Giving Capitalism a Conscience

Giving Capitalism a Conscience

Dr. Roger Ray

August 28, 2024

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Those of you who became adults in the 1970’s, as I did, may recall this famous book, Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler; actually, by Alvin Toffler and his wife, Adelaide Farrell, but in 1970 women didn’t always get the credit they deserved. 

The premise of the book is that our society was suffering from a kind of psychological shock that came from the world changing too fast. 

 

One is forced to wonder what Toffler and Farrell would have to say about the third decade of the 21^stcentury. News is happening so fast this year that I wonder what journalists will do when they have to start going out and trying to find stories rather than having news raining down on them like a ton of bricks every day? But I want to try to pull the camera lens back a bit today and take a longer look at history rather than being drawn down into the particulars of our current wars, political elections, and the threat and promise offered by technology, especially AI. 

 

My first memories of my family’s evening ritual was to eat a very early dinner so that we could gather around the black and white television in the den to listen to Walter Cronkite telling us what was happening in the world. There were no 24 hour news stations back in those days. Initially there wasn’t even an hour of news. Cronkite had 30 minutes every weekday evening to tell us what had happened that day whether it was the assassination of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, or Martin Luther King, Jr. The moon landing got extended coverage but most days we got a pretty cursory view of things but always including a death toll from the war in Vietnam. 

 

The reason given for that seemingly endless war was to stop the spread of communism. To a certain extent, maybe it was, since China and the United States were using North and South Vietnam to fight a proxy war against one another that was finally settled, oddly enough, by ping pong; which is a story far too long to go into now. 

 

Suffice it to say that for most of our lives, politicians have at least pretended to be engaged in a battle between capitalism and communism or communism’s little sister, socialism. Most of the conversation around these economic systems has been carried on by people who have no idea what they are talking about though that rarely seems to matter to them. When a politician suggests that state universities should be tuition free, someone will always claim that is socialism, or if they are really mad about it, they will call it communism, even though very few people would ever suggest that tuition free kindergarten through high school is a socialist plot. 

 

No one could win a local election if they started calling all school teachers socialists even though they would be fairly accurate if they did so. Our public schools are supported by taxing citizens, whether they have kids in school or not, to pay for our schools which, at its most basic level, makes our school system a socialist system. As is our congress, senate, supreme court, and our president, whose salaries are paid out of the taxes collected from citizens. But then, the largest budget item in any city is the municipal police so our police, our fire fighters, our highway departments, are all socialist, as is our army, navy, air force, and marines. 

 

We tell ourselves that we are a capitalist country but a whole lot of our economy is based in a socialist system, and, in fact, our capitalist society wouldn’t make much profit if the socialist system of roads, police, fire fighters, and the whole matter of federally managed banking and commerce didn’t make their capitalist enterprise possible. 

 

But the misunderstanding really goes farther than that. Regardless of whether your salary is derived from tax dollars, if you are working to support yourself with a salary from an employer, whether that is Walmart or Amazon or Ford Motor Company, you are not a capitalist. You are labor. You are working for a salary which you use to make a house payment, buy groceries, and provide clothing and transportation to your family. Sure, your pension funds may be invested in stocks, but you are not a capitalist. A capitalist is someone who derives their living from the investment of capital. The engineer at Apple who is designing the next iteration of your iPhone is not a capitalist, but Paris Hilton is a capitalist. 

 

The Hilton family isn’t engaged in changing the sheets in hotel rooms or even working at the front desk handing out room keys. They are the owners of great wealth, and they derive a lavish lifestyle from their investment of their capital. 

 

Because the words “communism” and “socialism” have been used like curse words in our political discourse, we have come to accept that capitalism is an assume American value like mom, the flag, and apple pie. Whenever someone starts to criticize Capitalism, they are setting themselves up to be labeled a socialist and by that, to be discarded as being either unAmerican, or unaware, or crazy. 

 

The most famous proponent of more socialist values in the way in which America uses capitalism is the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, who has made two runs at the Democratic nomination for president, the first in 2016, and the second in 2020. He is even older than Joe Biden so I don’t think that we will see him running for office again, but he is still writing best-selling books which is an odd thing for a socialist to be doing, since he is now a multi-millionaire based on his book sales. Capitalism has some funny quirks to it. I just got my annual royalties check for my three books that are still in print, and don’t worry folks, I’m still not a capitalist!

 

But Bernie was sidelined in both of his runs for the Democratic nomination, largely because he was publicly maligned as being crazy. And it wasn’t just Trump calling him “Crazy Bernie,” but leading Democrats said a lot of the same things, including Hillary Clinton claiming that no one likes Bernie and that he was driving her crazy. 

 

I accept that Bernie Sanders is a bit eccentric and there have been a number of odd twists and turns in his career but, for me, Bernie has nothing to do with the good or bad dimensions of the changes to capitalism that he was suggesting. In fact, if we took the issue one by one and put them to a popular vote, I believe that all of them would pass with majority approval. 

 

The issue that seems to get most politicians all twisted up has been his suggestion that we have Medicare, or something like it, for all Americans. Because the whole healthcare industry is such a cash cow for billionaires and a source of political donations for both Republicans and Democrats, both sides of the political fence insisted that his suggestion was unworkable and, in short, crazy. So crazy in fact, as one popular meme has noted, it has only been successfully implemented in 32 of the 33 western democracies in the world. 

 

When Bernie lost the nomination to Biden in 2020, he met with President Biden to discuss the issues that Bernie was trying to campaign on. There were 10 of them and he and Biden agreed on half of them. They agreed that the federal minimum wage should be raised to $15 an hour. They agreed that Medicare should be able to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. They agreed on the need to be more aggressive about combating climate change, and even on lowering the Medicare enrollment age to 60. And finally they agreed that we should stop using private prisons and detention centers that make a profit off of incarcerating Americans.

 

Does any of that sound crazy to you? Again, Biden even agreed on those issues, though it is evident that he will leave office without having accomplished these things but, there is least moral agreement. But what are the five crazy things they couldn’t agree on?

 

Of course, they didn’t agree on a Medicare for all plan, even though most Americans would vote for it in a New York minute. 

They didn’t agree on legalizing marijuana, even though this is happening in state by state votes, even in the darkest of red states. They couldn’t agree on forgiving all student loans, though Biden has certainly tried to take steps in that direction. They couldn’t agree on making state universities tuition free although 24 nations have already done it and the list is growing every year. And among Americans, this would be a wildly popular initiative, maybe even more popular than making marijuana legal!

 

And the final issue where they could not ready agreement was imposing a wealth tax on billionaires. So, I ask you, even in these issues that Biden and the Democratic party couldn’t support, does any of that sound crazy to you? It might hurt the people who make big political donations but, should we be letting people buy our elections and public policies anyway?

 

The profit motive inherent to capitalism can inspire innovation. It can spur people on to hard work, saving, and increasing the total wealth of the world but if it is not governed in a way that keeps redistributing that wealth, the greed that drives capitalism can lead to hoarding of resources. There are lots of ways of trying to describe how this is happening but one simple concrete way that Bernie Sanders likes to explain it is just this simple: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett control as much wealth as the bottom half of this 330 million person country. 

 

The existence of poverty in this wealthy nation would presume that even though we are the most wealthy nation in the history of the world, there still is not enough to lift everyone out of poverty. That, men and women, is simply not true.

The problem is a convoluted tax structure that, year after year, has been designed by the wealthy to serve the interests of the wealthy. This allows them to hoard so much of the nation’s wealth that they literally could not spend it all in a hundred lifetimes. What creates poverty? Not a shortage of resources; poverty is caused by hoarding.

These three familiar billionaires, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, have already designed and built space ships so that they could personally take a ride in space and there are five more with similar plans in the works. I understand that capitalism will create multi-millionaires who will own multiple houses, yachts, and every luxury imaginable but should our tax system even allow someone to become a billionaire? Is there any reason why any one person should be able to hoard so much wealth that they can shoot themselves into space for a brief joyride when many of their employees can’t afford reliable transportation to get them to, just for example, the Amazon warehouse, where they work? 

 

The wealthy can afford tax avoidance schemes like offshore bank accounts, and outrageous tax deductions for things like corporate jets, but the single mom making your coffee at Starbucks doesn’t have an off shore account. There is not a scarcity of money in this country but there is a clear paucity of compassion and logic. This problem has become much worse in the past decade, with even the majority of government spending to get us through the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 ending up enriching billionaires while many Americans lost income or lost their jobs entirely. Those two years of the pandemic saw the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class up to the wealthy than any other time in our history. Why was it even legal to profit off of a pandemic that killed a million Americans?

While we were still engaged in fighting in World War II, in 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed a 2^nd Bill of Rights in his state of the union address. Franklin acknowledged that the Bill of Rights that are the first ten amendments to our constitution, while important, had failed to guarantee freedom to Americans nor to provide for their ability to actually engage in a pursuit of happiness. If you are so poor that you cannot gain access to safe housing, needed medical care, food, and education, then you are not really free.

 

Everyone who has had to endure abusive working conditions out of fear of unemployment knows that they were not really free. Roosevelt said, “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” 

 

Of course, he was not able to implement all of these goals and we have not finished the job in the 80 years since he spoke these words but he insisted that every American has a right to meaningful employment and that such employment should pay enough to provide for safe housing, food, medical care, and recreation.

 

And that farmers specifically should be guaranteed sufficient prices for their crops to provide them with an adequate living. And that every small business should be protected from large monopolies and unfair competition. He also named access to education and protections in old age from illness, hunger, or homelessness.

 

He saw the end of the war was in sight but he was aware that bringing all of those in the service home to a nation that could not assure them of either education or employment begs the question of what we were fighting for in the first place. 

You are not really fighting for freedom if you are going to come home and have to sleep under a bridge. In the years since this 2^nd Bill of Rights was suggested, we have seen Walmart and Amazon gobble up the marketplace and shut down almost all locally owned retail stores. Family farms have been consolidated into corporate operations so that far subsidies that were instituted to save family farms is almost all going to the five major food corporations in America rather than to farmers.

 

Do you know who the largest owner of farmland in America is? It is Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame. Bill Gates is not a farmer, but he owns 269,000 thousand acres of farmland. Why?

 

I’m not suggesting that Gates has any nefarious plans for all of this farmland. I accept his explanation that his intention is simply to make the farms more productive and profitable, which is what rich people do, but it is still driving farmers off of the land and consolidating wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people which, clearly, isn’t sustainable.

 

Capitalism, if we allow it to, will destroy capitalism. In order to sustain a market, you cannot only think about what is best for the next quarterly returns. To have an economy, you have to have consumers who can afford to buy things. Wages have to be sufficient for people to do more than survive. There is more to life than just going to work. If it is possible to end poverty in America then there remains no moral justification for not doing it.

 

That’s just my opinion, it just so happens than I am right.

“Assisting in Our Own Victimization”

“Assisting in Our Own Victimization”    Dr. Roger Ray   August 11, 2024

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One of the oldest pieces of wisdom literature in the world, is a piece of philosophy written in poetry. It is the central portion of the Hebrew Bible’s book of Job. I say the “central portion” because, like a lot of ancient texts, it has gone through a lot of editing over the centuries with very inferior minds trying to force Job to make more sense by giving it a context and a conclusion that just makes the whole thing ridiculous. Ignore the first two chapters about a truly blasphemous wager made between God and Satan and the multiple added endings of the book that offer absurd fixes to the discomfort created by the original work which asks the time-honored question, “Why is there undeserved suffering in the world?” and answers that profound question, forty chapters later, saying, “There is no reason. It just is.” 

 

A lot of religious people try to take the sting out of suffering by insisting that it is God’s will, and God has a plan. I don’t think this is ever very helpful but to those of us of a more panentheist world view, God is not a person who makes plans or has a specific will, nor does God prefer baseball to hockey, or fried chicken over sushi. The universe is God and, in case you have not noticed, the universe is quite capricious. Sure, the universe follows what we call the laws of physics but given the infinite number of variables involved, it turns out to be rather capricious, as we experience it, but we can be reassured that the universe is never malicious.

 

This is important to understand. The universe can seem to be quite random but assigning it intent, like you are being specifically blessed or cursed is a very primitive anthropomorphizing of the universe which is, I am afraid to say, almost certainly not true. The universe has no malice of intent and, sadly, it also has no benevolence. It simply is. Meaning, direction, purpose, those are both human invention and, I insist, human responsibility. We bring structure to the chaos by our intent, our decisions, our plans.

 

The universe is not malicious but people sure can be very malicious. The universe just is, it goes its merry way sometimes dropping undeserved golden apples into the paths of some and spreading disease and heartbreak to others without rhyme or reason. The universe does not seek to bless you or to curse you, that’s all in your interpretation. However, as in most religious trivialities, there is a kernel of truth in the saying that everything happens for a reason, it’s just that it isn’t a divine reason, a lot of suffer comes your way for the simple reason that you have made horrible and irresponsible decisions. 

 

Job’s suffering is portrayed as being the capricious sort. His three friends who come to console him and also correct him, insisting that everything happens for a reason, that God has a plan, that Job had either done something to offend God and God is punishing him, or God has a bigger plan and is teaching Job something, but end the end, Job insists that they are all mistaken. His misfortunes, the loss of his fortune, the death of his family members, his own painful illnesses, were capricious occurrences of nature. Neither divine retribution nor bad conduct on his part, and folks, the plain truth of it is that some suffering is just that way. 

For many years, the longest running show on Broadway was a kind of modern recasting of Job in the person of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. 

Tevye has these brilliant and witty conversations with God. Of course, God remains silent, but Tevye speaks to God about how unfair it is to be a poor Jew at the turn of the century in rural Russia, as the Russian relocation of Jews was beginning. 

 

The play opens with Tevye, forced to pull his ox cart when his horse goes lame, selling milk and cheese to his neighbors. He pauses and says to God, “Isn’t it enough that you give me a life of poverty and bless me with five daughters and no sons, but what do you have against my horse, why must he go lame?”

 

A lot of Tevye’s suffering was just a result of his context. He was born Jewish in a rural part of Russia that would soon be turning against Jewish people. He lived in fairly pre-modern circumstances that left him working very hard but never able to work his way out of poverty. By pure chance, his wife gave birth to only daughters, giving him no sons with whom to share the labor that kept his family alive. 

 

But we see him suffering from his willingness to adhere to traditions that no longer served his generation. Arranged marriages, Jewish conformity to a crushing economic system, and even accepting racial prejudice against one of his daughters marrying a Russian Orthodox man. Most of what broke his heart was his own unquestioning willingness to be victimized by a set of beliefs that unnecessarily made his life hard and, in many ways broke his heart. 

 

I had to watch my parents struggle to very unsuccessfully pretend to accept their eighth grandchild who was my daughter, adopted from South Korea. The idea was as much of an affront to them as some of Tevye’s daughters’ choices in marriage, and like Tevye, they had no real reason to suffer over her brown skin and almond shaped eyes. In fact, they largely missed out on having a relationship with the smartest, most attractive, funniest, and most successful of all of their grandchildren, and I say that objectively. I can back it up with evidence if needed. 

 

Their racial prejudice was a part of their generation, particularly their generation in rural Kentucky, but most of their peers got over that prejudice years ago. They kept theirs by choice and the ones who suffered the most from their choice was just them. Because, folks, sometimes suffering finds us and sometimes we consciously or unconsciously choose it for ourselves when there are much better options right in front of us.

 

If you have never read Man’s Search for Meaning, please stop what you are doing and read it. It Was written by the holocaust survivor and founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankel, who advocated for Americans to balance the Statue of Liberty on our east coast with a Statue of Responsibility on our west coast. Because, he argued, simply being liberated doesn’t equate to a life lived in freedom. This proposed monument you see here is one arm and hand reaching down to grasp another arm and hand, which, I’m glad Frankel didn’t live to see… I think the artist missed the point of this one. 

 

Soren Kierkegaard said something similar a century before Frankel when he quipped, “People clamor for freedom of speech while avoiding freedom of thought.” We are at liberty to say whatever we want, within the confines of the obvious, “don’t shout fire in a crowded theater” sort of limitation. 

Social media in all of its forms allows us to spew unfiltered opinions, conspiracy theories, prejudices, and embarrassing nonsense at will but somehow it doesn’t seem to educate, persuade, or satisfy our need to be free, does it? 

 

I certainly understand that a lot of the social progress we have made in the past generation has come from very intentional decisions to be compassionate about the innocent suffering of other people. People with addictions, mental health struggles, people locked into cycles of poverty, and especially people who have been marginalized by social prejudices about race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. 

 

But we have, I think, often failed to do the hard work of thinking about how we may have participated in the times and ways in which we have felt that we were being victimized. Elenore Roosevelt was, perhaps, giving herself some license to exaggerate when she said that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. . . or, that is at least how she is popularly quoted. One of my counseling professors took her exaggeration and carried it a half mile farther down the field and told his students, “No one can really hurt you unless you help them.” 

 

This is an obvious exaggeration, but I think that Liston Mills used to say things like that in class in order to shock us into deeper self-evaluation. If you choose not to feel inferior when someone is trying to talk down to you, it is surprising how often you can resist being manipulated. When someone is trying to humiliate you, make you angry, insult you, choosing not to reward your tormentor with their desired reaction can short circuit abuse.

 

What Frankel learned in the Nazi death camps was that while they could take your family away from you, they could take your job, your home, your papers, his lifetime of research, they could take even your clothes and shoes, but they could not take away from you how you were going to react to their abuse. Those who gave in and were broken, typically quickly died. Those who resisted, who maintained a sense of their own dignity and worth, despite their circumstances, often were the ones who survived. They couldn’t physically fight back against the Nazis, but they could refuse to accept their view of Jews. 

 

I have often talked with people who felt that they had been terribly abused by their church. One young mother, a nurse, limped into my office one day with bruises on her face and neck, reporting cracked ribs and an injured knee. She was going to have to tell her supervisors at the hospital that she had fallen down a flight of stairs, an explanation she had already used once that year. 

 

She was in a violently abusive marriage, a marriage for which she had broken her vows in a convent, leaving behind her nun’s habit to marry and have children. Her priest told her, scolding her, that this abuse was her cross to bear for having broken her vow to God to be a celibate nun from the age of 18 until she died. As I said in each of our sessions, it was not only her husband that was killing her, it was also the Roman Catholic Church and she needed to leave them both. But she could not leave her husband because she could not imagine leaving her church. 

 

Was she a victim? Yes, she surely was. But, and maybe I shouldn’t say this, but if you ask yourself if she was enabling her victimization, I have to say that she was. That is not to encourage victim blaming. The first criminal in this situation is the violent spouse but close behind him, in my opinion, was the priest who used guilt to trap her in a cycle of violence. I knew this priest well and he was an elderly, poorly educated man who simply didn’t question the religious prejudices he had inherited and which he was passing on; but most of the priests I have known could figure that crap out quickly, he just didn’t choose to. But this nurse also didn’t choose to leave the religion that was so toxic in her life, binding her to a violent man.

 

You can go down the list of ways in which people are not simply victims, but they are literally coconspirators in their abuse. I spoke at a suicide prevention conference a few years ago and in the Q&A it became apparent that many mothers in the room were very concerned about their young adult gay sons who were contemplating, threatening, or who had attempted suicide. As the conversation continued, I learned that some of them had actually taken their sons to gay conversion programs and many still took their sons to churches that condemned them for being gay. 

 

They were literally putting the gun in their son’s hands while, in their own hearts, living in fear that they might kill themselves. As Kierkegaard lamented, they may exercise freedom of speech, but they just don’t embrace freedom of thought. They could escape a toxic religion that might push their sons to suicide, but they have to be willing to think their way out of the snare of the devil they know. They have liberty but not responsibility. They are free to make their own choices in life but they have not taken the responsibility to make better choices. 

Redemption Song is one of the most famous songs recorded by the Jamaican artist, Bob Marley. In it he implores his people who have suffered oppression by colonists, their own government, religion, and a crushing economic system to “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.” It is appropriate for those of us of a spiritual bent to try to understand people who have been unfairly victimized and to show them compassion as well as taking direct action to lessen their suffering. 

 

But Bob Marley is right, none but ourselves can free our minds, and to the extent to which we have been trapped in mental slavery, making us coconspirators in our own abuse, we need to take responsibility for thinking our way out of that. 

 

Strict obedience is not the only way of avoiding religious guilt. Turning our backs on toxic religion is a better way. Working hard, taking on two and three jobs, denying ourselves appropriate rest and reward, is not the only way out of poverty. Sometimes we have to challenge the unfair economic system that creates poverty. 

You don’t have to stay in a toxic marriage, or family, or job, or friendship. Your abusers always try to make you believe that you have no other choice but, believe me, you do. 

 

Your government always tries to convince you that they have your best interests at heart, but even after 40 years of trickle down propaganda, it is increasing clear that the government is peeing on us and trying to tell us it is raining. We don’t have to accept an economy that has been rigged to make the rich richer and to keep the poor in too much desperation to ever organize and change the system. 

 

I will have more to say about that in my sermon that will be posted on August 25^th, 2024. Until then, keep thinking your way out of mental slavery.