The Russian military intervention in Syria has produced a lot of interesting fallout. It is now becoming clear that the militants whom Russia is targeting were financed by the United States (via the CIA) for the specific purpose of overthrowing the legitimate Syrian government, and that most (if not all) of these militants are one and the same as ISIS, who have been responsible for much of the havoc wrought on the Syrian nation and surrounding regions over the last few years. It is also becoming clear that the one of the goals of U.S. intervention in Syria over that same time frame was delusional, for the U.S wasted over $500 million trying to raise an independent militia (and state) who were "moderate". The word "moderate" should be understood to mean, "friendly to the interests of the United States."
What are those interests? They are, by and large, corporate commercial interests. The goal of American foreign policy seems to be to create a world which is friendly to a economic order ruled by the United States, a world which doesn't mind being exploited by the United States, a world whose citizens come to resemble the citizens of the United States in their consumerism and utter dependence on the commercial networks established by the corporate masters of the United States. Consumerism is but a facet of hedonism. Temptations to hedonism are therefore used by the United States to export "democracy" to "markets" closed by national leaders unwilling to sacrifice their sovereignty to the United States. The "opposition" movements which spring up in such countries are often composed of people whose hedonism has been successfully awakened, and who are thus enticed to grumble against their existing national order because of the lack of "fleshpots, leeks and onions and garlic." Thus they are led to grumble against regimes which were often quite successful at meeting the basic needs of their citizenry.
We can see the export of hedonism in the British empire, where Britain legalized and fought to protect the opium trade in China during the 1800's. We can see it now in Afghanistan, in that the growing of opium - forcibly ended by the Taliban prior to the U.S. invasion - is back in full swing, thanks to U.S. involvement. These are but two of the fruits of the foreign policy of nations which have at one time or another called themselves both "Christian" and "defenders of freedom." What they really meant, it seems, was the "freedom" to be made into addicts.
I think the export of hedonism by Anglo-American society deserves much more research, and even several well-informed blog posts providing further elaboration. However, I am fighting for my life right now in grad school. So if anyone else wants to take up the topic, please feel free. If you wish to write on the subject, I ask that your focus be on the role of the Anglo-American export of hedonism in the fomenting of revolutions and attempted regime change by the U.S. and its allies, focusing especially on the time from the beginning of the Cold War onward. Thanks, and have a good day.
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Sunday, October 4, 2015
The Sunk Costs of Stinkin' Thinkin'
Certain characteristics are common to all families who are characterized by substance abuse and addiction. The central character is, of course, the addict, whose addiction and behaviors regularly cause damage to himself and to his family unit. The pain of the damage caused is the sort of stimulus that would cause reasonable people to try to get to the root cause of the damage and to effectively fix it. However, a family marked by substance abuse is not reasonable, for as the addiction of the addict progresses, so do his efforts to "train" the members of his family to avoid squarely and honestly facing the root cause of the damage. Instead of looking for an honest, effective remedy, the family is therefore trained simply to try to control the damage caused by the addict while ignoring the root causes.
A straight-up discussion of root causes is usually off-limits in such families. These families are not marked by very much honest self-appraisal and self-reflection. Such self-reflection might provoke an existential crisis, otherwise known as "decompensation," so it is usually avoided like the plague. Instead, when the family experiences the pain of a fresh episode of damage, they are also trained to look for scapegoats on whom they may project their frustration and anger for the pain they are suffering. When the family encounters any honest outsider who is willing to openly name the root cause of the family's pain, the family will often unleash a barrage of blaming, scapegoating, projection, and creation of drama in order to deflect attention from the actual "elephant in the room." As the damage caused by the addiction increases over time, so energy spent in damage control and blame-shifting also increases over time. This energy and effort represents a sunk cost, that is, it represents resources spent in an activity that yields no genuinely productive results, resources which, once spent, can never be recovered. Sooner or later the cost of damage control increases to the point where it can no longer be sustained, where the cost of further damage control exceeds the necessary pain of repentance. At that point, in many cases, both the family and the addict can be said to have "hit bottom."
America's addiction to guns and violence reminds me of the dynamics of a family controlled by substance abuse. Our fascination with guns and violence springs from the original sins which led to the founding of the United States, sins which this nation has enshrined and glorified rather than acknowledging them as sins. Moreover, throughout our history, this addiction has led to regular episodes of ever more frequent damage, and ever-increasing pain. Yet the discussion of the root causes of that pain is off-limits for many members of American society, who will react by blame-shifting, scapegoating, projection and drama creation whenever the subject of root causes is mentioned.
So there was another mass shooting last week; so we also see the attempt to honestly discuss root causes drowned out in yet another flood of drama and blame-shifting by people who would rather die than give up the "freedom" of their addiction. But there is no discussion of the sunk costs of that addiction. Yet people who seek to behave as adults should be aware of those sunk costs. And people who have adult responsibilities involving the safeguarding of life and property have to be aware of those costs.
I am thinking now of the vast number of people addicted to right-wing Kool-Aid in this country who even today deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change, who are unaware that some of the adults who care for them are required to take the effects of man-made climate change into account. They watch Fox News and listen to their favorite talking heads in environments whose air conditioning was designed by members of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, and they don't realize that for the last few years, ASHRAE handbooks and design guides have begun to address design of HVAC systems for a changing climate. Why has ASHRAE done this? Because they are part of design teams who have to design built spaces to withstand the damage done to our climate by our addiction to materialism. If their designs are inadequate, this results in legal liability.
In the same way, those who design the built environment have, for the last several years, been forced to begin to design built spaces which mitigate the effects of this nation's addiction to guns and violence. This can be seen in certain building codes such as NFPA 72 (authored by the National Fire Protection Association), which, several years ago, added a section dealing with requirements for mass notification systems in service buildings used by the public. There is also the increasing attention to architectural design responses to the growing "active shooter" threat (see this, this, and this). If active shooter incidents continue to increase in this country, I am sure that we will begin to see changes to State building codes requiring explicit design measures for all buildings in which people congregate, whether public or privately owned. Some of these codes will require expensive retrofits of existing buildings and structures. There will also be the increased costs of insuring and indemnifying such spaces. This will greatly increase the cost borne by your average Joe Sixpack as he undertakes a journey to any built public space in his Chevy truck with his Confederate flag flying from the bed and his NRA sticker on his bumper. He will grumble at the increased cost of going to places (and especially of being allowed entry into those places), yet he won't be likely to make the connection between his enjoyment of "freedom" and the increased cost of that freedom. Meanwhile citizens like him who live in some of the other "developed" countries won't have to pay such costs, because they aren't all armed to the teeth and most of them aren't unstable.
Perhaps the discussion of monetary costs might actually persuade the masters of our addicted society to take a good look at themselves, because the human costs of our addiction to guns and violence has not had any effect so far.
A straight-up discussion of root causes is usually off-limits in such families. These families are not marked by very much honest self-appraisal and self-reflection. Such self-reflection might provoke an existential crisis, otherwise known as "decompensation," so it is usually avoided like the plague. Instead, when the family experiences the pain of a fresh episode of damage, they are also trained to look for scapegoats on whom they may project their frustration and anger for the pain they are suffering. When the family encounters any honest outsider who is willing to openly name the root cause of the family's pain, the family will often unleash a barrage of blaming, scapegoating, projection, and creation of drama in order to deflect attention from the actual "elephant in the room." As the damage caused by the addiction increases over time, so energy spent in damage control and blame-shifting also increases over time. This energy and effort represents a sunk cost, that is, it represents resources spent in an activity that yields no genuinely productive results, resources which, once spent, can never be recovered. Sooner or later the cost of damage control increases to the point where it can no longer be sustained, where the cost of further damage control exceeds the necessary pain of repentance. At that point, in many cases, both the family and the addict can be said to have "hit bottom."
America's addiction to guns and violence reminds me of the dynamics of a family controlled by substance abuse. Our fascination with guns and violence springs from the original sins which led to the founding of the United States, sins which this nation has enshrined and glorified rather than acknowledging them as sins. Moreover, throughout our history, this addiction has led to regular episodes of ever more frequent damage, and ever-increasing pain. Yet the discussion of the root causes of that pain is off-limits for many members of American society, who will react by blame-shifting, scapegoating, projection and drama creation whenever the subject of root causes is mentioned.
So there was another mass shooting last week; so we also see the attempt to honestly discuss root causes drowned out in yet another flood of drama and blame-shifting by people who would rather die than give up the "freedom" of their addiction. But there is no discussion of the sunk costs of that addiction. Yet people who seek to behave as adults should be aware of those sunk costs. And people who have adult responsibilities involving the safeguarding of life and property have to be aware of those costs.
I am thinking now of the vast number of people addicted to right-wing Kool-Aid in this country who even today deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change, who are unaware that some of the adults who care for them are required to take the effects of man-made climate change into account. They watch Fox News and listen to their favorite talking heads in environments whose air conditioning was designed by members of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, and they don't realize that for the last few years, ASHRAE handbooks and design guides have begun to address design of HVAC systems for a changing climate. Why has ASHRAE done this? Because they are part of design teams who have to design built spaces to withstand the damage done to our climate by our addiction to materialism. If their designs are inadequate, this results in legal liability.
In the same way, those who design the built environment have, for the last several years, been forced to begin to design built spaces which mitigate the effects of this nation's addiction to guns and violence. This can be seen in certain building codes such as NFPA 72 (authored by the National Fire Protection Association), which, several years ago, added a section dealing with requirements for mass notification systems in service buildings used by the public. There is also the increasing attention to architectural design responses to the growing "active shooter" threat (see this, this, and this). If active shooter incidents continue to increase in this country, I am sure that we will begin to see changes to State building codes requiring explicit design measures for all buildings in which people congregate, whether public or privately owned. Some of these codes will require expensive retrofits of existing buildings and structures. There will also be the increased costs of insuring and indemnifying such spaces. This will greatly increase the cost borne by your average Joe Sixpack as he undertakes a journey to any built public space in his Chevy truck with his Confederate flag flying from the bed and his NRA sticker on his bumper. He will grumble at the increased cost of going to places (and especially of being allowed entry into those places), yet he won't be likely to make the connection between his enjoyment of "freedom" and the increased cost of that freedom. Meanwhile citizens like him who live in some of the other "developed" countries won't have to pay such costs, because they aren't all armed to the teeth and most of them aren't unstable.
Perhaps the discussion of monetary costs might actually persuade the masters of our addicted society to take a good look at themselves, because the human costs of our addiction to guns and violence has not had any effect so far.
Sunday, September 27, 2015
An Unexpected End to Uninvited Guests?
Update - 9 March 2020: This post should be taken with a grain of
salt. I wrote it during a time in which most of the West was being
flooded with propaganda from Russian sources such as The Vineyard of the Saker, Russia Today, and
the blog of Dmitry Orlov, to name a few. These sources were created as
part of a larger Russian campaign of disinformation designed to
fragment and fracture the West in order to bring the fractured pieces
under Russian influence. This was in accordance with the geopolitical
strategy of Aleksandr Dugin and Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately I drank
some of their Kool-Aid, but I have now detoxed, as can be seen in my
much more recent post titled, "A Clarifying of Stance."
Everything the Putin regime has touched has turned to garbage. One of
his garbage deeds was to help install a racist, narcissistic, idiot
President into the United States government in 2016.
Graduate school is starting again, and I am enrolled in coursework on top of working nearly full time. Therefore, I can't really do a lot of the research and analysis which has typically gone into many of my blog posts. I can only formulate opinions based on cursory glances at things of interest.
One thing that has caught my eye over the last four years is the Syrian "crisis", which was manufactured by the United States and its allies in order to secure and maintain American economic hegemony in the Middle East. It had nothing to do with "human rights violations" or "democracy." The results of the insurgency which the United States fomented and financed have been ISIS, a partially wrecked country, and a refugee crisis which has exploded into Europe. The refugee crisis has evoked much hand-wringing in the West, along with the pointing of Western fingers at the Syrians as a nation and a people and accusing them of not being able to manage their own affairs. This has also been accompanied by the usual round of horrified xenophobia at the thought of pure Europeans having to extend neighborly hospitality to people with dark skin and dark hair from the Middle East. (Some of that hand-wringing and xenophobia have crossed the Atlantic to the United States.)
But now Russia is rapidly building a military presence in Syria, to the tune of thousands of troops and large amounts of tanks and warplanes. I don't know what the Russians are planning, and they haven't volunteered to tell me. (Only fools openly discuss their strategy.) But what if Russia (along with China, Iran and Iraq) is about to solve the problem of "uninvited guests" in Europe by kicking uninvited "guests" out of Syria? What if the result of such an action is the immediate cessation of the current refugee "crisis"? (If outside interests are stopped from further tearing apart the Syrian homeland, why would Syrians choose any longer to be refugees?) What if a further result is another huge step toward the complete loss of the legitimacy of the West, and particularly of the United States? What if the United States begins to learn that you can't loot other people's countries and wreck other people's homelands without consequences showing up at your doorstep?
Graduate school is starting again, and I am enrolled in coursework on top of working nearly full time. Therefore, I can't really do a lot of the research and analysis which has typically gone into many of my blog posts. I can only formulate opinions based on cursory glances at things of interest.
One thing that has caught my eye over the last four years is the Syrian "crisis", which was manufactured by the United States and its allies in order to secure and maintain American economic hegemony in the Middle East. It had nothing to do with "human rights violations" or "democracy." The results of the insurgency which the United States fomented and financed have been ISIS, a partially wrecked country, and a refugee crisis which has exploded into Europe. The refugee crisis has evoked much hand-wringing in the West, along with the pointing of Western fingers at the Syrians as a nation and a people and accusing them of not being able to manage their own affairs. This has also been accompanied by the usual round of horrified xenophobia at the thought of pure Europeans having to extend neighborly hospitality to people with dark skin and dark hair from the Middle East. (Some of that hand-wringing and xenophobia have crossed the Atlantic to the United States.)
But now Russia is rapidly building a military presence in Syria, to the tune of thousands of troops and large amounts of tanks and warplanes. I don't know what the Russians are planning, and they haven't volunteered to tell me. (Only fools openly discuss their strategy.) But what if Russia (along with China, Iran and Iraq) is about to solve the problem of "uninvited guests" in Europe by kicking uninvited "guests" out of Syria? What if the result of such an action is the immediate cessation of the current refugee "crisis"? (If outside interests are stopped from further tearing apart the Syrian homeland, why would Syrians choose any longer to be refugees?) What if a further result is another huge step toward the complete loss of the legitimacy of the West, and particularly of the United States? What if the United States begins to learn that you can't loot other people's countries and wreck other people's homelands without consequences showing up at your doorstep?
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Give Me Some Delicious Reasons...
So, lately I've been in dialogue with a retired clergyman of a mainstream American church. He and I have had, shall we say, a more than moderate difference of opinion concerning the revival of overt oppression of people of color in this country, and the appropriateness of the mainstream American evangelical response so far. Those of you who read this blog know that I believe that the mainstream evangelical response has been rather lame, amounting to a non-response - which is why I can't really take mainstream American evangelicalism very seriously anymore, since I now view it as a tool of oppression. He tends to think that the problem of oppression in this country is much less severe than the facts now indicate, and he tends to talk vaguely of a "race" problem which he assumes to be a bi-lateral grievance between two belligerents who are equally at fault. The retired clergyman would rather I saw things his way, and our last face-to-face discussion was slightly hot in places. But amazingly, at the end, he offered to let me write an installment of the weekly prayer email sent to the prayer team at his church.
So here is what I wrote for that week:
"'Remember the prisoners, as though in prison with them, and those who are ill-treated, since you yourselves are in the body.' - Hebrews 13:3
"I am reminded of this verse as I consider a recent study I conducted in order to prepare for a discussion of ongoing injustice being perpetrated in the United States. One of the elements of that study was the failure of the criminal justice system, which has been guilty of sending many innocent people to prison (and in several cases, to death row). Here are links to some of the sources I read:
"Minorities (especially African-American) make up a disproportionate number of those incarcerated or sentenced to death in this country, yet the available data seems to indicate that the majority of prisoners of color in the United States are innocent. It is a real challenge for the innocent to prove their innocence and to obtain release from prison, because the criminal justice system purposely makes it hard for convicted prisoners to prove their innocence. Indeed, in 2009, the United States Supreme Court ruled that prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence.
"Therefore, please remember the prisoners, just as the Scripture has commanded us. Let us remember them in our prayers. Let us pray for their release from oppression and unjust imprisonment. Let us also pray about how we might physically, materially 'show compassion to those in prison' and to their families - Hebrews 10:34. And let us pray for the repentance of the United States."
As I said, it's amazing to me that I was able to send these exact words to the prayer team at that church. Now I guess I should visit a Sunday service to see how those words were received. And as for the hard words I have already written about mainstream American evangelicalism (and about present-day American society), I'm praying for some more delicious reasons to eat those words. We'll see...
So here is what I wrote for that week:
"'Remember the prisoners, as though in prison with them, and those who are ill-treated, since you yourselves are in the body.' - Hebrews 13:3
"I am reminded of this verse as I consider a recent study I conducted in order to prepare for a discussion of ongoing injustice being perpetrated in the United States. One of the elements of that study was the failure of the criminal justice system, which has been guilty of sending many innocent people to prison (and in several cases, to death row). Here are links to some of the sources I read:
- 'Three black men released after 18 years in prison on wrongful murder convictions' (this group is different from the three in the first article),
- 'Exonerations in the United States, 1989-2012' (especially starting at page 30),
- 'How Often Do Wrongful Convictions Involve Black Defendants?' (The answer is between 71 and 73 percent.)
"Minorities (especially African-American) make up a disproportionate number of those incarcerated or sentenced to death in this country, yet the available data seems to indicate that the majority of prisoners of color in the United States are innocent. It is a real challenge for the innocent to prove their innocence and to obtain release from prison, because the criminal justice system purposely makes it hard for convicted prisoners to prove their innocence. Indeed, in 2009, the United States Supreme Court ruled that prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence.
"Therefore, please remember the prisoners, just as the Scripture has commanded us. Let us remember them in our prayers. Let us pray for their release from oppression and unjust imprisonment. Let us also pray about how we might physically, materially 'show compassion to those in prison' and to their families - Hebrews 10:34. And let us pray for the repentance of the United States."
As I said, it's amazing to me that I was able to send these exact words to the prayer team at that church. Now I guess I should visit a Sunday service to see how those words were received. And as for the hard words I have already written about mainstream American evangelicalism (and about present-day American society), I'm praying for some more delicious reasons to eat those words. We'll see...
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
The Beginnings of Damnation - An Expanded List
Here's an article on another blog which illustrate the point I made in my last post, namely, that the United States is beginning to reap the consequences of its materialist evil (as is Europe):
And here's a news article which expands on the climate consequences for the United States:
And here's a news article which expands on the climate consequences for the United States:
Sunday, September 6, 2015
One Nation Under John (Frum, That Is)
In a previous post I described American evangelicalism as a patriotic cargo cult. As such, it has become a key component of the dysfunctional and harmful response of a people who are stressed by the emergence of a world they can no longer control to their liking. Therefore, in order to understand the ways in which many elements of mainstream white American society are responding to the changes now descending upon that society, one must understand mainstream American evangelicalism. To help further that understanding, I think it is good to examine the “cargo cult” characteristics of modern American evangelicalism.
What then is a cargo cult? According to Wikipedia, it is “a Melanesian millenarian movement encompassing a diverse range of practices and occurring in the wake of contact with the commercial networks of colonizing societies. The name derives from the belief that various ritualistic acts will lead to a bestowing of material wealth (“cargo”).” (Emphasis mine.) The story from several sources is that cargo cults arise among indigenous populations when those populations come under stress due to the arrival of members of a colonizing nation which possesses superior technology. This arrival results in a loss of local control of the distribution of resources among the indigenous peoples, with a corresponding loss of status of those members of indigenous societies who controlled the flow of wealth in their societies. The response of the indigenous peoples, and especially of their leaders, is to enact rituals designed to invoke the aid of the supernatural as they understand it, in order to regain access to control of resources and to gain control of access to the goods – the “cargo” – which the colonizers had brought.
Examples of this sort of ritual sprang up in Vanuatu and other South Pacific islands during and after World War 2, when the locals observed the arrival of U.S. military forces replete with cargoes of canned foods, medicines, clothing, metal tools, radios, airplanes, large ships, other assorted military hardware, and the like. After the war ended, the servicemen left, taking their “cargo” with them, and the natives, who had grown used to benefiting from some of the crumbs of that “cargo”, began to enact various rituals designed to mimic the things which they believed the Americans had done to bring that cargo to the islands in the first place. Such rituals included (links to images) villagers marching in drills with American flags and wooden replicas of rifles while building dirt airstrips and wooden replicas of control towers and radios in order to attract the “cargo” back to their islands. Some went so far as to build life-sized wooden replicas of cargo airplanes.
Control of the flows of material resources had been the foundation of the identity and prestige of the “big men” who ruled indigenous South Pacific societies before their contact with First World colonialists. Therefore also, the regaining of control of flows of material resources and of access to advanced “cargo” was the center and foundation of the indigenous cargo cults. To put it baldly, the cargo cults and the society from which they sprang were thoroughly materialist. However, the cargo cult practitioners enacted their rituals in almost complete ignorance of the true nature of the cargo they sought, or of the means by which it was actually delivered, being acquainted only with the outward “rituals” (talking on a radio, filling out paperwork, etc.) by which the foreigners obtained their “cargo.”
Mainstream American evangelicalism shares a large number of characteristics with the Melanesian cargo cults. First, it is dominated and ruled by “big men” (and a few “big women”) for whom the ability to rule groups of people, and to control the flows of material resources among those groups of people, is a foundational part of their identity. Second, it depends on certain rituals which are performed in order to invoke continued access to material wealth – that is, “cargo.” Third, it is both ignorant and willfully blind – ignorant of the God Whom it claims to worship, and of the true nature of supernatural realities; and willfully blind to the true nature of the means by which it has obtained its cargo.
To understand this, we must first look at the creed of modern mainstream white American evangelicalism. As I stated in a previous post, the majority of White American evangelicals believe that the United States is a nation chosen and founded directly by God, who, according to them, has decreed that the United States of America is specially chosen to rule the entire earth and all of its peoples. Therefore, God has condoned whatever means and methods the people of the United States have used in order to assert, expand and maintain that rule. This is why the hymns of Francis Scott Key are such a favorite among many American evangelicals. This is why they not only give thanks for the founding of the nation every Thanksgiving, but they expect everyone else to be just as appreciative of the nation's founding – including the surviving members of the Native American peoples they exterminated and the descendants of African slaves who are now being oppressed, imprisoned, and in many cases killed without just cause by the dominant members of American society.
Because of their strong materialism, most of them believe strongly that material prosperity is one of the surest signs of God's blessing upon the nation. As I have already said, they therefore engage in various rituals in order to secure that continued “blessing.” For the majority of American evangelicals, the rituals consist of public verbal opposition to certain sexual sins (although what these people do behind closed doors often belies their public verbal opposition), public proclamation of patriotism, public proclamation of “faith” in Jesus Christ, voting for the "right" political agenda, and public proclamation of faith in capitalism, the “free market,” and American exceptionalism. Note that the public proclamation of faith in Jesus Christ usually does not come with any attempt, public or private, to actually do what He has commanded. Nevertheless, most White American evangelicals believe that if the majority of the nation follows this simple ritual, God will continue to bless America with an abundance of “cargo.” Some American evangelicals try to add to the ritual, such as the "Christian Reconstructionists" who are trying to impose the Old Testament law on the United States. Their reasoning is that because God promised to bless Israel with material abundance if they kept the Law perfectly, the way to secure an endless supply of “cargo” for the United States is for this nation to keep the Law perfectly – and to avoid intermarrying with “inferior races,” by the way.
Perceptive individuals can see the problems with this approach. The first problem is the assumption that one can secure material blessings by keeping the Law perfectly. It is true that in the Old Testament, God promised material abundance to Israel if only they kept the whole Law. But Israel didn't keep the Law – indeed, they couldn't, because they were sinners, as are we all. And that points out the second problem, namely, the mistake people make when they associate wholeness of life solely with having lots of material possessions. The truth is that people who have an abundance of possessions, yet are not whole on the inside, always make a mess out of their abundance. This is why it is impossible for mortal, fallen human beings to make a Heaven on earth. Thus the definition of blessedness changes in the New Testament, from “Blessed are those with lots of cargo,” to “Blessed are those who learn to be Christ-like and love their neighbors, even though they themselves are poor and afflicted.” (Matthew 5:1-12; Luke 6:20-26; Acts 14:22) Our present earthly lives are thus transformed from an opportunity to acquire lots of cargo to an opportunity to allow God to make us whole on the inside – even in the midst of deeply contrary circumstances.
This is the spiritual, supernatural reality that mainstream American evangelicals refuse to understand. And they are willfully blind to the true nature of the means by which they have obtained and continue to obtain their cargo. The Good Book calls those means evil. Evil can be viewed as a rejection of wholeness and an embracing of inner spiritual disease. And both the Old and New Testaments teach that there are consequences for evil. But just as the Melanesian cargo cultists did not understand the true nature of the realities they were trying to invoke, so American evangelicals are, by and large, willfully ignorant of the reality of the consequences which their actions have begun to invoke. Because these actions are the result of a choice to do evil, those who have chosen them have chosen to be evil.
As I have previously written, the beginnings of damnation almost always start with the manifestation of the earthly, natural consequences of choosing to do evil. As the evil continues, those natural consequences propagate and expand throughout the entire lives of those who have chosen to be evil. Consider a crystal subjected to mechanical stress.
In response to the stress, the crystal will exhibit strain, defined by the people who work for Noah Webster as “deformation of a material body under the action of applied forces.” That strain will usually manifest itself as microscopic and submicroscopic dislocations which propagate throughout the crystal as the stress placed on it increases. The propagation is usually nonlinear and often seemingly stochastic – that is, it cannot be traced out in advance. Yet from the beginning of strain to the point of ultimate fracture, the propagation of dislocations in the crystal can be traced to a single root cause – namely, the application of a mechanical stress.
So it is with the propagation of the earthly, natural consequences of evil. The propagation is usually nonlinear and often seemingly stochastic, yet it can be accurately traced to root causes by those who are willing to look at things honestly. (However, magical thinking blinds people so that they do not see the root causes.) Over the last year, we have begun to see a few examples of the propagation of those consequences in mainstream America, and in mainstream American evangelicalism.
That propagation is first intrapersonal. We are now seeing the culmination of a long American tradition of viewing freedom as the ability to do whatever one wants without regard to how one's actions affect others. One of the ways that “freedom” is being manifested is in an explosion of addictions of various kinds. White America has lost its ability to self-regulate, to delay gratification, to say no to unhealthy cravings. This nation is having to face the fact of its addictions to mind-altering substances such as prescription painkillers, prescription psychiatric drugs, alcohol, and homemade psychotropics such as crystal meth. Indeed, the protagonist in a recent very popular TV series is a “meth-maker.” In the religious realm, the addiction to, ahem, “chemicals”, has included Rush Limbaugh, a man who frequently and loudly proclaimed his belief in God. But it goes beyond addiction to drugs to include addiction to sex. Here we enter a “target-rich environment” when discussing famous evangelicals who have recently fallen from grace. (Here's a link to information about a former pastor who dabbled in both drugs and sexual sin.)
And there is the ever-increasing addiction to violence. According to a recent study, there are over 300 million guns of various kinds in the hands of private citizens in the United States. (See this also.) The vast majority of those guns have been bought and are owned by White citizens. (However, the vast majority of people convicted for gun crimes in this country are Black. How can that be? Methinks more than a few police departments, prosecutors and district attorneys in this country are guilty of scapegoating.)
Which brings us to the second realm of propagation, namely, the interpersonal. It is because mainstream American society has lost its ability to self-regulate that we are witnessing an explosion of violence – especially gun-related violence. The gun-related violence is especially prevalent in cases of domestic or intimate partner abuse. (See this also.) But it is also a factor in the many suicides which take place in this country. And it is a factor in the increasingly violent adolescent real-life “games” which grown men are playing with each other in this country. For instance, most may not know this, but in May of this year, there was a massive shootout between two rival White biker gangs in Texas. I believe at least nine people died, and a number were injured, including a few cops. This is just one of the many shooting sprees which have taken place in this country over the last two or three decades. Yet one of the things most dear to mainstream American evangelicals is “the right to keep and bear arms.” (Look up “Christian militia” sometime and see where that takes you.) And we haven't even scratched the surface of the violence which this nation has inflicted on other nations, or the alienation which has resulted from this violence.
Violence is also being done to relationships, even where the violence is not physical. For the consequence of choosing to do evil is that the evil person becomes injurious and repulsive to those who know him. This is the reason for the absolutely horrible rate of transmission of evangelical values from one generation to the next among White evangelicals, many of whose children are now choosing to identify themselves as "spiritual, but not religious." But this is no surprise, because many American evangelicals have made themselves so nasty that increasingly, no one wants to be like them. In fact, in 19 states, white American evangelicals are now no longer a majority of the population. Some of these states are among the most populous states in the Union.
Lastly, there is the third realm of propagation, namely, the nonhuman. By this I mean especially the world in which we live, including the atmosphere we breathe and the biosphere which sustains our earthly lives. American evangelicals (along with the rest of the world) are about to receive in full the consequences of the magical thinking in which they indulged in order to justify trying to get an ever-expanding, never-ending stream of “cargo” out of a finite planet. Case in point: regarding climate change, Americans, including evangelicals are about to suffer the consequences which they had been able until now to inflict solely on other nations. This year – so far, the hottest year globally on record – has seen heat waves in India and Pakistan which killed over 4,000 people. Agencies such as the NOAA are predicting that due to the storage of heat in the Earth's oceans from this year's excessive temperatures, next year is likely to be moderately to significantly hotter. That means that many people in the United States may be subjected to killing temperatures next summer. These phenomena, along with other phenomena predicted by the Limits to Growth studies of the 1970's, are not the supernatural, “black-swan” judgments of a “cargo-cult” god whom we cannot hope to understand, but the natural consequences this nation has brought on itslf – consequences allowed by a God who wants to use these consequences to teach us that, “not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.” (Luke 12:15)
What then is a cargo cult? According to Wikipedia, it is “a Melanesian millenarian movement encompassing a diverse range of practices and occurring in the wake of contact with the commercial networks of colonizing societies. The name derives from the belief that various ritualistic acts will lead to a bestowing of material wealth (“cargo”).” (Emphasis mine.) The story from several sources is that cargo cults arise among indigenous populations when those populations come under stress due to the arrival of members of a colonizing nation which possesses superior technology. This arrival results in a loss of local control of the distribution of resources among the indigenous peoples, with a corresponding loss of status of those members of indigenous societies who controlled the flow of wealth in their societies. The response of the indigenous peoples, and especially of their leaders, is to enact rituals designed to invoke the aid of the supernatural as they understand it, in order to regain access to control of resources and to gain control of access to the goods – the “cargo” – which the colonizers had brought.
Examples of this sort of ritual sprang up in Vanuatu and other South Pacific islands during and after World War 2, when the locals observed the arrival of U.S. military forces replete with cargoes of canned foods, medicines, clothing, metal tools, radios, airplanes, large ships, other assorted military hardware, and the like. After the war ended, the servicemen left, taking their “cargo” with them, and the natives, who had grown used to benefiting from some of the crumbs of that “cargo”, began to enact various rituals designed to mimic the things which they believed the Americans had done to bring that cargo to the islands in the first place. Such rituals included (links to images) villagers marching in drills with American flags and wooden replicas of rifles while building dirt airstrips and wooden replicas of control towers and radios in order to attract the “cargo” back to their islands. Some went so far as to build life-sized wooden replicas of cargo airplanes.
Control of the flows of material resources had been the foundation of the identity and prestige of the “big men” who ruled indigenous South Pacific societies before their contact with First World colonialists. Therefore also, the regaining of control of flows of material resources and of access to advanced “cargo” was the center and foundation of the indigenous cargo cults. To put it baldly, the cargo cults and the society from which they sprang were thoroughly materialist. However, the cargo cult practitioners enacted their rituals in almost complete ignorance of the true nature of the cargo they sought, or of the means by which it was actually delivered, being acquainted only with the outward “rituals” (talking on a radio, filling out paperwork, etc.) by which the foreigners obtained their “cargo.”
Mainstream American evangelicalism shares a large number of characteristics with the Melanesian cargo cults. First, it is dominated and ruled by “big men” (and a few “big women”) for whom the ability to rule groups of people, and to control the flows of material resources among those groups of people, is a foundational part of their identity. Second, it depends on certain rituals which are performed in order to invoke continued access to material wealth – that is, “cargo.” Third, it is both ignorant and willfully blind – ignorant of the God Whom it claims to worship, and of the true nature of supernatural realities; and willfully blind to the true nature of the means by which it has obtained its cargo.
To understand this, we must first look at the creed of modern mainstream white American evangelicalism. As I stated in a previous post, the majority of White American evangelicals believe that the United States is a nation chosen and founded directly by God, who, according to them, has decreed that the United States of America is specially chosen to rule the entire earth and all of its peoples. Therefore, God has condoned whatever means and methods the people of the United States have used in order to assert, expand and maintain that rule. This is why the hymns of Francis Scott Key are such a favorite among many American evangelicals. This is why they not only give thanks for the founding of the nation every Thanksgiving, but they expect everyone else to be just as appreciative of the nation's founding – including the surviving members of the Native American peoples they exterminated and the descendants of African slaves who are now being oppressed, imprisoned, and in many cases killed without just cause by the dominant members of American society.
Because of their strong materialism, most of them believe strongly that material prosperity is one of the surest signs of God's blessing upon the nation. As I have already said, they therefore engage in various rituals in order to secure that continued “blessing.” For the majority of American evangelicals, the rituals consist of public verbal opposition to certain sexual sins (although what these people do behind closed doors often belies their public verbal opposition), public proclamation of patriotism, public proclamation of “faith” in Jesus Christ, voting for the "right" political agenda, and public proclamation of faith in capitalism, the “free market,” and American exceptionalism. Note that the public proclamation of faith in Jesus Christ usually does not come with any attempt, public or private, to actually do what He has commanded. Nevertheless, most White American evangelicals believe that if the majority of the nation follows this simple ritual, God will continue to bless America with an abundance of “cargo.” Some American evangelicals try to add to the ritual, such as the "Christian Reconstructionists" who are trying to impose the Old Testament law on the United States. Their reasoning is that because God promised to bless Israel with material abundance if they kept the Law perfectly, the way to secure an endless supply of “cargo” for the United States is for this nation to keep the Law perfectly – and to avoid intermarrying with “inferior races,” by the way.
Perceptive individuals can see the problems with this approach. The first problem is the assumption that one can secure material blessings by keeping the Law perfectly. It is true that in the Old Testament, God promised material abundance to Israel if only they kept the whole Law. But Israel didn't keep the Law – indeed, they couldn't, because they were sinners, as are we all. And that points out the second problem, namely, the mistake people make when they associate wholeness of life solely with having lots of material possessions. The truth is that people who have an abundance of possessions, yet are not whole on the inside, always make a mess out of their abundance. This is why it is impossible for mortal, fallen human beings to make a Heaven on earth. Thus the definition of blessedness changes in the New Testament, from “Blessed are those with lots of cargo,” to “Blessed are those who learn to be Christ-like and love their neighbors, even though they themselves are poor and afflicted.” (Matthew 5:1-12; Luke 6:20-26; Acts 14:22) Our present earthly lives are thus transformed from an opportunity to acquire lots of cargo to an opportunity to allow God to make us whole on the inside – even in the midst of deeply contrary circumstances.
This is the spiritual, supernatural reality that mainstream American evangelicals refuse to understand. And they are willfully blind to the true nature of the means by which they have obtained and continue to obtain their cargo. The Good Book calls those means evil. Evil can be viewed as a rejection of wholeness and an embracing of inner spiritual disease. And both the Old and New Testaments teach that there are consequences for evil. But just as the Melanesian cargo cultists did not understand the true nature of the realities they were trying to invoke, so American evangelicals are, by and large, willfully ignorant of the reality of the consequences which their actions have begun to invoke. Because these actions are the result of a choice to do evil, those who have chosen them have chosen to be evil.
As I have previously written, the beginnings of damnation almost always start with the manifestation of the earthly, natural consequences of choosing to do evil. As the evil continues, those natural consequences propagate and expand throughout the entire lives of those who have chosen to be evil. Consider a crystal subjected to mechanical stress.
Misfit dislocations in a silicon crystal under stress. Image courtesy of http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis.
In response to the stress, the crystal will exhibit strain, defined by the people who work for Noah Webster as “deformation of a material body under the action of applied forces.” That strain will usually manifest itself as microscopic and submicroscopic dislocations which propagate throughout the crystal as the stress placed on it increases. The propagation is usually nonlinear and often seemingly stochastic – that is, it cannot be traced out in advance. Yet from the beginning of strain to the point of ultimate fracture, the propagation of dislocations in the crystal can be traced to a single root cause – namely, the application of a mechanical stress.
So it is with the propagation of the earthly, natural consequences of evil. The propagation is usually nonlinear and often seemingly stochastic, yet it can be accurately traced to root causes by those who are willing to look at things honestly. (However, magical thinking blinds people so that they do not see the root causes.) Over the last year, we have begun to see a few examples of the propagation of those consequences in mainstream America, and in mainstream American evangelicalism.
That propagation is first intrapersonal. We are now seeing the culmination of a long American tradition of viewing freedom as the ability to do whatever one wants without regard to how one's actions affect others. One of the ways that “freedom” is being manifested is in an explosion of addictions of various kinds. White America has lost its ability to self-regulate, to delay gratification, to say no to unhealthy cravings. This nation is having to face the fact of its addictions to mind-altering substances such as prescription painkillers, prescription psychiatric drugs, alcohol, and homemade psychotropics such as crystal meth. Indeed, the protagonist in a recent very popular TV series is a “meth-maker.” In the religious realm, the addiction to, ahem, “chemicals”, has included Rush Limbaugh, a man who frequently and loudly proclaimed his belief in God. But it goes beyond addiction to drugs to include addiction to sex. Here we enter a “target-rich environment” when discussing famous evangelicals who have recently fallen from grace. (Here's a link to information about a former pastor who dabbled in both drugs and sexual sin.)
And there is the ever-increasing addiction to violence. According to a recent study, there are over 300 million guns of various kinds in the hands of private citizens in the United States. (See this also.) The vast majority of those guns have been bought and are owned by White citizens. (However, the vast majority of people convicted for gun crimes in this country are Black. How can that be? Methinks more than a few police departments, prosecutors and district attorneys in this country are guilty of scapegoating.)
Which brings us to the second realm of propagation, namely, the interpersonal. It is because mainstream American society has lost its ability to self-regulate that we are witnessing an explosion of violence – especially gun-related violence. The gun-related violence is especially prevalent in cases of domestic or intimate partner abuse. (See this also.) But it is also a factor in the many suicides which take place in this country. And it is a factor in the increasingly violent adolescent real-life “games” which grown men are playing with each other in this country. For instance, most may not know this, but in May of this year, there was a massive shootout between two rival White biker gangs in Texas. I believe at least nine people died, and a number were injured, including a few cops. This is just one of the many shooting sprees which have taken place in this country over the last two or three decades. Yet one of the things most dear to mainstream American evangelicals is “the right to keep and bear arms.” (Look up “Christian militia” sometime and see where that takes you.) And we haven't even scratched the surface of the violence which this nation has inflicted on other nations, or the alienation which has resulted from this violence.
Violence is also being done to relationships, even where the violence is not physical. For the consequence of choosing to do evil is that the evil person becomes injurious and repulsive to those who know him. This is the reason for the absolutely horrible rate of transmission of evangelical values from one generation to the next among White evangelicals, many of whose children are now choosing to identify themselves as "spiritual, but not religious." But this is no surprise, because many American evangelicals have made themselves so nasty that increasingly, no one wants to be like them. In fact, in 19 states, white American evangelicals are now no longer a majority of the population. Some of these states are among the most populous states in the Union.
Lastly, there is the third realm of propagation, namely, the nonhuman. By this I mean especially the world in which we live, including the atmosphere we breathe and the biosphere which sustains our earthly lives. American evangelicals (along with the rest of the world) are about to receive in full the consequences of the magical thinking in which they indulged in order to justify trying to get an ever-expanding, never-ending stream of “cargo” out of a finite planet. Case in point: regarding climate change, Americans, including evangelicals are about to suffer the consequences which they had been able until now to inflict solely on other nations. This year – so far, the hottest year globally on record – has seen heat waves in India and Pakistan which killed over 4,000 people. Agencies such as the NOAA are predicting that due to the storage of heat in the Earth's oceans from this year's excessive temperatures, next year is likely to be moderately to significantly hotter. That means that many people in the United States may be subjected to killing temperatures next summer. These phenomena, along with other phenomena predicted by the Limits to Growth studies of the 1970's, are not the supernatural, “black-swan” judgments of a “cargo-cult” god whom we cannot hope to understand, but the natural consequences this nation has brought on itslf – consequences allowed by a God who wants to use these consequences to teach us that, “not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.” (Luke 12:15)
Thursday, August 20, 2015
When National Narcissism Meets Unforgiving Nature
This week I have three things to share. First, I'd like to introduce you to Walk On, a blog written by Jesse Curtis. Mr. Curtis is currently a PhD student at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His research focus is American history, and the roles which American exceptionalism and racism have played in that history. He has particular insights into the role which American evangelicals have played in fostering and maintaining that exceptionalism and racism.
I am glad to have discovered his blog, because I believe that an accurate understanding of the present-day dysfunctional mainstream American mindset must of necessity include an accurate understanding of the ways in which white American evangelicalism and its leaders have contributed to the creation of that mindset. I am a Christian - a Biblically orthodox Christian - and yet I hereby declare my belief that present-day white American evangelicalism is deeply dysfunctional, and that in many ways it amounts to no more than a patriotic cargo cult. (One of these days, I will explain the ways in which the term "cargo cult" accurately describes American evangelicalism - unless someone wants to beat me to the punch.)
The nature of American evangelicalism and its impact on American society explains not only the dysfunctional ways in which the U.S. interacts with the non-white and the foreign-born. It also explains why the U.S. is responding in such a dysfunctional way to the limits now being imposed on it by resource depletion and environmental degradation - the original subjects of my blog. Along those lines, I present you with two reposts of articles describing the collision of national narcissism and unforgiving nature: "The Congress Created Dust Bowl," and "The Death of the Central Valley." Enjoy.
I am glad to have discovered his blog, because I believe that an accurate understanding of the present-day dysfunctional mainstream American mindset must of necessity include an accurate understanding of the ways in which white American evangelicalism and its leaders have contributed to the creation of that mindset. I am a Christian - a Biblically orthodox Christian - and yet I hereby declare my belief that present-day white American evangelicalism is deeply dysfunctional, and that in many ways it amounts to no more than a patriotic cargo cult. (One of these days, I will explain the ways in which the term "cargo cult" accurately describes American evangelicalism - unless someone wants to beat me to the punch.)
The nature of American evangelicalism and its impact on American society explains not only the dysfunctional ways in which the U.S. interacts with the non-white and the foreign-born. It also explains why the U.S. is responding in such a dysfunctional way to the limits now being imposed on it by resource depletion and environmental degradation - the original subjects of my blog. Along those lines, I present you with two reposts of articles describing the collision of national narcissism and unforgiving nature: "The Congress Created Dust Bowl," and "The Death of the Central Valley." Enjoy.
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