“When there is no vision, the people perish.”
This sagacious old saying underlines many of the seemingly intractable problems that now beset America, which run far deeper than most of my countrymen suspect because the bills for them have yet to come due. When one looks at the state of public discourse today, it is no wonder that we have gone from the world’s leading creditor to its greatest debtor, our public infrastructure has begun to crumble and why our industrial base has all but vanished in the course of just one generation. This is just a small selection from a smorgasbord of problems that our current leadership, in every branch of government, seems incapable of recognizing, let alone fixing. One need only contrast the manifest imbecility of George W. Bush, Sarah Palin and the current crop of Republican candidates for the presidency with that of the better Republican presidents of the past, like Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower, to understand just how far our standards of leadership have fallen. Yet they were willingly put into office by millions of voters, which points to an even deeper lack of vision in the common people themselves. One need only contrast the sophisticated arguments of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the last century with the shallow reasons millions of voters gave for electing Barack Obama – which often boiled down to a single mindless catch phrase, “Change” – to understand that America’s powers of reasoning have been dissipating for some time now. The reason our leaders are running the country into the ground is because they are simply rehashing philosophies that have consistently failed in practice time and again, such as capitalism and Cold War style militarism, since they lack any fresh vision of their own. As the old saying goes, “If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.” I will not tell you where the saying in the first sentence of this article comes from until the end, but this second bit of wisdom is often repeated by a sage I often refer to as Mom. Sadly, both of these sayings also apply to the reform movements that represent our only hope of putting America back on track. At least their purposes are good, unlike those of our Democratic and Republican leaders in every branch of government, but they lack vision and as a result, they keep on doing what they always did. Since the early ‘80s, that has meant consistent failure to achieve anything substantial. Unfortunately, the same erosion of reasoning has also doomed many reform movements I have some sympathy for, like the Occupy Movement, to certain failure before they have even begun.
An Autopsy of Modern Dissent
The day Ronald Reagan took office back in 1981 signified the beginning of the end of the various reform movements of the mid-20th Century, many of which had enjoyed unprecedented success in the annals of human history. Just as Gandhi succeeded in driving the British out of India without a shot by applying Christian tactics of non-violence, thereby preventing a war for independence that might have cost millions of lives, so too did Martin Luther King Jr.’s branch of the civil rights movement succeed in ending America’s version of apartheid without resorting to a violent insurrection that would have certainly claimed tens of thousands of casualties. The movement against the Vietnam War was also unique in human history in that it was the first time that the common people protested loudly enough to end a war of genocide that the reigning government was hell bent on prosecuting. Since the war for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people was already lost before it had begun (Eisenhower once admitted that Ho Chi Minh would have won any free and fair election with 80 percent of the vote) and they were driven further into the arms of the Vietcong by America’s counterproductive counterinsurgency tactics, that war would not have been winnable without resorting to weapons of mass destruction. All told, despite all of their faults, these movements saved countless millions of lives. The threat of such effective mass movements arising again has since kept our less savory leaders from rolling back as many of our rights and perpetrating as many injustices as they would like, but that fear has been fading since the early ‘80s because of the manifest draining of fervor and power from such movements. The reasons why our modern reform movements are a shadow of their former selves are numerous and dark, but I want to focus on one in particular. Whole columns can and ought to be written about how reformist movements have become corrupted in their very goals and thus deserve to fail, like the pro-abortion movement, because they stand against civil rights. Others have come to embrace evil ideas that obscure the good they do, such as Amnesty International with its new emphasis on abortion and homosexual rights, or the so-called Christian Coalition and its support of rabidly anti-Christian capitalist economic policies, or the predilection of the entire political Left for automatically siding with the abortion rights movement, even though it stands squarely against the equality and justice that they claim to fight for. The union movement has likewise been broken by a combination of the corruption of the unions themselves, the soaking of the working class in the propaganda of right-wing Hate Radio talk shows and the treasonous transfer of whole industries overseas by Corporate America. All of these reform movements have been drained of power by the commercial ethos of our civilization, which focuses everyone’s attention more on money than on virtue and thus teaches them to sell out and keep quiet, as well as depopulation through abortion and contraception. Young people generally make revolutions, not the middle aged, but there are simply fewer of them. Those children have inherited the goods that would have gone to their unborn brothers and sisters and therefore have become accustomed to a degree of luxury that is anathema to real sacrifice. All of these things are contributing to the agonizing, slow demise of the reform movements, which have in some cases been transformed into something more sinister: mass movements in favor of evil. There is one unseen litmus test that allows us to neatly differentiate between those reform movements which have failed and those which have succeeded in the last thirty years, one organizing principle that becomes unarguably clear once it’s been pointed out - but as with the source of the old adage that started this article, I won’t identify it yet. First we must discuss one of the overarching reasons for the death of reform in America: a clouding of vision. Without this, none of the other aforementioned culprits would have been succeeded in confusing the reformists themselves, sometimes to the point of filling their heads with falsehoods and their hearts with injustice.
There are still movements active today which have their hearts in the right place, but each one of them has failed due to a single fatal flaw: they have no new ideas occupying their heads. Most of them look back to the ‘50s and ‘60s for their inspiration, but have none of the clarity that the anti-war and civil rights activists had, though they need even more of it because the enemies they are up against are sometimes even more frightening. The pro-life movement, for example, is up against a global Holocaust that has claimed more than a billion lives in the last four decades. To defeat such an enemy requires a level of organization and commitment it simply does not have today, but neither of these is possible without a truly deep understanding of the problem at hand. Any reform movement must have clearer insights into its own subject matter than it enemies in a number of different ways, including the intrinsic nature of the issue at hand; secondly, a clear grasp of what it stands for, not merely against, to provide greater contrast; third, historical knowledge of how the problem arose, so that it can be ripped out by the roots rather than being allowed to regrow after some superficial half-measures; fourth, an account of why past reform movements failed to fix the problem; fifth, a step-by-step, comprehensive plan for resolving the problem once the movement attains power; and last but not least, the presence of mind to avoid creating new problems, or even worse ones, through bad tactics or hasty changes. On the last score, virtually every political movement in the Western world has no concept of when to stop; for example, it is not as if the women’s movement has any consciously delineated idea of when their own quest for rights might infringe on the rights of men. No black civil rights leader today ever gives lofty speeches about the right of white men to be able to walk through ghettos at night without being mugged. This kind of imbalance arises because the activists want easy, flattering answers more than justice; by making their causes into idols, they make themselves into villains. It is necessary for every activist to have a broad vision that stretches beyond the mere issue at hand, one that recognizes the importance of other issues and rights, otherwise they become dangerously single-minded. Likewise, the anti-abortion movement has utterly failed in large part because it is too focused on one particular issue, which prevents it from expanding to sufficiently large size to really threaten the Establishment. This global genocide is by far the most single important injustice facing humanity, but defeating it would require the activists to embrace a broader range of causes that both deepens their commitment and likewise threatens the secondary injustices that make it possible. Chief among these is the Gospel of Greed that capitalism is spreading across the world, which in turn serves as the primary motivator for almost abortions. If anti-abortion activists had any understanding of the basic motivations behind abortion or of its history, then so many of them would not sabotage their own causes by embracing far right-wing economic policies, as the false Christians among them so often do. Their vision is limited in other ways, particularly by nationalism, which leads the Americans among them to focus too much on Roe v. Wade, without grasping that this genocide is global in nature and will require a global response. This is particularly important for the anti-abortion activists of Europe to remember, since even the greatest powers of Europe are nowhere near as populous and powerful as the European Union taken as a whole. If any anti-abortion movement were to gain any real success in Romania, or Sweden, or Portugal, or even a larger power like Britain or Italy, then that nation would likely face EU sanctions; long before then, the proponents of abortion would have funneled money to swing elections against them. The vision of the anti-abortion movement has been stunted in every direction, from space to time to scope; there is little understanding of the roots of fetal murder in the past and no appreciation of the obstacles that await it in the future. Nor is there any understanding of the true nature of the problem, which arises from the spiritual force of avarice. It is the same enemy many activists of the Left have concentrated on fighting, with an identical lack of success. It is no accident that the Left has likewise met with little success in fighting capitalism since Roe v. Wade, since far too many of its own activists fail to recognize that the right-to-life movement is fighting for the same civil rights they claim to stand for. Until this fatal and festering rift between the two movements is healed, neither will make any progress towards their respective goals.
David can still beat Goliath, but not if his Left hand is fighting with his Right; movements that fight for certain virtues like equality or the right to life cannot succeed if they simultaneously stand for vices like economic inequality or the right to murder unborn children. It also helps if David has a clear understanding of what he stands for; he was highly motivated precisely because he believed in a highly defined philosophy with roots in the past and a vision of the future, one that touched on all areas of life. When fighting a giant with your back to the wall, it is also a good idea to understand exactly what motivates him, what he’s armed with and where the chinks in his armor are; David knew exactly where Goliath came from and had no need to enquire about Goliath’s legendary height. Instead of thinking these things through ahead of time, many of today’s reform movements are simply rushing blindly into battle, just like the anti-abortion movement. As a result, they get slaughtered, just like the many valiant warriors that Goliath vanquished before David. The annals of history are littered with the names of reform movements that had their hearts in the right places but failed because their vision wasn’t broad enough. Among these was the Populist Party, a homegrown, grass roots third party that shook America’s political landscape in the 1890s. It was an alliance founding by poor farmers in the West against banks and other elitist institutions, which enjoyed a meteoric rise after forging alliances with labor unions in the cities; for the first and only time in American history, both halves of the working class had been brought together into a broad and seemingly insuperable coalition against the rich. The meteoric fall began just as instantaneously, after the leadership developed a myopic focus on the single issue of silver prices, which then had temporary importance for farmers. They staked the whole future of the party on this single narrow side issue, then lost it all in the election of 1896, when they backed the Democratic candidate for the presidency instead of fielding their own. After his failure, they rapidly disintegrated after their focus shifted towards backing particular Democratic or Republican candidates for state, local and federal offices. The majority of the Populists were gobbled up by the Democratic Party, which then proceeded to put none of their reforms into practice. This was similar to the fate that awaited the Green Party after the 2000 presidential election, when Ralph Nader won 2 percent of the vote; neither the party nor Nader have come anywhere near that vote total since because the Democratic Party leadership has skillfully manipulated the Green Party’s supporters to vote for their candidates instead, on the grounds that the Republicans might win if their votes are split. Of course, once in power the Democratic candidates behave exactly like the Republicans, but some voters don’t think that far ahead. The Green Party still survives and holds some promise for the future, but it is hampered by a lack of vision in other areas that will likely cripple it. It is not a single-issue party but has some of the failings common to one, particularly its lack of consciousness of ideological limits. Like feminism or minority rights, environmentalism is a good cause that can be turned into an evil menace once it becomes an idol. This has already occurred among the fringe environmentalists, such as the hysterical but harmless insanity of PETA or the sober but deadly idea that the human race is a scar upon Nature, one that must be pruned. Environmentalism can thus be turned into a poorly thought out argument for a genocidal depopulation of the planet. Many followers of the Green Party already half-consciously echo this philosophy whenever they side in the same knee-jerk fashion as the rest of the Left with the pro-abortion movement. And like the rest of the Left for the last three decades, it has some quite constructive ideas about economics, but has not yet thought out any broad alternative to capitalism.
Rebels with Half a Cause
It is this lack of a complete philosophy that has doomed many of the other modern reform movements that I have some sympathy for. Among these is the loose agglomeration of groups protesting again the WTO, IMF and d World Bank across the Western world. Thanks to their corruption by Western capitalist economic ideas, these institutions have spread much misery across the world since the first of them was established after World War II, particularly by demanding wholesale changes in the economies of Third World nations. Riots frequently erupt after the governments of poor nations are cajoled into these “structural adjustment” programs, which inevitably bring poverty and even greater dependence on foreign loans; they are ultimately designed to enrich foreign investors by dismantling all of the institutions that ordinary protect the citizenry against exploitation. Yet there is very little talk among the protestors about a detailed alternative to the WTO, IMF and World Bank. No one is stridently standing up for a comprehensive theory of protectionism, or even discussing the many flaws in the capitalist theory of comparative advantage, in order to counteract the ideology behind the WTO. It would be feasible to turn the terms of structural adjustment loans on their head so that they drain the rich and protect the poor and middle class of Third World nations, but there is little talk of doing so. There isn’t even an idea of how these institutions came to be, let alone where capitalism itself came from. Likewise, the leftist politicians who have succeeded in taking power through the ballot box in Latin America over the last twenty years seem to be devoid of understanding of what to do next. Because they have no new ideas of their own, they’re simply tinkering with the failed systems established by their forefathers, to greater or lesser degrees; some of them have been strident, like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, while others have been mild, like Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva in Brazil, but they have universally failed to uproot capitalism and plant something else in its place. They have done some good by ameliorating some of its worst aspects by establishing social programs, preventing corporate crime and keeping foreign investors from exploiting their natural resources so blatantly as past governments, but they’re not striking at the roots of the problem. As soon the reformist mood passes, as all moods do, some opposing faction will come to power and quickly undo everything they’ve accomplished. Even when it has come to power, the Left around the globe has seemed rudderless for more than a generation. The sanest among them used to pursue a “middle way” between capitalism and communism by taking the best of both worlds, such as nationalizing a few key sectors of the economy (like oil production) and leaving the rest on a private basis. Since the inevitable failure of Marxism, however, many of them seem to have no distinct plan in mind save for a general dislike of capitalism; once in office, they simply imitate the least offensive capitalist economic policies and throw a few bones to the poor, such as increasing social spending a little. Likewise, the Occupy Movement making headlines today knows what it hates, but cannot say what it stands for, let alone give us a detailed list of precisely what actions it will take once in office. In lieu of forethought, they have substituted militancy, which ought to be the last ingredient in any reform program, not the first.
If you want to fight Goliath, the last order of business is to pick up your sling, not the first. I have some sympathy for the Occupy Movement, but its problems are a microcosm of what is wrong with every authentic reform movement today and every failed movement of the past. It hasn’t demonstrated any realization of what its enemy truly is, let alone discerned where it came from or how resistance to it has failed in the past; there isn’t even a clear idea of what it would want to accomplish, even if its leaders were handed the keys to the White House tomorrow. If we judge it on the amount of publicity it has generated, it is a success, but if we judge it on what it could accomplish in the future, it is already a failure in advance because it doesn’t even know what it stands for. It is merely a tactic in search of a philosophy, rather than an ideology searching for a tactic to apply towards a clear goal. There is certainly a need for militancy in any reform movement, but it has to come last, not first; simply causing a ruckus is not enough, even if there are a lot of people on the streets causing it. Like many of the tactics developed by reformists in recent memory, it also carries great risks of unnecessarily alienating the common people it claims to defend and needs to succeed. I wholeheartedly hoped that the protests against the last war in Iraq would succeed, because on many levels the war was not just immoral but a long-term threat to international stability and ultimately our own security. It was easy to see that the protests were doomed, however, when demonstrators in some cities began resorting to blocking traffic out of sheer frustration. Preventing a grandmother from driving to the grocery store to pick up milk might make for one angry and thirsty grandmother, but it simply wouldn’t have any effect on decisions going on at the Pentagon. If anything, it would lead the public to oppose the demonstrators and their cause. Likewise, the Occupy Movement risks alienating the ordinary citizens living in cities like New York, Seattle and Oakland without ever stopping a single shady business deal going on in the skyscrapers above them. I do not know if they have crossed that line, but I do know the line exists and that it will be tempting to cross it out of mere frustration when the protests inevitably fail to accomplish anything. A more constructive tactic that might also pose a real threat to the capitalist class would be to spread out across these cities and actively engage the ordinary citizens, in an attempt to mobilize them. It is far more likely, however, that the movement will degenerate into mere baiting of the police by a small minority of hard core militants who are merely there for the excitement that comes from causing trouble. One of the reasons the protests against the Vietnam War succeeded is that the largest organizations of demonstrators, such as the Mobe, had their own unofficial police to keep such troublemakers in line, but I see no indication that the Occupy Movement leaders have thought that far ahead or have reached that level of organization. I hope it grows into something broader and more constructive, but at present the Occupy Movement is merely a tactic based on a feeling, one that will fail as soon as those feelings change, as moods are bound to; it is impossible to persevere past a change in mood without a well thought out idea of what one is persevering for. As a pure tactic, it is extremely limited in its utility. A more innovative and fruitful tactic to hit the capitalist class where it hurts emerged recently in Bank Transfer Day, in which activists called for people nationwide to transfer their assets from big banks to non-profit credit unions. In order to win the war against capitalism, it will be necessary to develop a wide array of such creative tactics, not just cling to one. Yet without a clear vision of your own goals or your enemy’s weaknesses, applying any tactic is ultimately useless; without them, strident action will never amount to anything more than flailing blindly.
Like so many other failed reformed movements in recent decades, the Occupy Movement only knows only what it doesn’t like: capitalism. Unfortunately, there are quite powerful people who are willing to kill for it, so it is crucial to understand what powerful ideas motivate them; just as David knew where Goliath was coming from, so must we know where the capitalist class gets its motivations. Their greatest opponents in the 20th Century, the Marxists, had more success because they had a detailed understanding of certain aspects of capitalism and knew how the capitalist class thought. The reason why the Communists succeed in plaguing humanity with their twisted reforms for the whole last century is that they knew exactly what they stood for, even though much of what they believed was wrong; the ideas formed a barrel that allowed them to go in a definite direction like a bullet, even if that direction was misguided. They had vision, even if their vision was riddled with lies. Many other wrong-headed reform movements arose at the same time but had no effect in the long run – thank God – because they didn’t have a clear idea of where they came from, what they were fighting or where they were going. That is why the Communists could take over countries and fight wars, while the anarchists never made any impact on history save to assassinate an occasional politician. Unfortunately, the enemy the Occupy Movement is up against has an even more detailed philosophy of their own, one that is taught in every high school and every college, although it is riddled with as many lies and half-truths as Marxism. Furthermore, people who believe in this philosophy are entrenched in every position of power in Western society, from the corporate board rooms to the editorial boards to the halls of academia to the highest and lowest offices in the land. If you threaten to peel back those layers, you can be certain to face massive, violent repression by any nation’s security forces, because as history has shown, whenever the capitalist system is under threat, the rich call out the soldiers to gun down the people. This is the story of many of the coups that plagued the Third World in the last century, in which armies often turned on their own people in order to prevent duly elected reformists from taking office; it is also the story of what happened here in the Progressive Era and Great Depression, then again during the Vietnam era. The wisest among the Occupy Movement probably know enough history to see that Goliath has the guns, the numbers and the money, but there is probably less appreciation of the fact that the capitalists are highly organized and have had 500 years to develop their false philosophy. They will foam at the mouth at the minute you question any of the core tenets of capitalism, freely throwing out insults like “liberal” and “communist” with little understanding of what those words really mean. The true nature of what capitalism is only becomes clear once you begin to really argue the case against its every false teaching effectively, to the point where its followers no longer have any response left except to explode in anger, unleashing a torrent of hate unlike any you have ever seen. Once you start speaking heresies against it, you will see that it is actually a religion.
Goliath Without a David
By protesting corporate greed, the Occupy Movement is up against a much bigger target than a mere government; it is taking on one of the seven deadly sins, avarice, which will be a permanent temptation of mankind until the end of time. They’re taking on a much bigger Goliath than anyone suspects, but most Christians recognize that we can’t expect any permanent, planet-wide victory over this particular giant until the Second Coming. The times in human history when a revolutionary movement has successfully overthrown a rotten government are unfortunately rare, and rarer still are those fractious times like the French or Russian Revolutions when the governments of major powers have been shaken. It’s doable; it’s within the scope of possibility; but a complete defeat of Greed itself is a task only angels and deities can contemplate. In one sense, it is a bit like those demonstrations against rape that occur occasionally on college campuses – it’s not likely that anyone’s going to mount a counter-demonstration for either rape or avarice. That type of protest has some usefulness, but it is not likely to deter any rapist, let alone get them to organize together in a Roofie coalition. On the other hand, capitalists are quite willing to organize into effective coalitions, although they generally don’t carry banners labeled Greed! dyed the color of a dollar bill. The enemy we are up against today is almost unique in human history in that it constitutes an intellectual defense, even a celebration, of the old fault of greed. Like Michael Douglas’ character in the film Wall Street, our leading citizens really do believe that “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Since we are governed by salesmen, however, they just don’t put it so blatantly, at least in public. One really has to dig deep into history to find the nearest parallel to the reigning ideology, which is the worship of the god Mammon in ancient Syria, or the personification of the love of money. As I have said time and again, Jesus himself singled out the “love of money” for being a “very great sin,” and not without good reason, for it is a love of the root of all evil, one that drowns the fire of every other type of human love in a bucket of selfishness. What is unique about our day is that our ruling class openly glorifies this particular sin (without, of course, referring to it as greed) to the exclusion of all others; it worships wealth in the same way that the Nazis made an idol out of German nationalism or the Soviets turned Communism into a national religion. It has not only thought out an entire philosophy to back this up, but has converted the whole of Western civilization to this Gospel of Greed and threatens to taint the whole world beyond. Furthermore, it has deep roots going back to the Reformation, when the first generation of capitalists arose in the Protestant lands after chucking the whole system of Catholic economic ethics. The Calvinists began to openly proclaim that wealth was a sign of God’s favor, while the lack of it signified damnation - although the opposite is actually true, for “it is harder for a rich man to get into Heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.” The Puritan settlers brought this vicious idea with them when they set foot on Plymouth Rock. America was the first nation ever founded on a creed of greed, which coexisted with more beneficial ideas like democracy thereafter. By the time of the Robber Barons, this impulse had grown into a full-fledged ideology that glorified the rich as productive agents of Evolution weeding out the unfit, unholy working class beneath them. That class of men never repented; they merely handed down the same ideas to new generations of capitalists until the present day. It is feasible to having a ruling class motivated by better ideas, which is why such kings as St. Louis and St. Elizabeth of Hungary were able to reign in the Middle Ages. We have hard historical evidence that it is possible for nations to enjoy saintly leadership that is wise enough to ensure prosperity without resorting to capitalist economic sins. If so, then it is practicable to roll back this monster, but it is crucial that we know just how big our Goliath really is. We are fighting against one of the most intractable sins in history, which has had 500 years to ferment like a poison and spread like a cancer deep into the psyche of the American people, and laterally across the whole of Western civilization.
When the Occupy protesters look up at the bland skyscrapers that our rulers have erected as cold monuments to Mammon, they need to ask what motivated the builders. Their enemies are not merely flesh and blood, which are difficult enough to overcome, but a spiritual force. Capitalism is merely the codification of every economic sin that the rich would like to get away with, from usury to speculation to hoarding to market manipulation; it is a technical solution driven by a vice. The money to build Wall Street came from these economic sins, which were outlawed until the first generation of Puritans (who were mainly arrogant businessmen from the upper crust of their respective societies) made them legal. This was precisely when the first bank collapses and financial panics began to afflict humanity and they have caused us ever-greater pain with each passing generation since then, in a never-ending, permanent financial crisis that has lasted half a millennium. This is but one small symptom of the utter failure of capitalism to bring prosperity to the human race. So are the starvation of eight million people and the murder of some 40 million unborn infants annually across the planet, which can ultimately be traced back to this economic system, although that is a story for a different time. In order to stop capitalism, you have to strike at the economic evils it originally legitimated, which means criminalizing sins like speculation and usury, just like our wiser ancestors. Had they lived in medieval times, most of our CEOs and tycoons would have been doing time in a stockade in the public square for their monopolistic practices. In order to stop the flow of money into Wall Street, you’ve got to stop the flow of money which comes from these crimes, which entails rejecting the fantasy that they are actually somehow productive. Millions of ordinary people have been tricked into believing that this social order benefits from them, when in fact no one benefits except the rich. These same millions of people have succumbed to the Gospel of Greed, which is blared at them from every television set in dozens of commercials a day; the degree of power businessmen hold over us is illustrated best by the fact that until today, advertisers could at best shout loudly in the public square, but now invade our homes on a daily basis. These temples on Wall Street would not exist if they were not being fed by the greed of millions of people who practice sins like charging unjust prices and paying unjust wages, or engaging in usury and speculation in their own lives on their own small scales; they have to be converted to an entirely different economic ethos in order to dry up the rivers of gold flowing into the world’s financial centers. As long as the common people are trying to make a quick buck buying low and selling high in the stock market themselves, or charging each other whatever the market will bear for their own goods, then we will not be able to stop the far more rapacious monsters above us. The fight against a monster like capitalism will have to expand from beyond the confines of Zuccotti Park into every legislative chamber and every courtroom, otherwise it will get nowhere; it will have to deepen into a long-term mass movement of individuals dedicated to rooting avarice out of their own lives, otherwise we will never get to that stage. The fight against greed must begin at home by rejecting its every manifestation. It means not taking interest on our bank accounts; it means voluntarily losing the rate race against the Jones’ next door; it means teaching our daughters not to marry businessmen or corporate lawyers for their money, because this is not only a manifestation of avarice but equivalent to rewarding such men for doing evil. It means teaching your sons not to compete as hard as they can in the business world, even if that means losing. It means respecting people for what they do, not what they wear or how they speak. It means not listening to commercials, which are even more dangerous to the soul than the sex and violence on television today.
The problem of greed is an explicitly spiritual one, so it will require a spiritual solution. If we find one, then there will truly be earthquakes on the political landscape. What we are fighting is not merely a single dictator, who would be difficult enough to topple, but an entire ruling class dedicated to a particularly strange form of religion. In that case, we will need something on the scope of an opposing religion to defeat them, because as a practical matter, nothing else will work. It will take great sacrifice and more than one generation of commitment, because we are up against a fanatical ideology that has been entrenched in our civilization like a tick for a half a millennium. Neither you nor I will live to see it fall, which is why we must train a new generation to carry on an entirely alternative lifestyle, otherwise we will have accomplished nothing. Without such a level of commitment, or historical understanding of capitalism’s origin, or a vision of the future, we will never represent a threat to the capitalist class – that is precisely why the politicians and police give our protestors a degree of breathing room, because they can be safely laughed off. Then the radical, unbalanced fringe in our ranks will move to the fore and provoke a fight, because that’s what they’re there for, like a minority of the police on the other side. That scenario is one of the most common deaths suffered by reform movements, to either fade into ignominy or to damage their own cause at the end. Gandhi once said, “First they ignore, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” but that only applies to a mass movement that is growing stronger. Most of the time, the lack of vision and discipline dooms reformers to being ignored, laughed at and beaten all at the same time. This is probably going to be the fate of the Occupy Movement unless they take a wider look at things. Other reform movements have succeeded but didn’t deserve to, like the Communists of Eastern Europe; some have failed, but in the process have provoked even worse evils, like the failed Communist revolts that helped Hitler justify his takeover of Germany. Others have been diverted from their long-term purposes by short-term goals, like the Populist Party. Some have been outright bought off by the lure of wealth and popularity, so the members sell out their causes little by little. Some have likewise compromised away all of their virtues, like Europe’s so-called Christian Democrats. The greatest barrier to the success of reform movements has of course been persecution, in both violent and non-violent flavors. Only one group of people in history has consistently survived it, just as only one institution has been attacked in each generation only to survive: they are the Jews and the Catholic Church. This is a strong clue as to where we need to look for a lasting solution to the problem at hand.
What Capitalists Fear Most
In fact, the Catholic Church is literally the only organization in human history that has not changed its substance from age to age. Every philosophy has changed from one generation to the next, just like the doctrines of every other religious denomination have changed, but those of the Catholic Church have not. I tried to disprove this contention by soaking myself in encyclicals and the proclamations of church councils from all over the last two thousand years, but had to admit defeat. The Occupy Movement, like so many other reform movements, is relying too much on a healthy horror of evil, but a feeling of revulsion cannot be passed down from generation to generation. Human moods change far too much, which is why the institutions we build inevitably fall. Even Soviet Communism changed drastically in the course of its seven decades, looking entirely different under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev respectively, all of which would have been equally unrecognizable to Marx. The only reason capitalism appears the same from each generation to the next is that is a codification of a temptation; it has changed from one generation to the next, but only by surrendering more to its infinite depths. In order to defeat that, we need a spiritual solution, one that reaches deeper into the hearts of its followers, one sustained over a multi-generational span, based on a well-defined philosophy that motivates men to great acts of self-sacrifice. In short, we need a religion. Not just any religion will do; we need one that won’t wildly change course from one generation to the next the way every other denomination in history has. Thankfully, the Catholic Church already has a detailed philosophy of economic ethics that stands in direct opposition to everything capitalism stands for. It is an ideology that has its roots as far back as the Jews of the Old Testament, one that was successfully put into practice in medieval times and made the Renaissance possible. It is something far different from either capitalism or Marxism, one that is equally threatening to Big Business and Big Government. In fact, it is the only competing economic philosophy left on the planet. Since the end of the Cold War, virtually the whole planet has succumbed to the allure of capitalism, which is why our planet is rapidly sinking into a moral abyss. It has also corrupted the minds of most of the clergy, which is why you never hear sermons against usury, speculation, unjust prices, unjust wages and the other economics sins condemned under Catholic dogma. Capitalism hasn’t quite prevailed over the Catholic Church, however, and it never will, if history is any guide. To a historian, it doesn’t take any faith to believe the promise of Jesus that the gates of Hell would never prevail against it, because in every generation for the last 2,000 years it has suffered perpetual crisis, yet no one can seem to sink it. Now that every other economic philosophy has demonstrably failed, we can try the only one that consistently works in practice: distributism. The reason capitalism is popular today is because most of the world is Falling Away from orthodoxy at a quickening rate with each passing generation, not because it works, because it never has. Because capitalism is so contrary to Catholic teaching, people embrace it, just as they are embracing the most destructive “deform movements,” such as those championing homosexual rights and abortion, while rejecting the Christian ones on the other side, like the economic equality preached by the Occupy Movement or the civil rights of the unborn championed by the right-to-life movement. This litmus test explains an awful lot of what is going on in the politics of the Western world today.
One day I will write a great deal about distributism and alternatives to other popular and anti-Christian philosophies, such as some of the terribly mistaken ideas behind modern psychology. In every academic subject under the sun, the thinkers of the Western world are embracing philosophies that simply don’t work in practice. This is because they cut God out of the equation, but without that piece they will never be able to put the puzzles of their respective disciplines together in a coherent order. These subjects ask certain questions, and religion simply can’t be separated from them without changing all of the answers to wrong ones, for the simple reason that it is part of reality. That destructive brand of separation of religion from everything else not only emasculates religion, but serves certain interests, such as those of scholars who want to feed their egos without restraint. Economists are among them. They are paid by the capitalist class to teach false philosophies contrary to Christianity precisely because they want to line their pockets without interference. It is a historical fact that it is this same class of people that have made discussion of religion taboo; as G.K. Chesterton once said, “Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.”[1] The most effective weaponry of our ruling class is not its tanks (which would, make no mistake about it, be turned against anyone who threatened to end capitalism through the ballot box) but the prejudice against religion it has infused our whole culture with. Even our Catholic priests do not dare speak of distributism, or usury, or speculation, or the doctrines of just price and just wages; religion cannot even be mentioned now inside the churches, if that entails offending the rich. I didn’t mention the origin of the saying that started this article because it comes from the Book of Proverbs for one important reason: the media, the schools and all of our institutions are devoted to conditioning a reflex reaction in the common people, which prompts them to stop paying attention when any mention of religion comes up. Their efforts are geared toward preventing one particular thought, which hobbles every reform movement from the very beginning: the one heresy that they hate most is the idea that religion can be looked to for practical guidance for everyday problems. Religion is now taboo because it provides the only practical solutions to problems that certain scoundrels desperately don’t want us to solve. If we actually want to fix the problems of the human race, we must dare to break it.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to psychology to economics since age 9.
[1] see Chesterton, G.K., 1937, Autobiography. Available at http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/GKC-Autobiography.txt
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