In the Middle Ages, people believed that their lives were affected by “good spirits” and “bad spirits.” With the advent of the Renaissance and then the scientific revolution, people gave up such folly. But was it folly, really? Is our modern way of describing emotions in terms of love and fear really any different than our ancestors’ describing them in terms of good and bad spirits?
There are eternal patterns in history, both personal and collective. Our histories unfold according to a universal rhythm: thesis meets antithesis, creating new synthesis. Everything in life impels its own opposition and the opposing forces then birth something new.
And thus we grow, as truth expresses itself in an ever-unfolding revelation of how life operates. Yes, Renaissance thinking freed the Western mind from the overmystification of the Middle Ages. But no, the scientific revolution was not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Yes, there are objective, discernible laws of the physical universe, but yes, there are also mysterious, unexplainable phenomena that mechanistic thinking cannot grasp. The cutting edges of science now support some ancient spiritual traditions.
Which takes us back to “good spirits” and “bad spirits.” No, we’re not in the Middle Ages anymore, but neither did “bad spirits” go away just because we stopped believing in them. “Bad spirits” are fear-based thought forms, and they are not merely personal. They are collective as well. In fact, because on a spiritual level all minds are joined, all thought forms are on some level collective. As we have discussed before, mere external remedy does not ultimately solve a problem, unless the root thinking that produced the problem is transformed within the mind. As long as anyone still holds a racist thought, slavery still has legs. As long as anyone still feels that one group of people is more entitled than any other, then war will not be over. As long as anyone thinks that someone else’s being empowered disempowers them, then injustice will not disappear from the earth.
For instance, historians now believe that during the Middle Ages, somewhere between 800,000 and 9 million people were burned at the stake, 85 percent of whom were women. While we no longer burn witches, we have still not completely routed out of the Western mind the suspicion that there is something dangerous about female power. On a psychic level, powerful women are still burning. We’ve merely changed the consonant from “w” to “b.”
Fear-based archetypes live beyond time or place, inhabiting the eternal regions of the subconscious mind. Scientific or social or political progress can temporarily render them ineffective, but cannot rout them out. Thoughts of fear merely mutate when chased, taking different forms in different times and places. Reason cannot exorcise what is essentially a spiritual darkness. Fear grows like an uncontrollable fungus on the soulless layers of the modern mind, leaving us with an insatiable appetite for a stew of externals that cannot feed us. Traditional therapy cannot assuage the spiritual malaise of the times in which we live. It is a spiritual, not a psychological disease, that threatens to destroy us. In the words of Carl Jung, “Only spirit can cure spirit.”
Our disease is not that 9 million people on this earth die of hunger and hunger-related illnesses each year, while there is no fundamental dearth of food on the planet; our disease is that we are willing to tolerate it. Our disease is not that millions of American children are living lives of hardship and despair as deep as that of any Third World country, while politicians appear on political talk shows every night and don’t feel the need to mention it; our disease is that they can get away with this. Our disease is not that while the United States is the richest nation in the world, we give away only 1 percent in humanitarian aid to nations less fortunate than we; our disease is that any politician suggesting we be more charitable might risk losing his or her election!
Only a spiritual awakening can heal us. Our national conscience is impacted now, held as in a cave, waiting for resurrection and release. “Bad spirits” are floating around us, old archetypes that appear and reappear throughout human history, mocking and destroying the most evolved human dreams.
Spirits” inhabit bodies. As Lincoln said, it is the “angels of our better natures” that we must choose to allow to direct our lives—and there are the good and the bad, the loving and the fearful, in all of us. That should apply to politics as much as to anything else, because karma works collectively as well as individually. What goes around comes around for a country, too. And while on the material level what we give away we no longer have, on a spiritual level only what we give away do we get to keep. Spiritual Law will always, in time, supersede material law.
And what we attack in others we merely fortify in ourselves. That is because, at the deepest level, we are each other.
So what are we to do when we see “bad spirits” taking shape in our world? How do we react when we see a fear-based politics threatening to destroy us all? How do we react to oppressive systems?
First, we begin with the power of awareness. Agape love is brotherly love, in which we reject the deeds of the oppressor without rejecting the oppressor himself. What you hate, you can’t get rid of. The warden is asbound to the prison as the prisoner.
Second, we must commit not to participate in injustice and oppression—even if it is turned into law, by the way, and even though there is usually some candy thrown our way if we do participate.
Third, we must ask God to remove the thoughts of fear and guilt from our own minds, for we live in a holographic universe and if it’s out there, then it’s in here, and if it’s in here, then it’s out there.
Fourth, it behooves us to pray for the oppressor—whoever he or she is—for as we know, the oppressor is merely showing us to ourselves. All of us have elements of fear as well as love within us, and seeing fear only outside ourselves means we’re failing to do the nonviolent work that alone can heal the world.
WE’VE ALL HEARD the expression “the spirit of democracy.” It’s a cliché, but it’s also a very real thing. It is a force of consciousness, a love of liberty, and an embrace of the notion that there is a brilliant goodness in all of us that deserves to come forth and creates a veritable garden of the world when it does.
And is there a spirit that is “undemocratic”? Yes. It is fear’s response to the very notion of the equality of souls. Love brings up everything unlike itself, and democracy has always called forth that which would destroy it. This is why those who love democracy, who benefit from its gifts, must always be vigilant on its behalf. Antidemocratic efforts take many forms, but they are always marked by injustice perpetrated by one group of people toward another.
In Europe’s ancien régime, the aristocracy was quite aboveboard about who and what it was. Today, one of the most virulent antidemocracy, aristocratic forces does not announce itself as such, or even necessarily see itself that way. It is an economic worldview that now threatens to dominate the peoples of the world, even the so-called free governments of the world.
In 2017, of the top 100 economies in the world thirty-one are nations and sixty-nine are corporations. Today, these corporations are literally more powerful than governments. An ugly behind-the-scenes drama, to which the United States is not immune, is that of free, sovereign nations succumbing to what is in effect the power of a corporate colonialization process. The world’s most powerful economic institutions push treaties by which nations and communities are prohibited from passing laws that would weaken the hold of global capitalism in that country. Nation after nation is going down, lured by the illusion of economic security sold to unsuspecting citizens. We are giving in to a corporate dominance that would culturally homogenize the world, suppress the vast majority of its citizens, and run rampant over our natural resources. International financial institutions carry a mandate backed by the power of the strongest nations in the world, particularly the United States: eliminate all barriers to the free international movement of goods and capital, ensuring the right to such movement even against the will of democratic governments and the people to which they are accountable. This effectively makes a mockery of democracy. Can you imagine a treaty that says to a nation that it cannot pass this or “that law if it makes it harder for a large corporation to make money in that country? What difference does it make who our leaders are, or how much they put the good of their citizens before the good of transnational corporate entities, if those entities have become more powerful than governments?
IN AMERICA TODAY, free-market capitalism cannot legitimately claim that where more money is produced for a corporate entity, life by definition is made better for everyone. If the cost of doing business is ecological distress that threatens the welfare of people and planet, if American workers continue to lose social and economic ground in the unraveling of the social contract between management and labor, if executive compensation packages continue to eat the lion’s share of this country’s profits, if money continues to rule Washington and turn the American government into little more than a handmaiden to corporate donors, then democracy will be sacrificed. Our almost tragic deference to the needs of the free-market capitalist economy goes even against the philosophy of Adam Smith, who proclaimed that the free market cannot exist outside an ethical context. Part of what makes capitalism a reasonable economic system is that it allows people freedom. But with freedom comes responsibility. Capitalism itself is morally neutral, but capitalists should not be. Every free market enterprise should be backed by human beings asking this question: “Does what I am about to do serve only the short-term financial good of economic shareholders or does it serve a long-term social good for other stakeholders as well—employees, community, and environment?
The issue of whether American capitalism is willing to course-correct its radical swerve away from an ethical center is the overriding political question of our day. It is a political and not just an economic question, because in what is today’s system of legalized bribery called American politics, how corporations go is how we go. Ethics will not return to either politics or capitalism until ethics are returned to both.
If we decide that improving the life of the average American is more important than consolidating more power in the hands of a corporate elite, then we had better go back into politics, with all our intelligence and all our heart. For a corporate colonialism is running rampant over this planet. In the absence of campaign finance reform—hopefully with public funding for federal campaigns and at the very least a way to override the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision—both major political parties are beholden to the undue influence of money.
One of the things that has impacted me most over the last few years is how many elected officials, when they hear complaints about the kinds of things I am discussing here, can only say, “I know, I know,” with the same fear and frustration as so many of us feel. It makes you wonder who’s really running the country, when the people holding all that so-called power are feeling as disempowered as the rest of us.
Our hope lies in a massive, nonviolent citizen revolution coming up from the streets, including local as well as national politics, growing in various communities, open to new ideas, calling on all the powers of the soul, pressing forward despite the spin and veritable shadow dance of current corporate influence, not only over so much of what we do but over even what we think.
CORPORATE INTERESTS—NOT THE people of the United States—for all intents and purposes now own America.
Moneyed interests control the political process, routinely pouring so many millions of dollars into so many political campaigns as to have completely corrupted the process. This is not a secret anymore. The health and well-being of corporate structures are placed before the health and well-being of individuals and communities, no matter how many people are trapped in poverty by the process; no matter how much the preferred corporate policies widen the already alarming gap between rich and poor; no matter how much human havoc is wreaked among working people whose livelihoods are threatened by corporate restructuring and downsizing; no matter how many more known carcinogens are poured into our ground, our air, and our food; and no matter how many young people are sent to decrepit schools that cannot even afford textbooks, where teaching becomes by definition more crowd control than education, in communities where real chances for young people making it in the world get smaller and smaller every day.
The top one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; huge and profitable companies lay off thousands of employees for no other reason than to increase their short-term stock prices and their already outrageous executive compensation packages; Congress grants huge subsidies and tax breaks amounting to billions of dollars in corporate welfare—and the life and safety of the average American are increasingly crushed underneath it all. Yet the corporatists have the nerve to say the poor are too “entitled”?
Gargantuan economic concerns, whose financial interests are unabashedly placed ahead of the collective good, pour through the halls of our government like lava. We do not spend billions upon billions of dollars more to support certain industries than to support our children for any other reason than that organized business interests can afford highly paid lobbyists to make it happen, in both legal and illegal ways. The influence of money on the political process is a fast-growing cancer threatening to destroy our democracy. It grows in small ways and big ways, every day of every year.
CORPORATIONS IN AND of themselves are not the problem, but only their undue and at times unethical influence on our political system. We don’t want to turn off the system. There is nothing beautiful about what happens in a society when money stops circulating. Our challenge is not to destroy capitalism but to transform its dominant ethos; not to childishly and blindly demonize the corporation but to make a case for the importance—and ultimate benefit to all—of conscience within it.
The free market has been good to me, and I know a bit about its upside; I celebrate my economic freedom as much as anyone. But there is no amount of money I can make that would protect my child from the explosion of horror that will occur in this country if we do not commit to a serious effort at universal access to the opportunities a free market affords.
As a child I was fed, stimulated culturally, safe in my environment, and cared for medically. I was told I was valuable by the world around me—psychologically as well as materially, I had a reasonable chance of success. And it was not just my parents, or our religious community, that gave me those things. This was a larger culture of which I was a part, believing in me and supporting me in myriad ways both large and small: in short, I was set up to succeed. If you make it into the club in America, there is no other country like it. But our problem today is that not enough people can make it into the club. Millions of American children today are absolutely set up to fail. It’s one thing to say that everyone has to climb the ladder of success by him or herself; it’s another thing entirely to make the bottom rung too high for a child to reach, and then condemn him when he can’t climb from there! That is what is happening to millions of children in America, each and every day.
Children cannot provide their own health care; children cannot be responsible for their own education; children cannot create their own cultural stimulation before someone teaches them how. To provide those things to all of America’s children is our responsibility as a society dedicated to self-governance. What we are doing today, as evidenced by so many undereducated, undercared for, throw-away children, is abdicating our moral responsibility to the development of millions of American lives, and then acting horrified when they turn to dysfunctional behavior. In addition, too often the dysfunction that results from their suffering becomes fodder for the profit-making machinery of the prison-industrial complex.
We need to do more than rally to serve all America’s under-privileged citizens; we need to ask ourselves what is wrong in our society—including our public policies—that there are so many people living in desperate conditions to begin with.
In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson sought to break the financial chokehold that he thought the Bank of the U.S. had over American life. His words make sense today:
It is to be regretted that the rich and the powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist . . . but when the law undertakes to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions . . . exclusive privileges to make the rich richer and the more potent more powerful, the humble members of society . . . have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.
It is time to pause in our career to review our principles, and if possible revive that devoted patriotism and spirit of compromise which distinguished the sages of the Revolution and the fathers of our Union. . . . [W]e can at least take a stand against all new grants of monopolies and exclusive privileges, against any prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many. . . .
We hear many people say today that poverty is a “charity” issue, and that the government should not be involved in charity. According to that line of thinking, it should be the purview of nonprofits, churches, and so on, to support America’s disadvantaged citizens. But as someone who has founded nonprofits, who understands the importance of charity work, and has led a religious congregation, I know very well that charity cannot compensate for lack of social justice. When I look at the advantages of my own child compared to the relative disadvantages of children a few miles away, I don’t just think that I should be involved in charity work. I think that child on the other side of town is being denied his or her rights in a democratic society, and I fear for my own grandchildren, years from now, if I and my fellow citizens don’t stem the tide of growing economic injustice in this country.
Pointing out the economic inequities in our midst is viewed by some as incendiary talk, often labeled as fostering “class warfare.” But in reality, class warfare in this country is what already has been and is being waged against the middle-class and poor among us, and the prevailing system feels it has the upper hand in that war because our prison system is large enough to handle the expressions of rage that inevitably arise among our most disadvantaged citizens.
Hungry kids don’t learn, and hungry adults can’t hold down a job. Moreover, the hungry among us exist. They are not figments of anyone’s imagination. According to the USDA, 42.2 million Americans faced hunger in 2015. According to the NGO Feeding America, 13.1 million of our children and 5.4 million of our seniors live in food-insecure households. What is going on in our psyches that we are conducting our national business as though this elephant in our living room does not exist?
Over the last few decades, economic opportunity has been systematically drawn upwards, and now the smallest portion of our citizens control the majority of our wealth. With economic opportunity moving upward all the time, the middle class becomes crushed: the greatest fear admitted by most Americans today is job insecurity. And how does the collective ego respond to wealth inequality? What does the power elite say to those now crushed from above? That the problem is those right below you—those who are actually being crushed even more!
There is too much needless suffering in our midst, forming a pressure cooker right beneath us. Nothing is more dangerous to social stability than a large population of desperate people, and that is what America has. A myriad of social “dysfunctions emerge from poverty, endangering our entire society. What family can function well with the specter of economic catastrophe always haunting them? And who among us will function well in the future, if we continue to ignore this ignobility in our midst?
“I WAS SITTING having brunch with a friend at a trendy location in Los Angeles. A famous model had just walked by.
It’s not enough to just give money to the poor, Marianne,” said my friend, sipping his mimosa. “The poor are going to have to change their attitudes.”
I asked him who he thought had a better chance at a positive attitude today: the people having brunch in this beautiful restaurant, or people about ten miles away on the other side of town. Bobby Kennedy used to say that until you have spent one full day in the neighborhood of the inner-city poor in our society, you have no right to condemn them or judge them.
The poor is who my grandfather was; was yours? The immigrant is who my grandparents were; were yours? The desperate are who I once was; were you?
New paradigm thinking, relevant to all human endeavors, posits the interconnectedness of all people. The poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” This is not just an economic, social, or emotional truth; it is a spiritual, or ultimate, truth and thus will always be reflected across the board in human affairs.
No one can win at the expense of another and long retain his or her advantage. If we severely oppress people economically, they will act out their desperation in ways that ultimately endanger all of us. Harsher prison sentences and other tightened screws will hardly set us free.
The average American, for obvious reasons, has not recently driven through the streets of our most devastated communities. With their jobless rates three to four times the national average, the millions of residents of America’s urban wastelands are caught in a culture of vicious poverty as deep as that of a Third World country. And many of our rural communities are not faring much better.
When someone in America now says the economy is doing well, we should ask ourselves, “Well for whom?” The inner-city poor in America have lived for decades with social and economic conditions as bad as those endured during the worst days of the Depression. The Depression lasted for ten years maximum, and was considered a national catastrophe. It would have been inconceivable for Americans, or the American government at that time, not to try to alleviate the suffering of those whose lives were wrecked by the Great Depression. President Roosevelt created jobs through the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration. President Eisenhower would later help rebuild the economy of the rural South through the Economic Development Administration, creating jobs by constructing the highway system that still runs through that region. To aggressively seek to rebuild the economy of a devastated segment of America hardly runs counter to our traditions; what runs counter to our traditions is the way that, today, we do not help. Today, we act like giving a tax cut to the rich is the best way to help the poor. With no economic evidence to back up this outrageous claim, those who foster it promote it nevertheless.
Why should there not be a Marshall Plan for America’s inner cities? It has been more than half a century since America had a massive repair of its infrastructure. Our schools, parks, libraries, and highways all need a major overhaul. The whole country would benefit from a massive job-training and job-creation program for America’s citizens who need them. What we lack is the political will to do it.
The pain of millions of Americans now stuck in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness can only result in greater social dysfunction, such as family rupture, drugs, and crime. More prisons and tougher welfare laws will of themselves do nothing but spray gasoline on the already raging fire. Hatred does not end hatred, and fear does not end fear.
A return to economic and social justice requires exertion of our national will. A massive focus on the economic revitalization of our more devastated communities is, while not yet politically popular, morally correct. Some would say, “Well, they can get a job at McDonald’s, if they want it,” but it does not substitute for providing a fair means to move beyond that job for those willing to exert the effort. Jobs such as those at fast-food restaurants used to mainly belong to students working odd jobs, while today they are the backbone—sometimes two or three such jobs at once—for millions of Americans. Meanwhile, politicians get to brag about lower unemployment rates! That’s like Yertle the Turtle saying that all the turtles beneath him had purpose in their lives. Millions of people having to work two to three minimum-wage jobs just to make ends meet is not the sign of a morally, spiritually, or economically healthy society. People need more than jobs; they need the opportunity to get a good job. That is what job training and mass transit provide, and child care makes more possible. Underemployment is a crisis in America for millions of people. Child care is a crisis in America for millions of people. It is very important not to let lower unemployment figures obscure the reality.
A conscience-based politics cares less for political expediency than for moral truth. We should extend our hands to the struggling portions of our nation for no other reason than that it is the right thing to do. Why would we bail out another country, but not our fellow Americans? And why would we not want to help those in trouble, if we ourselves are in our right minds?
Some propaganda, of course, is that such ideas would create a “nanny state,” a culture of dependence rather than aspiration. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The nannying being done now is by the U.S. government, taking such care to make sure that the richest among us are tucked comfortably into bed each night, dreaming of more stock options and a second or third $18 million penthouse. I have never seen more aspiration than I have among those who would love nothing more than to get in the game. Who want to work. Who want to create. Who want to produce. And if they had had a better education, or health insurance, or weren’t burdened by all those college loans, then they would! An economy that works only for the few at the top does not necessarily create happy people; but an economy that seeks to foster happy people by removing the material shackles that bind them would explode with creativity and possibility for all.
As usual, we could do the right thing and watch what happens.
ACCORDING TO THOMAS Jefferson, all Americans were to have universal access to the opportunity to produce modest material abundance. Not every rich person is greedy—not by a long shot—any more than every poor person is kind and noble. Indeed, many of the richest Americans are becoming alarmed at the increasing economic disparities in America, for they do not bode well for any of us. If this boat sinks, we’re all going down. It will do us little good to be wealthy if we have to live in gated communities and in fear for our very lives. That is what will happen in America if the emotional violence already spawned by economic injustice continues to spill over into more widespread and collective expressions of outrage.
After World War I, the European Allies made a terrible mistake. Punishment of the vanquished Germans was cruel and unrelenting. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson passionately argued against the punishing attitude of our European Allies, predicting exactly what occurred: that an economically and socially crushed Germany would be prey to something even more dangerous in the years ahead.
It is generally agreed by historians that if Germany had not been in such a desperate state in the years following World War I, Hitler would not have had such an easy rise to power. That is why we treated Germany and Japan so differently after World War II: we helped rebuild their economies, realizing finally that there is no greater threat to peace and security in the world than a large group of crushed and desperate people.
We have to rethink money and its place in our lives if we are to transform American society. But the solution to economic injustice does not lie in making money bad. Spiritually, there is only one of us here; in the final analysis, there are no separate needs. We do not have to choose between the rich and the poor, but only between a consciousness of abundance and a consciousness of lack.
The primary political issue should not be the distribution of wealth but the creation of wealth. That is why job training, job creation, and education matter so much. The creation of wealth should be validated, not undermined; but it must be validated for all American citizens. It is not a limited amount of wealth, but a limited amount of creative, compassionate thinking that is our problem now. There is not a limited amount of potential prosperity in America, because there is not a limit to human creativity. In the presence of love, integrity, discipline, and the commitment to excellence, limits fade away. We must push back against the notion that conscience has no place in politics, and unapologetically proclaim that, in the long run, a little more love would create a lot more money.
President Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, “The free society that does not take care of its many who are poor will not be able to save its few who are rich.
CHANGE DOES NOT come from the top down, but from the bottom up. Each of us can help transform the financial ethos of the United States.
As individuals, and as a nation, we need to carefully watch our economic choices. They are powerful expressions of our values. Every time a screenwriter says, “No, I won’t write a script in which the woman gets cut up into little pieces and the restaurant full of people gets blown up by a sixteen-year-old blonde bombshell carrying an AK-47, even if you do pay me $500,000,” conscience takes an economic stand. Any time a lawyer says, “I won’t let you buy my services so you can find a way to legally exploit old and feeble people out of their life savings,” conscience takes an economic stand. Any time a business executive says, “I don’t want to spend this meeting only asking ourselves how much money we’re going to make this quarter; let’s also ask how much good we’re going to do for the country and the world,” conscience takes an economic stand. Any time a lumber company executive says, “I don’t care how much money we would get from cutting down those trees—we’ve only got four percent of our virgin forests left in this country as it is, and I don’t want to steal from my grandkids anymore,” conscience takes an economic stand. Any time a Congressman says, “No, I won’t vote to take money away from summer job programs for inner-city youths and then vote for further subsidies for wealthy businesses that don’t need it,” conscience takes an economic stand. And any time we lobby our Congressional representatives against a tax bill that squeezes money from the middle and lower classes to give more money to the rich, conscience takes an economic stand.
A true marriage of conscience and economics will not depress the U.S. economy; it will rebuild it from within, revitalizing it in a way no external economic machinations could do. The greatest unmined source of wealth in America is the potential peace and happiness of millions of now stressed-out Americans. And the greatest unmined source of energy in America is the unmined genius of every undereducated and poorly educated child. When we as a nation return to our natural goodness and common sense, money will flow more easily for all of us. I heard a story once about a man who had some fishes and loaves. He told us to give to the poor. He always took care of the children. And he gave the money-changers a piece of his mind.
Chapter 6 will be emailed to you tomorrow!
Listening to Chapter Five.
Cant find Book Club
Is this still happening???