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 "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" Edmund Burke |
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Race, Culture and Nation |
| The Local World Part XII by Geoffrey Dobbs In this final chapter there must be some recapitulation; and
since the delay in its serial publication has been so long, I must
return to the words of indelible poignancy with which Wilfred Owen,
a young poet who died in the First World War, expressed, as a poet
should, the thoughts and feelings which have driven to despair many
of the finest not only of his own generation, but of all those that
have followed:
What, then, is it that is driving us to despair? Not the real world: the sunlight or the starlight, the plants in our garden or the sheep on the hill. These we turn to (if we dare) as a part of God's Creation, and therefore both good and real. No! the despair comes from a world of unreality imposed upon our souls by those who control the electronic impulses which have suddenly pervaded our lives in this country. And this imposed world is increasingly and mostly orientated towards evil, that is the rejection or denial of the good. Young people are commonly told by their elders to "face the facts of life " - which are always understood to be bad. But these are not the facts of life but, literally, the facts of death, and the last thing we should do is to live our lives 'facing' them. On the contrary, we should face away from them, towards the real, glorious and overwhelming facts of the living Creation. This is frequently jeered at as 'escapism,' i.e. an escape from the harsh reality of evil' into a world of goodness, assumed to be unreal and wholly imaginary; which if you come to think of it, is sheer Satanism, the worship of evil. But this is seldom directly acknowledged. More commonly it takes the form of the worship of remote, centralised, human power-the spirit of evil in its widest operation, whereby right and wrong, good and bad, become a matter of mass-opinion, the electronically induced social consensus. The great and true Christian myth tells us that originally Satan was a glorious and good archangel who fell from grace through pride. It is all summed up in that famous hexameter: "How art thou fallen from Heaven 0 Lucifer, son of the morning!" The Reality of Goodness
Most people are now aware that money is just electronic impulses. The figures on a bank balance sheet are merely a print-out from a computer, and notes and coins a convenient form o that print-out for daily use. This change too in invisible electronic money is as radical as that from gold and silver coins to cheque-money. It has taken the imposition of an illusory 'reality' substituted for the true reality a long step forward. Money is now issued as 'credit ' (i.e. interest-bearing debt) in such a way as continuously to devalue our purchasing power - our sole means of living in the electronic pseudo-world -- thus building up an ever-increasing and irredeemable debt-the inversion of redemption. It was an engineer, C. H. Douglas, who, between the Wars, pointed out the devastating, long-term effects of this, and was ridiculed, though the effects have followed inexorably, and the remedial movement which he initiated persists. Debt locks up the future against us. It destroys hope. It reduces politics to a futile contest between parties of money-slaves for the favour of their money-masters, leading to ever more remote centralisation of power. It is of the very essence of despair. C. H. Douglas - Economic Sanity C. H. Douglas, in the 1920's, drew attention to the close relationship between bankruptcies and suicides; but he did a great deal more than that. As early as 1918 he pointed out that rising prices were built into the system; and then, in a series of books of world- wide circulation, he practically turned the whole of economics upside down by viewing it from the producer's and the consumer's point of view instead of that of the banker and the economist. Instead of starting as economists do, with money and monetary theory as a means of controlling the economy, Douglas started with the reality of our technology with its vast productive potential, so grossly wasted and misdirected under monetary control. Money, he maintained, is an accountancy system. It should not control the economy but enable it to function properly, enabling producers to meet the real demands of the consumers, much as in a more limited way, a ticket system enables railways to supply the demands for rail-travel to different locations. It is intolerable that the extent of rail travel should be controlled, not by 'real factors but simply by the supply of tickets. The same, in more general applications, should apply to the accountancy figures called money. Sanity requires that they should not control but enable the economy to function effectively. But while money rules sanity is ruled out., which is the main reason why, to most people who have retained their common sense, the world seems, literally, to have gone mad. In his grasp of the potential of industrial technology Douglas was a pioneer at least a generation ahead of his contemporaries. When the 1914 War started he was engaged in supervising the work an the London Post Office Tube, of which he had drawn up the electrical specifications. This Tube, which is still running in the 1990's, was among the first examples of large scale automation, per- haps the very first. At the time, the electrical part was the essential innovation. It appears, however, that Douglas's bosses did not think much of it, or pay him very well for his pioneer work. Such pioneer work is seldom recognised at its outset. Near the end of the War, as a Major in the Flying Corps (later the R.A.F.) he was seconded to the Government Aircraft Factory at Farnborough to sort out their somewhat muddled accounts. This he did in a highly original and un-academic way, using his experience as a production engineer as well as a cost accountant to go beyond the conventional balance sheets. With the aid of 'tabulating machines' he was able to calculate the rate at which the Factory was generating cost as compared with the rate at which it was generating purchasing power in the form of wages, salaries, plus dividends (if any). As is now obvious, but was not so then, the rate of income distribution was well 'below that of cost-generation; and later work showed that this discrepancy exists in every business investigated, as can be seen in their annual reports. But no one had previously noticed the significance of this universal discrepancy, and every effort is still being made to deny that it has what is clearly a vast and manifest social significance, 'since it does not fit in with any acceptable economic theory, but only with the facts of life. The Social Inheritance Many economists are genuinely puzzled and unable to think in
Douglas's practical terms or to understand his approach at all. This
is because their training has saddled them with certain ideas about
money which became increasingly obsolete as the social 'inheritance
of invention and technology progressively displaced human labour
as the chief factor in production.
Economists in general do not seem to understand the term 'rate' as applied to the function of money which should enable costs to be met in full without debt; that is, the rate of flow of computer and cheque money from banker as credit-issuer to employer as bank's debtor, via retailer by sale to wage-earner as consumer, and then in reverse back to the bank again in repayment with interest of the bank credit. Some of them seem still to be hag-ridden by the barter idea in the form of the 'velocity of circulation' of 'money' (i.e. coins and 'notes) from butcher to baker to pawnbroker and so on; the same 'money' going round and round, settling more or less trans- actions according to its 'velocity.' Doubtless this still goes on a good deal in what is known as 'the black economy,' mainly with a view to avoiding taxation, but that is not the main economy which is functioning so hopelessly in terms of stop/go, inflation/recession, so that the only way in which the built- in devaluation of money can be slowed down is by strangling the whole economy. Those who criticised Douglas's analysis mainly did so by ignoring its essence, namely the time factor whereby the purchase of yesterday's products is achieved by mortgaging future earnings with further debt. This, because inevitable under the debt-and-employment system, is accepted as if it were an unalterable law of nature. As for the gross inadequacy of aggregate incomes to meet costs and therefore prices, as revealed by Douglas when 'hire purchase' had barely been heard of, at the time this was dismissed as a temporary phenomenon attributed to the normal working of the Credit Cycle which he had mistaken for a permanent one. Money is + or - Now, consumer credit constitutes a 'large part of the economy, without which it would collapse. While this is only a part of the practical proofs of his correctness, even so it is alone sufficient to show that he was broadly right in, the long term and not merely in the short. Money is numbers which have a sign attached, + or -. In a boom there is not "too much money chasing too 'few goods." There is a greater deficit than ever of + (asset) money. The rest is made up of - (debt) money. The arithmetic of economics reckons that 3 - 2 = 5! It seems that the thing about Douglas's analysis which particularly riles the economists and financiers is his comparison of the function of finance to that of a railway ticketing system., an enabling system for everyman_-for them almost a blasphemy, depriving the powers that be of their chief instrument for controlling and manipulating the lives of the common people. Political 'democracy' is reckoned all very well so long as it is limited to numerical voting for various class-divisive variants of monetary control: Conservative, Labour, Marxist, and so on; but actual Economic Democracy (the title of Douglas's first book) would be a denial of the power-basis of our civilisation, of their god Mammon himself! Since price inflation is manifestly built into the system, sanity requires a price-discount to be built in to counter it. Insanity inverts this into a Value Added Tax to penalise all worth-while work by raising its price further so that more consumer-debt is needed to buy it. But even lowered prices would not give us economic democracy so long as for most people a living income can be obtained only as a hired underling of, mainly, remote money-masters whose purposes may be constructive but are often vicious, destructive or silly. If un-hired, then one must be 'genuinely seeking' such work to obtain a conditional pittance much-grudged because extracted by taxes from those who are working. Productivity beyond Human Needs Economic democracy requires that everyone-Yes, everyone!- shall be free to choose the purposes for which he works, which is possible now that the cultural inheritance of technology has multi- plied productivity beyond any human needs. Here we have the solution to the misplaced conflict between equality and inequality in skill and merit. Equal pay for work of unequal quality is a denial of natural justice, but merit does not enter into a common technological inheritance. Here equality applies to every member of the inheriting community. There is something here which is meet to be divided - a dividend, and no reason for inequality in its division. It is 'as of right' with no conditions or debt 'attached as it would be if extracted by taxation; and would take the place of all the doles, hand-outs, benefits and bonuses of the Welfare State. As for the aggregate amount of such a discount and a dividend,
it is vital that that should not be determined politically, but mathematically, so as to fill the gap between incomes and prices, a task
by no means beyond the scope of the computer. For politicians to
compete in 'offering tempting hand-outs as 'dividends' would return
us to our present chaos of political use of the money system. That people, in aggregate, by the use of their money-votes, should be allowed to determine the products of our vast productivity rather than having to consume what their money-masters choose to produce and sell to them, including wars, recessions, drugs, pollution, abortions, and electronic brainwashing, goes contrary to the belief that wisdom is inherent in remote, centralised mass-control: that but for this mankind is non-viable, so that it must 'be the little mistakes and errors of common men which are disastrous rather than the monstrous blunders and massacres of the mighty. Mankind threatened, Not Earth When I started this book I intended it as a sequel to my former book On Planning the Earth (1951), retaining the same title and following the same theme, with special reference to the Environmental or Green Movement, its local validity and its mass-misuse. As time passed it became more and more apparent that the policy of control by our World Planners is directed against Mankind rather than the Earth, of which the survival is not threatened. Of all the forms of life on this planet people are the most vulnerable to the anti-life policies of our would-be master-minds, through the centralised powers of mental as well as physical control. Hence the shift in emphasis towards an attempt to defend a viable sanity in human affairs. I return, therefore, to Douglas as an example of that sanity. The criticism and jeers at Douglas were mainly directed at his constructive proposals and not at the policy itself, which in the face of monetary poverty imposed on real plenty was too sane to attack openly. As an outsider he was despised by the academic economists, but no one who claimed superior expertise supplied a set of proposals to gain his objectives, i.e. their objection was actually to the policy, though directed at any suggested means of 'realising it. Keynes patronisingly referred to Douglas as: "a private, perhaps, but not a major in the brave army of heretics." To quote Douglas himself:
Nevertheless his various constructive proposals are worth keeping in mind, as evidence that, given the will, the way out from any monetary predicament is by no means beyond the wit of man when it is applied to it. So widespread were Douglas's ideas in the 1930's under the name Social Credit that millions of people who had not grasped the full nature of his policy formed 'Social Credit Parties' which gained considerable success, notably in Canada. Fortunately none of these has survived, since the idea of 'power for us and our party' is incompatible with the policy of decentralisation. Those interested would be advised to get in touch with the Social Credit Secretariat, a body set up by C. H. Douglas in 1933 to handle his correspondence, now centred in Edinburgh, with members in Australia. Poverty in Plenty is Monetary Since it is manifest plenty that renders monetary poverty and deprivation intolerable, maintenance of control requires that the plenty has to be denied or regarded as an evil. Indeed, if money is treated as part of the natural world, nothing for which there is not a monetary demand is accepted as real. But here we are going deeper than economics and dealing with the whole attitude to life, the belief in the nature of things-in fact with religion. This plenty is but a fragment of the goodness of the Creation, of which a primary property is balance, a property essential to sustain- able life. The technical term is homeostasis, whereby positive feed- back such as, for instance, the slowing down of the metabolism with increasing cold, would be fatal if not countered by a negative feed- back such as increased activity, shivering, and in humans warm clothing fires, etc. It is blatantly obvious that our economic system lacks homeostasis, that debt has a positive feedback leading to devaluation and social disaster, and that what is required is a negative feedback of counter- debt to establish an equilibrium. In so far as we live in a world in which values are determined by debt-money, not only money but all other values on which it has an impact are also being devalued, not excluding our religion, as we are experiencing in our society today. God too Good to be True ? The immensity of the good reality far surpasses the scope of our
imagination and in the prevailing cynical atmosphere, God, and His
bounty, are seen as simply too good to be true. As for those atheistic
humanists who for the most part determine that evil-orientation of
the electronic pseudo-world, their belief is that of Lucifer-they are
the Top and they deny anything 'above' them.
When we turn to the Creation itself, the awesome, infinite and infinitesimal Universe-even the scrap of it with which we can make contact is so overwhelming that many are prone to confuse it with its Creator and worship it. This, again, leaves Man at the top with nothing to limit his dictatorship. And here, also, we find the evolutionists before us, following the fashion of looking first at the negative and destructive as if that were the creative side of life. They substitute Natural Selection - the elimination of the unfit - for Creation itself. Selection from what? Unfit or fit for what? (A tautology anyway since survival is the only test). Is it from or for the product f innumerable mutations, i.e. changes in the DNA? But changes from what? Whence comes DNA? In this verbal trickery something has been left out, something too vast and taken for granted to. be visible to those looking away from it. Existence! Being! Creation! And so the Creator. Evolution by natural selection has to be an impersonal process, something we clever men can look down upon in our pride. Belief in God and His goodness is still not "intellectually respectable" among most intellectuals. So dominant has been this fashion of thought in biological circles that any scientist who looks first at the positive reality is regarded as a 'crank'; as I have been because of my preoccupation with the mutualism, the symbiosis and positive interactions between diverse living things; e.g. between trees and fungi (mycorrhizas) and especially fungi and algae (lichens). To look at the 'good' side is considered soft, sentimental, unscientific. The politically correct attitude which faces the nasty facts in a 'manly' way, is to describe them as "controlled parasitism." An Infinite Variety of Mutualisms Yet, when one looks into it in detail rather than collectively as a population problem, the ecology of any natural association consists of an infinite variety of mutualisms, of fittings in together in time, in space, in nutrition, in chemistry, in the supreme symbiosis of sexual reproduction and in every other possible way, far beyond any human grasp. All we may do is select for study some especially obvious and widespread examples, such as lichens, or study in detail the ecology of one species. But of course it is so. Again, the fact is too enormous to be noticed. It is not the misfittings, the diseases, the parasitisms, the predations, the anti-life elements in a society which constitute its being, though they play their important part in clearing the way for its dynamic survival. It not the chips which fall from the sculptor's chisel which constitute his great work. It is the solid shape that remains. At the core of the derided Christian tradition which sustained our society until recently is the belief that the creative power which made and maintains the Universe is that which we call Love - and also God. Its major expression as applied to humanity is in the Incarnation of God as Man, giving the opportunity of repentance, of turning back from wrong to right, a possibility which is eliminated if neither is recognised. As applied to mankind the word Love is full of emotional as well as tremendous spiritual content, and has been much trivialised, but in its highest meaning as a spiritual thing, how can we recognise its operation in the non-human world, un- complicated by our emotions? We cannot perceive it directly with our senses, but only by its effect. And what is that? What else can it be but that infinite variety of mutuality that we find when we look for it in what we call Nature, a name we give to that small part of creation within reach of our limited ken? Long time have we marvelled at the beauty and intricacy and balanced existence of individual creature, and have worshipped the glory of landscapes and sunsets which strike into our hearts, and been awed and humbled at the more-than-majesty of the heavens. But how could all this even begin to exist 'or survive without the mighty power which enables it to fit together in mutual benefit? Why not call it Love ? Is it not clear also that this power of love, even when operating as an infinitely intricate mutuality, is as essential for the creation and survival of human societies as for non-human, but the personal, mental and spiritual potentialities of us human creatures make it manifest that an 'impersonal concept of love is wholly inadequate? A higher form cannot automatically or by happenstance emerge from a lower, nor the greater from the less. Moreover, the lower cannot even begin to grasp the nature of the higher unless the latter chooses to reveal itself at the level of comprehension of the former; as Christians believe that God reveals Himself to us through the manhood of Jesus Christ. Deprived of the Creator, Evolution 'became a belief in the automatic emergence of quarts out of pint pots; indeed nowadays, in the emergence (with a Big Bang!) of super-giga-quarts out of an infinitesimal non-pot! To such nonsense is human pride reduced in its refusal to look above itself. What is seldom realised is that human reasoning leads to opposite conclusions if programmed on the one hand with a belief in God, or with a disbelief in God on the other. For here, surely, we have arrived at the super-natural, beyond Nature and beyond Science, at the ultimate miracle, creation ex nihilo by the Uncreated-one of the names of God. But on what grounds may it be assumed that the Creator stops there and ceases to maintain the Universe He has initiated? There is something hilarious 'about the sight of the ordinary scientist, with his fashionable atheistic scientistic religion, rejecting as "intellectually contemptible" the faith in such divine interventions as the Incarnation and the Resurrection with its tremendous human consequences, while accepting and promoting as 'scientific' the Nothing that Bangs Theory, arrived at through big-money-directed computer modelling of the Universe and checkable against any sort of reality only by a handful of mega-devices inaccessible to 99.9% of mankind. In contrast, belief in God is accessible to Everyman, and can be tested, and long has been, by direct, personal Ife-experience, as well as social observation. Normal science, which has not taken off into the higher symbolic sphere, operates by the same methods (hence its claim to truth) but on a vastly shorter time-scale, being bound back in detail to reality by constant experiment and observation. The trouble with too much 'religion' is that it is largely verbal or symbolic and is not 'bound back' to any reality at all. Some have found it necessary to invent an 'anthropic principle'
whereby the evolution of mankind is implicit in the original Act of
Creation; an idea which takes us back almost to mediaeval terra-centrism. This can lead to a sort of Deism-belief in a Being whose
sole Act is to Bang out of Nothing a Universe complete with its
modus operandi, including such products as 'faith, hope and charity,
and the whole actuality arising from the Christian Faith; after which
it is totally inactive.
Redemption versus Debt Once we have escaped from the pervasive electronic nihilism which suffocates our minds, we are free to perceive the hope which lies in a religion of faith in redemption and the remission of sins, and the despair implicit in its denial. How can a Society which is sinking through irredeemable debt to destruction, make a fresh start if it denies redemption and the difference between right and wrong? What is not seen as wrong cannot be put right. For though an individual, who has a soul to be saved, may repent of his wrong-doing, and if enough do so they may begin to correct the wrong-doing in Society, the larger the society the greater the inertia and the harder it is to change it 'uphill,' so to speak, from wrong to right. Hence it appears that such changes can be made only from the bottom up, from the individual to the small group, thence spreading to larger groupings and localities before it can reach anything on a national scale. In a society debt-orientated from the top and increasingly death-orientated as ours is, a great temptation for Christians lies in a form of Dualism, or Manichaeism, whereby evil is seen as a rival reality to be 'fought' rather than a perversion or inversion of the only reality of the good Creation. We are so mentally soaked in everything bad we may become obsessed with 'fighting' not only the perversion but the real thing that was perverted,, which in fact is the only thing that can defeat it. A notorious example of this may be seen in the misuse of the word apartheid, meaning the independence and separate development of racially and culturally widely differing peoples - a matter closely related to the freedom of their individuals. But since in South Africa this name for a good policy was applied to measures of forced segregation, the whole idea of separate development has been denounced as evil and used to deny independence to peoples who have demanded it, such as Zulus and some Afrikaners. So instead of forced segregation we have forced multiracial merging with an electorate which will outvote them - another perversion of democracy. Promote the Good rather than Denounce the Evil Our task, therefore, when confronted with social evil, is to clarify the situation, to identify the good reality which is being perverted, and to promote that. In doing so we shall, of course, expose the precise nature of the corruption which has twisted the reality, which is a lot more effective than merely, denouncing it. It is better to love life than merely to hate abortion', to uphold the normal Christian family than to concentrate on deploring its breakdown, to enjoy and insist on wholesome entertainment than to 'act only in protest at violence and pornography. In each case the contrast between the reality and its perversion speaks for itself, and the positive stand made hold's up the flood of falsehood. Poverty, for instance, is not, in itself, any sort of evil if freely chosen as by Jesus and his disciples, or by St. Francis and members of religious orders. But the unwilling penury imposed on many in the midst of plenty or even of wasted surpluses, by withholding the monetary means of a living, is a gross denial of reality. The productive capacity of our technological civilisation far exceeds that required to supply any reasonable and wholesome level of consumption for everyone, with decreasing paid employment. This is the reality we need to 'face first, before considering how the accountancy system can be accommodated to it. The absurdity of requiring the dwindling number of employable people, to pay, through taxation, the pensions of the growing number of pensioners, plus the doles and other benefits of the unmoneyed, certainly verges on the insane. A recent article even suggests that people should be encouraged to breed more children, not because babies are thought desirable (on the contrary they are represented as pests, threatening the planet), not because their labour will be needed to supply enough goods and services to keep the poor and the aged, but in order to supply enough taxpayers to tax to allow others monetary access to the available wealth! Individualism and collectivism (or socialism) are two more, linked, distortions of the truth. Though the end of man is unknown, we do know that we are here to grow and develop our selves to our full potential, which is easily perverted into 'selfish' greed or gluttony. These may swell the pride or the body, but they shrink the soul. There is something analogous in us with the seed that must break its coat to germinate.; so must we break out of our personalities before we can attain that service which is perfect freedom. And though salvation is for the individual, not the group, we cannot achieve it without that loving association with our neighbours which brings with it so great a social gain in effectiveness. Even though they may appear sententious, it is necessary nowadays verbally to express these age-long truths because they are so continually distorted in the pseudo-world. But even when not so distorted, they are no more than sentiment until put into practice. Their practical implications, though manifest, are unwelcome in the world of money-power. Let us Live and Work in the Real World The first is that we must live and work, as far as we possibly
can, in the real world and not the artificial world. Despite all the
corruptions of money-power, people cannot survive without the basic
skills and occupations that maintain life and a reasonable degree of
comfort and culture. For these then there must always be a demand,
and satisfaction in fulfilling it. Ambition, therefore, to rise 'above'
the level of useful work into the realms of remote administrative
power must be laid aside, since at this level money rules supreme.
Life more Abundant But apart from these, as technology displaces more and more human labour from the routine production of mass-produced goods, more leisure and energy becomes available for personal production, for quality and craftsmanship, for home and family, for many forms of voluntary work and helping other people, for thought, study, reading, writing, poetry and art and sport, for enjoyment of nature, for gardening and cultivating and exploring, for initiative and invention, for growing in health and in wisdom, for meditation and prayer, for redemption and for worship. With the sins, the infidelities, the perversions, the quarrels and divisions, the failures of the churches and of church people being daily seized upon and multiplied a million-fold by the media, it is easy for us to lose sight of our mighty heritage of two thousand years of the Universal Catholic Church of Christ ever growing throughout the World - not merely as a great mass and number, but as a multiplicity of neighbourhoods. While nowadays we may lock our doors fearfully, with three burglaries in the last ten years in our minds, most people leave their keys with friendly neighbours, taking for granted their honesty and decency as normal. The pseudo-world stresses constantly the misuse of leisure. It fills our minds with crime, vice, drugs, boredom, disease, hopelessness and vandalism. Not enough do we hear of the normal, constructive use and enjoyment of leisure by normal, sane, loving people; including many who draw 'benefits' from the Welfare State. When
we turn our face towards it, and live in the real world of locality,
people and hope, the sheer goodness in people, which is a part of the
great, glorious and joyful world of the Love-Creation, can be seen to
have overwhelming resources, rightly used, to deal with the 'virtual'
world of mass-hypnosis and despair. |
| Published
by the Australian League of Rights, Box 1052. G.P.O. Melbourne 3001. |
