Blind Prejudice is
Murder
This week we had our meeting on Friday evening instead of
Wednesday. Wednesday was Teachers' Day and we celebrated it all day long. On
Thursday I was too tired to do much. But on Friday I did a lot of different
works.
After our prayer and request to God to connect us with those
etheric souls who wished to attend our conference, I explained to the group
that I wanted to show two movies, one about the 1929 Wall Street Crash, and one about the
Great Depression that occurred afterwards, and lasted almost till 1939. I
wanted to draw some lessons from these catastrophes.
There are three types of morality, individual or personal,
social, and global, but they all depend on the same fundamental principles
of love, truth, fairness, liberty,
equality, fraternity, sustainability, spiritual and intellectual growth etc
etc.
As regards economics, there is no such thing as economics
separate from politics and law-making, because it is laws that decide what you
are allowed to do in the field of economics. But there in something else that
you cannot separate from economics, and that is morality. If there is no
morality, you will not trust anybody, and you will not put your money in a bank
but keep it in your mattress, running the risk of robbery. In such a case the
whole economy will come down to a primitive low-production, low-income level
for everyone.
In the 19th century the British Prime Minister
William Gladstone never spoke about economics. He called it 'political
economy'. That is a slightly more holistic expression. He was also a man of
acute moral consciousness.
In my opinion, a viable political economy should balance the
three principles of Liberty ,
Equality, and Fraternity. Political scientists have remarked that the more
liberty you have, the less equality can be attained, and vice versa. But
Schumacher, who wrote "Small is Beautiful" pointed out that liberty
can be calibrated with equality if you apply fraternity (which he labeled as a
transcendent quality). The French Revolution popularized these ideals but
failed to attain them. You cannot establish Fraternity by cutting off the heads
of both guilty and innocent persons in an orgy of hatred.
In modern times America
was committed strongly towards liberty, but at the same time it did achieve
equality before the law and social equality in the sense of eliminating overt
snobbery such as the guillotine had penalized in France . It did at one time achieve
a classless society as regards attitude, but not as regards material wealth. As
the original spirit of fraternity declined in America , a huge gap opened between
rich and poor. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a minute portion of
the population became a certain recipe for disaster, because there was not
enough purchasing power in the hands of the general public to support the
markets for industrial and agricultural products. Unfortunately, this situation
has not abated in recent times. So the American economy has failed to calibrate
the three principles effectively.
On the other hand, the Soviet Union
was committed to brotherhood or fraternity even at the expense of diminished
liberty. You might think it was committed mainly to equality. But the Russian
Communists say they were rather more committed to brotherhood than equality as
their ideal. But they also failed. Why? I believe they failed for the same
reason as the UB says that you can't achieve a true realization of the
brotherhood of all humans unless and until you realize the Fatherhood of God.
Karl Marx, Lenin and Stalin were all atheistic materialists, so they could not
appreciate the Fatherhood of God.
As for the Fascists, in my opinion Fascism was not so much
an ideology in its own right as a back-lash against two ideologies: capitalism
because it had failed, and communism because it threatened the European way of
life. Fascism was a phenomenon of the panic of both the property owning upper
classes and salaried middle classes, and they had to support upstarts like
Hitler and Mussolini because otherwise they did not know how to galvanize the
lower classes. Hitler was the only demagogue in Germany who was not a Marxist.
But Hitler himself was under the directions of Caligastia,
the Devil. Once I read an eye-witness account of an SS bodyguard who was
guarding his quarters. Hitler was alone in there and the place was safely
secured. There was no TV or similar system in there. But the guard could hear
voices inside Hitler's locked quarters, not just Hitler's voice but other voices,
loud and clear. Maybe Hitler was getting directions from the fallen celestials.
We also know from the messages of Lanaforge that this sort of thing was
happening.
So how could you get a good mix of Liberty , Equality and Fraternity from such an
evil leadership? No way! Fraternity can never be realized while humanity is
segregated into notionally superior and inferior categories of people.
Fraternity should reflect a family spirit in which all members of the family
are loved and cared for equally. We are of God's Family, and He loves each and
all of us equally, and that alone is the most important thing about us and it
constitutes us as spiritually equal, as Oliver Cromwell believed.
Therefore it must be essential for the fulfillment of the
principle of Sustainability, based on quality of life, equality, and growth, to
calibrate the three principles of Liberty ,
Equality, and Fraternity in a pragmatic way. A correct mix of these three
principles is probably a necessary ingredient of sustainability.
Capitalism, Communism, Fascism all failed to calibrate these
principles correctly. But certain features of those ideologies could be at
least partly true. For example, in all history we have never seen such a
powerful instrument of economic prosperity as capitalism, at least in the boom
stages of the business cycle. The entrepreneurial and innovative capacity,
mobilization of investment and resources, and activation of self-organizing
business administration shown by capitalism should ever be an intrinsic part of
a sound political economy. At the same time, the aversion to debt, integrity,
and social responsibility of my grandfather's generation in the City of London in the
nineteen-twenties and thirties should be
a safeguard against reducing the capitalist system to a glorified casino, as it
was before 2008.
In any case, whatever system you have, it will not work
without morality, and immorality (meaning greed, selfishness, dishonesty, and
irresponsibility) will ruin even the best system. Also, we should realize that
morality cannot be enforced by coercion. It must come from a person's inner
spirit, convictions, and self-mastery.
We do not need a new system as much as a new name for a
system that tries to combine the best points of all the systems we have
experienced. Perhaps this could be achieved under a familiar name such as
Social Democracy under which so much has already been achieved in combining the
better points of various systems of political economy.
The first film underlined the well-known statement of John
Kenneth Galbraith that what we can learn from history is that nobody learns
anything from history. That is why we are condemned to go on repeating the same
mistakes over and over again. No wonder the Eternal Son has decided to upgrade
homo sapiens to homo spiritus. We badly need an upgrade because our thinking
power, in general, is deficient. There is very little difference between the
mistakes we made in the period 1919 to 1929 and the mistakes made from about
1970 to 2008. And forty years of deteriorating praxis cannot be remedied in one
or two years. It is bound to take time.
For about 40 years the leading wealthy investors gave up
investment in turn-key productive projects and created the "acquisitive
society" by playing all kinds of dirty tricks to take over other peoples'
corporations, not to promote industry so much as to indulge in asset-stripping
for the sole purpose of making more money without any regard for the betterment
of the industry or the welfare and security of its employees. They showed that
their God was money.
On the banking scene, D Phils with arcane financial
knowledge, far beyond anything their bosses could understand, invented
convoluted derivatives, and packages of "securitized" mortgages, and
hedging systems of inscrutable subtlety that could do everything else except work
properly. For that they were paid fantastic salaries for enabling some dumb
boss to parade and boast a trophy genius under his wing. Alas poor Yoric, the
world was not created only for wannabe genius, but for average blokes with a
bit of common sense. It was, therefore, certain that history would take its
revenge.
In the second film we see an appalling example of how
prejudice can filter out reality by denial. Herbert Hoover refused to believe
that people were starving even when the fact was generally well known to vast
numbers of Americans. As one eye-witness said it is only when you have gone
hungry yourself, even for a single day, that you realize that starvation is a
misfortune that can overtake anyone at some time in their life.
Belief in the supposedly perfect principles of market-driven
capitalism blinded both President and Senate to the loyalty and peacefulness of
the veteran Bonus demonstrators in 1932, as well as the justice of their cause,
and the need to negotiate with them in an honorable way. They would have
settled for a phased pay-off I think. Instead, after police firing in which two
veterans died, Hoover
called in the Army, commanded by the Chief of Staff, General MacArthur. Under
him were Majors Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton. As usual, once in command,
MacArthur disobeyed the orders of the President and destroyed the camp of the
veterans across the river which the President wanted them to retain. As an
excuse MacArthur said they wanted to take over the government by force. I do not
believe this. In the heat of the moment a few veterans might have expressed
such a sentiment, but it does not reflect the policy or behavior of the
majority. It is just that MacArthur had a tunnel vision about military force
and could not appreciate the political dimensions of a problem. He almost nuked
China in the Korean War, but
Harry Truman was a stronger man than Hoover
and booted him out before he started WWlll.
If there is one thing we can learn from all this it is that
without God we are nothing and can do nothing. We should pray to God every day
for His prevenient and efficacious grace so that whatever we do will not go
against His will. Only in that way lies our safety.
Signing off at Malbazar on Sept 8th, 2012
John Robert Thwaytes
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