence we think that there might be someplace on earth, a place where dark side evil exists, but we really don’t know for sure. Furthermore, if we just all think good thoughts, evil will retreat, like it is currently doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Well, I have to admit things are not going as well there as we had hoped, so I guess we should just pack up and go home. Surely then the evil will go away, or at least respect our sovereignty. Just think of all the ostriches we could raise with all that money.
The thing about the Bible is that it does speak the truth about evil and God’s response. God will destroy it. Evil exists for God’s ultimate good purposes, as we touched upon in “Death in the City” last week. Once evil’s effectiveness of bringing sinful people to find futility in their own sin and seek God as their only hope in life, both in this world and the world to come, then and only then will that evil be destroyed. At that time evil will not be tolerated, it will be destroyed.
I have a different perspective on this light side versus the dark side of evil than pretty much any leader in America today, for I spent my early adult career as a spy. I was on the far light side of the spy business, but never the less you can not spend a few years in that line of work until you understand that what is really happening in the world is not all that it may seem on the surface. As a naive young man from the fields and forests of Eastern Washington it was a tremendous eye opening experience. As a consequence I have chosen to continue to seek the lightest side of this life that I can find in the world, but always be cognizant as my now defunct intelligence agency motto stated, “Vigilant Always.”
You only need to meet a few dark side spies of any genre and it should, or will scare the hell out of you, because they have been covert for so long they really don’t know what overt reality is anymore. There are a lot of generally evil places in the world, but to be truly evil, it takes specialized training by experts. One place that stands out in that role is the former British colony of Burma, now Myanmar, there the evil of the Japanese and the Communist insurgents were defeated by first American and then the British special forces. In this world, dark doesn’t get any better than this. But in contrast we have tried to fight the war in Iraq until now like the British fought the American Revolution and lost. Rule 1 in winning an insurgency war, no matter how light or dark the country or the insurgency. That rule is to kill the insurgents, all the insurgents, wherever they may hide. There is no need for other rules.
For the remaining space in this week’s installment we will look at this light side - dark side of evil tension from a Christian Biblical perspective stated in Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?”
In the 20th century we have seen a number of totally materialistic regimes rise to prominence. Many have ceased to exist but a couple of them are worth noting, because of their effect upon the whole world stage. By materialistic I also mean naturalist in the sense that nothing exist in their world or the universe that is not material. That means only stuff, there is no God or gods, and man is nothing more than a sum of evolved random consequences. The first that we should focus upon is the rise of Communism in Russia, the second is the Rise of National Socialism before World War II in Germany. Both were repugnant in the evil sense in the eyes of the good and the lightly evil world.
It should be noted however, that the now President of the Russian Federation is Vladimir Putin and that his life before the fall of the Soviet Union was in the far dark side of spy enterprises. There is also Rule 1 when dealing with true spies, that rule states, governments may come and governments may go, but spies and the police go on forever. (Because their specialties are required to maintain order in chaotic societies). The absolute truth is that only order and freedom can coexist under the rule of God. Therefore to maintain order in atheistic cultures the only way this can be achieved is by the suppression of individual and community freedoms.
So what makes Germany and the Soviet Union, that different from the rapidly developing anti-God atheism in the United States? Save the grace of God alone, about 50 years. However, what makes this demise even more frightening is that God ordained national sovereignty of all the world’s countries are now relegated to necessary but worthless status, by global feudal corporations that have created their own monetary systems, essentially pay cursory taxes to the countries in which they operate, have no regard for the natural environment, view people other than their elite managers as serfs, animals, or machines, solely as a means of production. These corporate feudal states have made money and power their true bottom line, their true gods.
Do these organizations believe in the God of the Bible and the First Commandment of God’s law? Absolutely not. As a consequence when you read about “Babylon the great” in the book of Revelation it is not hard to understand what John’s revelation of the Apocalypse is talking about.
In “The Road to Serfdom,” F.A. Hayek writes about the evils of national socialist monopolies in Europe before and after WW II. This book served as the basis of much of the American free market emphasis in the Reagan Revolution of the 1980’s. However we did not settle for Hayek’s economics, it just wouldn’t do to import that lowly European “Austrian” model to such a grand country such as the United States of America. American economists sought to improve upon Hayek’s free markets by removing all restraint from corporate expansion, bigger is better, all the time. Monopolies are only outwardly damned because covertly they will make us rich also, especially if we spin it, calling it global free trade, then they will promise to sell us cheaper stuff for a time.
But Hayek points out in “Road to Serfdom” that markets can be only free if the market structure is free from all government interference. To be put bluntly, enterprises must pay the full cost of the goods and services that they produce. That was never part of the Reagan Revolutionary model. This eventually leads us to the Bush doctrine towards everything from starting the Iraq war, to stating Monday that ethanol is really part of America’s energy future.
The fact of the matter is that if the energy markets were truly free, ethanol from corn would never amount to anything, because even with the best funny money economic numbers, the energy gain is only marginally positive when you look at energy in, versus energy out. In other words the ethanol hype is a model of national socialism without national return or without nationalization of industry. However, it is not all that different than what Hugo Chavez is trying to do to oil companies in Venezuela, which is controlling markets for the benefit of an elite.
If this “Republican” strategy was not bad enough the Democratic proposals are nothing but the same big government centralized planning type of measures that led to the down fall of the Soviet Union and current economic stagnation in Europe and other planned economies around the world. While Democrats seem to be attempting to micro manage military commanders in Iraq, on their watch gasoline prices have risen say fifty cents a gallon, while the price of crude oil has slowly decreased since they came to power. What is really happening is that oil companies are taxing the American people, without representation, so that they can control the markets and development of all alternative fuel and energy supplies.
Therefore, on the one hand we have a mutant lap dog, wagging his tail and slobbering all over his master, and on the other you have this oxymoronic amorphous blob of jelly trying to find intelligence where there are no nerve cells. “Death in the City,” is the writing on the wall?
A couple of months ago I tuned across c-span, there a spokesman for one of the Washington, DC, Neocon think tanks was giving a presentation on our economic future. As he moved down the points on his PowerPoint presentation it was quite a good summary of where the country has been and where it might be headed in the future. What caught my attention however, was one of the upcoming points on entrepreneurialism. What I found shocking was when he got to the entrepreneurial slide he basically said, “This is where the true hope for our economic future lies, we really don’t know at all how it works!” and he moved to the next slide.
Business Ecology will shed some light upon that subject, because quite simply you can’t have a harvest without good seeds, water, and laws of descriptive observational science that govern God’s created universe. You cannot produce continued economic prosperity without good ideas, financial liquidity, and the knowledge that only a jealous God holds the future of mankind. God’s plan for His people is much more diverse and rewarding than a world based upon the worldview that all there is in the world is material stuff, money, and political power.
As we ended last week, we shall state again:
Stupendous change has always been used by God to get people to take their focus off themselves and to look to Him as the source of all truth and all that will continue beyond this world. The times have been short, only thousands of years, because it doesn’t take all that long for the sins of man to completely lose sight of God’s truth.
Tune in next week for our first Business Ecology interlude in this stupendous change series.