In yesterday’s DM and the video that accompanied it, we laid out the most recent makes an attempt at democracide, that’s the aware killing of democracy by folks like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (on monitor to turn into the primary trillionaire on this planet).
And we should not pass over their patron, he who occupies the current White Home–presently being dissembled to make room for a grotesque showcase for the richest Individuals to assemble. The identical sort of of us who attended a Halloween celebration at Mar-a-Lago, ostentatious to the hilt on the very time when 42 million Individuals have been about to be disadvantaged of SNAP advantages, i.e. have been going hungry. Now that is a really scary Halloween occasion certainly.
Sure, the richest nation on this planet can not feed its hungriest residents. Nor present well being care to 40 million residents. Can’t? Or chooses to not?
What, of their minds, is to switch democracy?
We noticed how Thiel, the only most influential kingmaker within the present MAGA authorities, is so petrified of the regulation of AI that he calls such a motion to manage it “the antichrist.”
What’s a authorities with out regulation of its richest and strongest residents? It’s certainly not a authorities “of the folks, by the folks, and for the folks” that Abraham Lincoln spoke of. He dreamed, because the founders of this republic dreamed, of a authorities the place the folks reigned. “We the folks,” as our Structure places it.
However a authorities sans regulation shouldn’t be a authorities of “we the folks” however of “we the billionaires (and soon-to-be trillionaire).” With out regulation, authorities turns into out there to the best bidder, and it’s assured to be a authorities of greed, avarice, and corruption. Of, by, and for the grasping? What may presumably go mistaken?
When America was constructing its center class within the Fifties, there was real regulation occurring of essentially the most entitled of its residents. At the moment, there was a better likeness to the salaries of the house owners of wealth and the working class that continued just about as much as 1980. In 1980, among the many Fortune 500, the ratio between CEO pay and the typical employee’s pay was 42 to 1. In 2023, the ratio was 268 to 1.*
The attention of this hole, whether or not aware or unconscious, fueled the anger that received candidate Donald Trump elected each in 2016 and 2024. However now that, as president, he’s by no means fulfilling his guarantees to the decrease courses, fireplace is going on once more within the American physique politic.
Talking of “regulation,” such a bete noire among the many spoiled courses, allow us to take into account what all non secular traditions warning about: The capital sin of Greed or Avarice.
Thomas Aquinas teaches that “the greed for achieve is aware of no restrict and tends to infinity.” He factors out that there are pure needs and artifical needs, however pure needs can’t be infinite as a result of “nature tends to one thing finite and glued. Therefore, an individual by no means needs infinite meat, or infinite drink.”
Artifical want followers a quest for the infinite. “One which needs riches could want to be wealthy less than a sure restrict however to be merely as wealthy as attainable.” Or richer than the subsequent man—or each man.
Aquinas calls greed “the alternative of justice” as a result of it erects such an impediment to like and compassion. This will assist to elucidate why the richest man on this planet, Elon Musk, killed over 600,000 of the poorest folks on this planet—principally kids—when he and Trump dismantled USAID for ravenous Africans this 12 months. Tens of millions of Africans are projected to die subsequent 12 months in consequence.
David Korten warns that regulation is important for survival of the planet as we all know it. “To just accept the truth of bodily limits is to simply accept the necessity to restrict greed and acquisition in favor of financial justice and sufficiency.”
World warming is at difficulty right here—the Earth is finite and may solely soak up a lot of human greed that in flip bets on fossil fuels for short-term achieve.
*Collins, Burned by Billionaires, p. 46.
Banner Picture: Poverty vs. ostentation: the kids within the truck are painfully actual, whereas the mannequin is staged as an opulent objet d’artwork. (L) “Household of ex-sharecroppers from Arkansas, close to Little Rock, on California freeway.” Photograph by Dorothea Lange, 1937, colorized by Ian Betley, 2023. (R) “Ziegfeld Mannequin Risqué.” Twenties photograph by Alfred Cheney Johnston, restored by Nick & Jane. Each on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you see regulation as “the antichrist” like Thiel does? And no regulation as the federal government to switch democracy? Or do you see greed as needing regulation each as a private apply and a societal one?
Associated Readings by Matthew Fox
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Remodeling Evil in Soul & Society, pp. 301f., 304
Trump & The MAGA Motion as Anti-Christ
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Imaginative and prescient of Love and Motion by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, Jen Listug
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Consciousness with Social Justice
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Items for the Peoples of the Earth
Unique Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
“Warriors for Ecological and Financial Justice,” in Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Instances
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Imaginative and prescient For a New Era by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox
