MAY 5 2018
ACCULTURATION (1)
The word ACCULTURATION speaks for itself, well, perhaps not quite. It’s not a word we employ every day. You recognize the ‘culture’ in it, which has ‘cultus’ as root, meaning ”worship”, so it has something to do with our religious way of life, the manner in which we live and the habits we take for granted.
What I try to explore this week and next, is whether our lifestyle conforms to biblical givens and for this I use some examples, both from contemporary scenes as well as from an episode found in Revelation, the last Bible book, in which Jesus sends a special letter to a church in Asia Minor, the present day in Turkey.
I read the word ACCULTURATION first in my ‘MAN’S RISE TO CIVILIZATION. There it is defined as “the change produced in one culture by the encounter with another”. The author uses the example of the first Europeans landing in America and meeting head on with the reigning lifestyle of the natives there.
Our First Nation sisters and brothers gave us a host of their foods, such as maize, potatoes, pumpkin, squash, avocadoes, chocolate and several kinds of beans, all sorts of medicine, such as quinine, but there the change stopped. We did not adopt their way of life. One look at the First Nation Reserves in Canada and the Indian Territories in the USA is clear evidence that not the original native, creation-friendly way of life prevailed, but the European, with disastrous results for both the indigenous crowd and the WHITE people.
The curious fact is that whites, when first encountering the native way of life, actually preferred the “Indian” way. When thirty cases of captive Whites were analyzed by an anthropologist, he found that they refused to be ransomed, preferring the native way of life of sharing and hospitality which was lacking in their own culture. The native sharing was all-embracive, included the natural treasures, such as the animals and the plants, which all were seen as an integral part of their existence. Where the invaders, the Europeans settlers saw trees as something to be exploited, saw the soil only as a medium to cultivate, the people they encountered in The New World had a totally different philosophy of life, treasuring the unity of their humanity with the environment.
We know only too well that the European way of exploitation prevailed and, by and large, the acculturation, the cultural transfer favored the invaders.
So where are we today?
Where in the “Indian- First Nation” culture, life was fully integrated with the environment, today everywhere the opposite is true, the dominating factor being MONEY, fiat money, money created out of nothing.
THE DEBT SITUATION.
The Global Debt situation, currently at the peak of $237 Trillion, means that every person on the globe owes $31,000, the poor peasants in Africa and India and the rich folk in North America, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Europe. However, based on the immense difference between poor and rich, we, wealthy Westerners, on an average, are on the hook for more than $300,000 per head, or more than $1 million per family.
How did this debt situation come about?
If the financial institutions had not been able to turn debts into assets – mortgages and bonds – and sell these to investors, then debt creation could not have gone to such extremes and consumers would not have been able to borrow and spend themselves into a looming financial ruin.
If western consumers had not been able to borrow themselves so far into looming ruin, they would also not have been able to buy so many goods from Asia and other developing nations for a time. Asia and developing nations would not then have been able to mint so many new millionaires and billionaires in their governments and businesses who then funneled capital into western property markets, and western property markets would not have appreciated so far beyond domestic income gains.
If property prices had not increased so far beyond income gains, then households would not have had to borrow so much just to get a roof over their heads or obtain a post-secondary education.
If property owners had not been able to borrow so much, property prices, education and related services would never have been able to rise so much for so long, and become so unaffordable for the masses.
So, here we are: dug into a hole out of which there’s no escape.
William Butler Yeats (1854-1939) warned us in his poem The Second Coming that the world is upside down and that “the center cannot hold“:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…
Butler Yeats lived through World War I, saw the rise of Hitler and experienced The Great Depression.
Today we are on the verge of something worse. Here’s why.
The old need the young to drive productivity and innovation, pay taxes and support the social safety net. They also need the young to buy their assets (real estate, securities, businesses) when they wish to downsize and raise liquidity. If the young are broke: under-employed, over-indebted and under-saved, they cannot get a footing and the social contract becomes undone. That scenario threatens today.
Twenty years of central bank and government-enabled debt-driven asset bubbles, have broken long-standing laws of financial and social equilibrium. A total repricing cycle is necessary to break these inflated prices and return to “normal”.
Is return to normal still possible? When I took out my first and only mortgage in 1962, the ‘normal’ rate was 6 percent. SIX PERCENT today would kill everything.
For centuries cities have lured the young and ambitious in search of jobs and security. Now only the smart, brainy well- educated couples in finance and law can find a home there. Only they, earning is excess of $125,000, can assume the immense debt or afford the high rent of living in the city. Most other young people either flee or shun the increasingly unaffordable property prices.
Only a culture of debt has made city living possible. A culture of Debt always degenerates into a culture of Death.
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” is a famous phrase said by Polonius in Act-I, Scene-III of William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. In it the character Polonius counsels his son Laertes before he embarks on his visit to Paris. He says, “For loan oft loses both itself and friend.”
ACCULTURATION further explained.
We live in a money culture, a culture financed by debt. It reminds me of Hitler Germany.
Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and in an amazing six short years he managed to build up a tremendous war machine, which, once it was set in motion, in the space of another 6 years conquered all of Europe except Great Britain.
On May 10 1940 the city I lived in, Groningen, fell, and after a 5 day struggle, the Netherlands too came under German occupation.
It used to be that in peacetime money is created when people buy homes and take out a mortgage or corporations build factories by issuing bonds, with the banks or bond byers providing the money. With the low money rates today – now as low as 3% – house prices almost everywhere in the world shot up, because the lower the rates, the more people can afford to buy property.
In wartime, money is created by government order for another purpose. Then the opposite happens: rather than financing positive developments, such as single family dwellings or office towers and museums or art galleries, that money is used in a negative way with fields littered with craters, with people killed and wounded, with roads destroyed and buildings demolished and children and their parents fleeing, often demoralized and depressed.
Today this difference is no longer true.
Now even in non-war times we experience war time conditions, because we are in a perpetual war against creation, where we exhaust water sources, where we deplete soil, where we pollute the air, where we change the weather for the worse.
As the universal war against creation worsens and becomes more violent, the planetary liabilities increase as deserts spread, seas rise, potable water disappears, lives are destroyed and infrastructure disappears: the inevitable result is inflation, money becoming less valuable. Wars always lead to stagflation, inflation combined with depression.
All this comes from creating money out of nothing, which fed our addiction to the money culture.
That’s how Hitler financed his 6 year war from 1939 to 1945: he just printed money. At his death, the Germans possessed 70 billion Reichsmarks in worthless banknotes and 380 billion in obligations of a regime which no longer existed. All of Germany had been converted into money and was totally destroyed, reduced to ZERO.
The JUBILEE effect.
In 1947-48 the allied occupation powers, the USA and Great Britain canceled all German debts, which was easy because most of the debts were owed to people who had been Nazis. Freeing Germany from debt was the root of its economic miracle.
Actually the Bible advocates such a move: every 50 years God had ordained that in the year of Jubilee all debts must be cancelled, giving all a chance to start a new life unencumbered by debts.
Today this is not possible because the debt is too huge: it would bankrupt all financial institutions and all governments.
Here’s what will happen.
Today our Age of Money is plunging the world into the most perilous instability. There are more than Seven Billion people in the world, increasingly huddled in cities that survive only by virtue of money. But money is to us as the potato was to the Irish people in the 1840’s: when money fails in its function – and with $237 Trillion of debt out there this is bound to happen – the cities of this earth, London, Amsterdam, Paris, New York, Washington, Hong Kong, Beijing, will starve. Every city has a little Ireland in it, as Marx foresaw.
Money, far from being the harmless arena of human pride and joy, is the great destroyer. Because money is eminent desire, there’s no satisfaction in the external world unless it is conveyed in money.
Columbus landed into a money-less society, built on perpetuity. He then sucked out a thousand years of gold from the Caribbean in two or three years and extinguished all its human life. They were killed not by the musket, but by the more lethal invention, money.
Jesus, when he died on the cross, saw before his eyes not only the cosmos he had created, not only the people who had clamored for his death – and he prayed for them then and there – but he also saw with great clarity the thirty pieces of silver which had been the catalyst for the betrayal. He also pictured in living color, and in extreme detail the destruction caused by the human race, and the creational devastation, the result of the pursuit of money.
In our Western world everything is about money: the stock market, the strength of the dollar, the price of gold: three items mentioned in almost every newscast.
The word ACCULTURATION speaks for itself. It has the word ‘culture’ in it, which has ‘cultus’ as root, meaning ”worship”, so it has something to do with our religious way of life, the manner in which we live and the habits we take for granted.
The ‘cultus’ of today is MONEY. Let’s not kid ourselves: Mammon is God, the Dollar is King in the world and its possession a holy grail. We now put a price tag on everything. First on Jesus – 30 pieces of silver – and now also on the rest of creation: the woods are paved, the mountains mined, the seas eaten, species eliminated: all because of money. More than half of all wild animals have disappeared in the last 40 years because of money.
We all participate in that criminal act. Jesus was sold for the price of a slave. Today we are selling God’s creation to serve us as slaves, 24/7.
More next week. .
(Some of these thoughts I found in “FROZEN DESIRE, an inquiry into the meaning of money” by James Buchan.)