REflections
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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
— Wendell Berry
In C. S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia,” Aslan, the Great Lion, serving in the typology of Jesus Christ, mentions often the “Deep magic before the dawn of time.” If we humans think of creation at all, we seldom put it into the context of the truly unknowable. Even more to point, we never think in such terms about our world today. We are the masters of our own destiny, creators of our own world, and just because we still have a few evolutionary kinks to work out, without any help from some mythical figure, we will eventually get it right.
However, if we were not so self-righteously arrogant and presumptuous, we should be readily able to discern, that Aslan’s deep magic did not end with the creation of the world, but still is the force that maintains the world in such order that life on earth continues to be possible. Natural law, ordering the physical known and unknowns such as dark matter, flows like a river, towards an eternal ocean, where this magical unknown will become part of our understanding of reality.
If this is true, in times like this, perhaps wisdom begins with the reality that we should pray more, boast and pontificate less. Texas Governor Rick Perry has gotten all sort of secular distain for proposing, something quite similar to this, as the beginning of the transcendent solution to what ails the nation, and also our world.
Watching the Internet traffic to the Wonder Springs Chronicle you can see a definite drop off in site visitors when some part of an article focuses on some spiritual attribute such as God’s grace or faith as a means to bring clarity to our current problems.
With that in mind I figured I might as well get the God stuff out front at the beginning, because this week that is pretty much the context. When you look at the world, in the light of faith in God and the justification provided by the grace of God alone, you see that it is not Lewis’ Mere Christianity, but the Christian religion that is not that much different than Al Gore’s quest to save the world from global warming. It is all about keeping the law, our efforts to become gods, and really nothing about God becoming human flesh and by grace alone, becoming the propitiatory sacrifice of all human sin.
We are not going to save ourselves eternally, and our simple minded solutions to this current mess are just going to continue to provide more unintended consequences to our bimodal solutions; we are not going to fix this predicament without realizing, that, just as Wendell Berry says, “Nature (natural law) is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
It seems to us, in our selfish but collective outlook; that the Deep Magic natural law river, just doesn’t take us where we really want to go. However in a Sin-Cosmos world, we are in the process of destroying what little remains of our culture’s inherit stasis, and we will soon head off that half-life decay waterfall cliff.
Two weeks ago I mentioned Eric Robert Morse’s book: “Juggernaut: Why the System Crushes the Only People Who Can Save It.” Could it be, just like Glenn Beck, my mention of the book seems to have currently sold it out on Amazon, except for the Kindle Edition? Probably Not. Over the weekend, I finally finished the book and it pretty much lays out what we have been saying at Wonder Springs. That is essentially that the Industrial Age, which in its current final passage, has relied on globalism and leverage debt, and is collapsing, will be replaced by and Individual Age, where people again become human and more self reliant.
Juggernaut is a seventy-five percent book, in that I mean it is generally about seventy-five percent about the current problem and about twenty-five percent about possible solutions. I began this type analysis when I was in the military and began reading the 1970s new environmental books, which most were ninety percent books, one hundred eighty pages, of moaning and groaning and twenty pages of things that might help improve the situation. I now look very carefully at books and give them a pass if they are predominately bitching and carping, and negligent on workable solutions.
In actuality Juggernaut’s twenty-five percent solutions, are not all that much different than the hippy, back to land movement in the 1970s, revamped into twenty-first century sustainability within a Classical Liberal worldview. Morris calls these changes autarchy. In other words the solutions are not that novel, which slants towards save us; and Mother Earth—through Austrian School economics and true capitalism, which is still far distant from your modern-liberal-progressive Juggernaut approach.
The seventy-five percent is by far and away the best primer I have read on the demise of much of our twentieth century reality, especially since the 1970s when money was released from real world values. It points out very well, that our current problems result from closing of the natural frontier a century ago, thus making money and economics a closed, zero-sum game, in which we all must play our part if we are to survive.
In that context, our critic of the bimodal Laffer Curve is that it changed, simply progressive high marginal tax avoidance investment schemes, into Wall Street, large corporate investment schemes, and in the process forced entrepreneurs and start-up businesses into the extinction we see today.
The fundamental issue, that it seems that twentieth century focused economists and politicians have evolved beyond the capacity to understand, is in a closed system, only those with access to the primary sources of money, become winners and everyone else loses. If you look at everything that has happened since late 2007 until the pending debt limit chaos and the attempted revamping of Federal spending, you see simple minded, yet pedantic solutions, all of which relate to a closed, zero-sum gamble on a behemoth economic world that is rapidly vanishing, if not has already become an extinct dinosaur.
I might add that this same fiat-faux reality can, is still being kicked down the road in the Eurozone, as well as Japan, China and emerging markets.
In the twentieth century we look at economic growth solely in terms of GDP or Gross Domestic Product within the equation: GDP = Consumption + Investment + Government + Net Exports (Exports – Imports). In classical economic terms these are all calculated in terms of the universe of money—that makes this world go round.
As we pointed out last week, there is no means to measure true wealth creation within this formula, because true wealth creation, as with the creation of Microsoft, is really an open agricultural process, in which a few million dollars in initial investments may return billions, some, much, most, is never created into classical Investment wealth, until it is converted into money. This occurs when some portion of stock becomes publicly traded on the stock exchanges, as classical investors look to some sort of return on investment, directly related to some sort of play on compound interest.
All of this is really a gamble on the future, because in this game, investments are limited to really the money supply and how it enters the game. In that sense gambling in a casino is really an open process, where the odds of winning and losing are well known, but your potential wins and losses are subject to the frontier of new players entering the game, not some arbitrary and capricious standard in which people with access to the new money win; and everyone else eventually loses.
To create a new frontier of potential wealth creation we need to look at the nature of the Juggernaut, being defined as overwhelming powerful institutions, which exists to create, try to maintain and improve order, ergo to quench all chaos.
Some related definitions:
Chaos = disorder and confusion.
Anarchy = chaos without authority.
Entropy = inability to utilize or provide energy to maintain or increase order.
Negentropy = reduction of entropy, a corresponding increase in order, to provide energy to create order out of chaos.
Bluntly stated the Industrial Age is entropic and no amount of wizards playing monetary games behind the Juggernaut screen is going to overcome the developing chaos, which left unchecked will eventually lead to anarchy. You spell Greece, G-R-E-E-C-E, but that is also true for much of the world, but with just a longer juggernaut time horizon.
The solution from physics is Negentropy, which can occur in a true open system, not by evolution, which must follow entropy laws, but rather the open process of natural law so well stated by Wendell Berry at this week’s beginning.
Negentropy is the design by which new wealth can be created. Just like God created the heavens and the earth; created in the image of God, humans can create new wealth, not ex nihilo, but within a world in which we create agriculturally open opportunities, without the oversight of the Juggernaut. So it is quite simple, we just need to add a W to the twentieth century GDP equations:
GDP = C + I + G + N +W
Wasn’t that easy! We simply need a way of describing new frontier wealth creation in terms of money, or probably more easily; we need to redefine GDP instead of completely in terms of money, but also in terms of wealth and wealth creation. We really just need to think outside the box of the Industrial Age economics.
This is impossible within the Industrial Age understanding of humanity, as essentially specialized machines of production and consumption. When you think about it objectively, the Industrial Age was nothing more than a totally materialist evolutionary economic system, in which humanity was forced to become part of the materialism, except for the evolutionary elite, who were able to rise above the masses and become a superior race, and in the unfolding of the closed frontier of the twentieth century, through wars and genocide killed 160 million human beings.
Staying with in this mindset, we must redefine a couple of other terms of natural law. Those terms are competition and aggression. Competition is the natural law condition in which organisms compete for a niche in the natural world. It is not aggressive, except in the process of saving the life of the individual or the offspring, such as the now famous mama grizzly.
In our human definition however, we have dumbed down true aggressive behavior and called it competition. Killing 160 million people in a century is aggressive, so is the jungle mentality that exists in many human major urban centers. In biological terms aggression is really the results of an adrenalin addiction that either through environmental conditions or personal choice cannot or will not be turned off. In simple terms adrenalin addiction kills, either others or eventually the self. This is the true tragedy of forcing humans into a mold of not even possessing a living soul.
So to create new wealth, as well as curb untold human aggression we must return to the realization that people are really people. In his book Morris describes this process with the RE-words: RE-lief, RE-form, and RE-niassance. This will eventually lead to his concept of a broader self-sufficiency or autarchy.
If however we look at that deep magic river which underlies reality, we see the change that now brings us to the Sin-Cosmos cliff, is really part of God’s plan for eternity. In that respect our future is not all that different than Old Testament Israel, except the United States was a New Testament unique creation by God, to provide an example that mankind is capable of ruling himself, within the confines of God’s unlimited grace.
It is not God’s grace that is being tested in our current mess, but our human transgressions of natural law. Hence to the extent we tend to focus upon the closed frontier of twentieth century materialism—down that demise trail we shall continue.
Way back in November 2007 I wrote and article on the Dry Bones Valley in Ezekiel Chapter 37. That tag in the archives will take you to other related articles. We really don’t need to see a literal fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy, as part of some deep magic, to understand that except for those who have access to almost all the fiat money, the rest of us and our hope, are pretty much looking like dead bones in a dry valley. From that vantage point, it surely looks like all those who are saying they are willing and able to help, are really just gaming the money system.
What all that means is that the dry bones are going to become alive, in God’s timing, and just like in Narnia the deep magic will work its wonders, and human opportunity, to function as humans, will again reappear as an option of God’s grace before the deep magic river flows into the eternal sea.
Now while I have contrasted the Industrial Age with the Individual Age, the Individual Age is not what we have been educated into the twentieth century the genre of selfish materialism, but rather an expression of the Individual as part of a larger community of human proportions; not juggernaut or global corporation proportions.
Being in a line leadership officer position in a garrison military situation is probably the best job in the world; because the company is large enough to actually do something positive, yet small enough that you know everyone, and everyone knows you. That means that everyone can grow, and feel like they can still be totally human, yet provide significantly to the accomplishment of the total mission. Yet in that environment, power and authority come together to the point where those who have a more personal selfish agenda, can be quickly reassigned to become someone else’s problem.
From that company union of say two hundred fifty personnel down to a basketball team with five people on the court for each team at a time, you can see that human beings are basically hard wired to perform best in human structures we can get our minds around; families, teams, churches, and small business enterprises for starters. In these structures we can be competitive, yet not aggressive. It isn’t rocket science of the Industrial Age, but is the fundamental survival and reason indigenous peoples have been able to create effective self-government throughout the ages.
The Juggernaut dehumanizes you and everyone else. It creates a world in which even your ability to do good for others, is dependent upon the amount of money you can give to become part of a grand collective.
In the 1960s a popular saying developed: Turn on, tune in, drop out. The essence of overcoming the Juggernaut is brought up to date with this video.
The problem with this type of response is it does nothing to increase true wealth, so in essence the GDP naturally is kicked off the cliff for a hard landing, in which your only choice will be to drop out; to survive, without any of the turning luxuries. That is a reality facing many people and families today.
Finding a solution to wealth creation in an open and growing culture is a necessity. All we can do is to work toward that goal again next week, when we will take a look at REsources. Yet it seems all the politicians want to do is make jerky out of a dead horse.