Letter to the next President

Waldmark, 06 June 2008

Capitalism is not bad in itself; it's bad when mankind refuses to set boundaries for it. So please, Mr Obama, before office will demand all your time and energy, define a strategy to curb capitalism.

Mr Barack Obama:

Songbirds sing praises to God; flowers praise God through the beauty of their shapes, colours and scents; fish tumble in the seas and young lambs dance on green hills. The earth seems full of the praise of the Lord God.

But appearances are not always heralds of reality. For it is only a modest part of the world that still knows that the meaning of life is found in acknowledging and praising its maker. The crowning glory of Creation, mankind made in the image of God, seems to have lost its conception of the meaning of life almost entirely. Our young boys and our innocent young girls are (voluntarily!) drinking themselves into stupors while piercing their skins with pins and needles, filling their lungs with poisonous smoke, damaging their brains with alcohol and drugs and radiation, and dishonouring their bodies with sperm pregnant with deathly diseases. Our strong workforce is slaving for the meagre reward of a seat in a soccer stadium and a new flat-screen tv. Numerous religious leaders are worshipping their own man-made doctrines or the size of their following. Many political leaders are ignoring the facts of life and sacrificing tomorrow’s well being for today’s vote.

All this is the result of mankind having shifted allegiances. We used to worship the God of Heaven and Earth, but we turned away from him, to a new god whose name is Capitalism. The ‘original’ God required mankind to offer him thanks and praise but the new god is not so easily satisfied. The god called Capitalism is on a fat diet. It feeds on man’s greed, and from both young and old it demands a daily sacrifice. These are mankind’s offerings: decency, honesty, compassion, vision, courage and common sense.

The fruit of capitalism is not wealth and prosperity for all but division; extreme riches for a few, poverty for many and shattered illusions for the rest of us. The price of capitalism is the sacrifice of virtue and the fuel that drives capitalism is a highly flammable mixture of greed and egoism with a splash of envy, said mixture being stored and kept in barrels placed around the world in vast warehouses proudly flashing their shocking names in huge neon signs: Cruelty, Indifference, Brutality, Inhumanity, Wickedness, Lack of Compassion, Ruthlessness.

Upsetting, non? Well, brace yourself for here is the worst part of it: the world is convinced that this is actually the preferred state of affairs! Humanity embraces capitalism as the world order of choice, natural partner and close friend of democracy. Mankind is willing to consider the price we pay as acceptable, from a misguided conviction that alternative world orders would require an even higher price or yield less desirable results.

There are a few among us who recognise that the immaterial costs involved in the worship of the god called Capitalism are alarmingly high, but when speaking out they are being silenced or ignored. Mankind doesn’t want to understand they are paying such a high price to keep their greed going.

It is a pathetic situation mankind has gotten itself into.

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So, if this is the present situation, then what is the solution? Am I merely offering another of periodic observations that we should break free from the grip of desperation many people nowadays experience? Or I am advocating that mankind should abandon capitalism altogether? No, my contribution is pointing out that there is a way out. It is free, it is expressed in two simple statements and it doesn’t require any costly resources. Here it is: we should praise the God who made Heaven and Earth and Everyone of Us, and we should approach the people we deal with, in business and in private, exactly as we would like them to approach ourselves.

Everyone can understand these few words. They do not require interpretation from theologians or philosophers nor explanations from columnists or teachers; two straightforward statements is all it takes to release us from the stranglehold of capitalism.

Mr Obama, mankind has raised the economic system of capitalism to the status of a god and now it has grown beyond control. It is no longer an option to think that we, mankind, can somehow surmount these problems we are facing. We have let war and hunger and poverty and crime and failing health services and disastrous education systems happen to us, but just because mankind caused them doesn’t mean that mankind can somehow solve them. It cannot be done, our new god will not allow it.

The horrible truth is that we have caused a monster. Initially we didn’t want to bring it under control but is has by now grown way beyond our every measure aimed at curbing its grip and influence. The god called Capitalism is no longer answering to us, no longer following courses we have charted. It is the reverse, we find ourselves obeying this god we created. Every attempt we initiate at combating crime or poverty or drugs, all our efforts to improve public transport or to control energy prices or to ensure the safety of crops or to preserve the rain-forests, they are all thwarted by those who don’t want to co-operate. We answer to the god of Capitalism and thus we can no longer restrict the greed of those who interfere with the execution of our good intentions.

Slowly but surely we seem to be getting desperate for a helping hand. And here’s the dilemma. Mankind didn’t want to define the boundaries for Capitalism while there was still the opportunity to do so. As a consequence governments now find themselves outmanoeuvred by the riddle of how to curb greed without limiting the individual’s freedom to grab as much as one can, even though the grabbing causes food prices to double or treble and housing to become too expensive for many. In a similar way mankind now again has an opportunity, this time to ask the helping hand to show a way forward. Unfortunately, we have become arrogant and find ourselves unwilling to appeal to any authority higher than ourselves: mankind refuses to admit that some issues, such as capitalism, peace, world without hunger, a stable global climate, are beyond what we can handle.

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Capitalism is our new god, and our adoration of science has caused the arrogance which blinds us to the fact that there are things we cannot influence or control. Mankind still has not accepted that good intentions published in good looking reports and translated into 180 languages are not going to cut it. The world’s problems gradually continue getting worse, not better.

There is a small window of opportunity though, a narrow but secure path circumventing the warehouses with their grotesque mixture of fuels stored inside. Are we willing to admit that Capitalism is our god but not our ultimate goal? Are we willing to consent that none of our good intentions are helping us achieve a better world? Then here’s what we might consider doing: return to the God of Heaven and Earth, the only one really worthy of our worship, who can help us defeat the surrogate god of Capitalism.

To the people of the world who may read this also: we don’t want to ignore this mighty God who is above all. We will most certainly fail if our goal is to solve our problems without his help. Only with external help can we overcome our problems. We are neither god ourselves nor are we equal to to the one God who is.

Most thinking people know that the challenges facing us require nothing less that massive co-operation on the scale of continents, not on the scale of schools or villages or even cities or single nations. We will not tackle world poverty, climate change, war, or the consequences of natural disasters, unless we can all agree with one another and move in one direction.

We also know that such is not going to happen because a good many of us will remain unwilling to rein in their greed and lust and advancement at the expense of others. Especially the rich and powerful simply have too much to lose and many will use all their power and influence to prevent their privileged state being taken away from them. As mankind we need to pull together but the greedy ones will not co-operate for anything less serious than Armageddon, when total annihilation can actually be seen marching on the horizon. And even then their collaboration remains to be seen.

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We are faced with a spectacular collapse. The only thing is, we don’t see it coming because we refuse to acknowledge that the total collapse will happen as a result of our unwillingness to pull together, including coercing those who resist, before it is upon us. If this sounds a bit difficult, you’ll get it when you think it through. What I’m saying is that we are faced with bad times and don’t see them coming. The reason we don’t see them coming is because we refuse to acknowledge them and the reason that they happen is because people refuse to agree on measures which could have prevented them. Sad, isn’t it.

All this is because we are, many of us, anyway, under the spell of our new god called Capitalism and unwilling to voluntarily give up our seats of power or our new car or our new kitchen or our new gadgets or our rounds of golf in a desert artificially turned green and lavish. Our new god called Capitalism has decreed that everyone has a right to make money at the expense of decency and fairness and many people refuse to give up their worship of this new god.

But as I said, we still have time, albeit little, and we also have a choice. We can go on trying on our own, determinedly holding on to our belief in science and refusing to give up our confidence in mankind’s ability to change even nature itself (even though deep down we all know we’ll fail) or we could admit that we can’t even change our own nature, and precisely by this very admission achieving the change in our own nature that allows us to turn for help to a higher authority, to the power who created the earth to begin with, to the power who controls the winds and the rains and the orbits of the planets through the universe, to the God who asks nothing more of us than our acknowledgement of him and our praise.

Capitalism is getting out of control and we are no longer able to curb it by our own strength and ingenuity. Do we let it get worse and let disasters ruin our civilisations and our natural environments (and wait for the Incarnation of Cruelty to appear in the guise of the Apocalyptic World Leader, and make us wish we were never born)? Or do we accept outside help from a benevolent helping hand?

Just before I wrote this letter, Mr Obama, I read about King David, a great leader of a nation. He once said: ‘May God be pleased by these thoughts about Him. Hallelujah.’ Hopefully you’ll decide to allocate some time to thinking these things through before becoming leader of your great nation; my wish for you is that your thinking may be along similar lines as King David there.

May God bless you and the United States of America; I believe the world really needs it.

Tags: Barack Obama, president, USA, capitalism, greed, praise