Chapter 15: Democracy & ChristianityChristian Democrat instincts sound; Societal inversion and Thomas Robertson’s seven great mechanisms of society; The Natural Order with finance as society’s servant; Usury virus and its workings within society; Usury and interest; Jewish moneylender unfairly treated in written histories; The Inverted Order; Misdirection of money and credit in the inverted state; Chester-Bellocs and Distributists; Thomas Jefferson and abolition of legal rights of corporate bodies; G.B.Shaw’s insistence socialists seek to abolish private property not personal possessions; War forces power flow reversal; Dogger Bank for Geordies not Chinese.
Though staffed by men unlikely to comprehend the logic of their position, the Christian Democrats are a Structuralist Party. Modern industrial civilization has evolved into an inverted order. It is a looking glass world turned upside down.The instincts of a Christian Democrat respond to the symptoms they see around them of this societal inversion. Intuitively they have realized that the message from their Christian gospels and the reality of their world cannot be reconciled without structural change. The idea of a Christian society cannot be realized within the assumptions underpinning the modern corporate state.
In the book Human Ecology published in 1947, the retired Heriot-Watt Professor of Biology, Dr. Thomas Robertson set out a model of society that helped him to explain how this societal inversion had taken place and the role of the usury virus in causing it. It is worth our while taking a little time to understand the Robertson model (see The Foundations of Structural Sociology)
Society, argues Dr. Robertson, can be thought of as made up of seven great complex systems of human action. These seven mechanisms can be pictured forming themselves into a hierarchy of dominance. In the natural order of society, power flows through ethics and values from the religious mechanism to the education mechanism and from there to the political mechanism.
It is here in the political mechanism that the needs, the hopes and the aspirations of the many little people making up a society are translated into a language of policies and programmes of action so designed that they emerge in a form suited to the workings of the administration mechanism, which is then charged with the task of seeing that the things that society has decided to do are done the way society meant them to be done.
So far so good.
In a well ordered society, the administration mechanism will then work through the sanctions mechanism distributed throughout society in the form of rewards, taboos, laws, customs, manners and the like to influence the day to day work that is carried out by the many little people with the help of energy slaves, intelligent tools or whatever else they need for their particular task, in the industrial mechanism.
At the bottom of the heap, as a service to the calls of the industrial mechanism is the financial mechanism, releasing money, making available credit and regulating the rewards of money, property and wealth according to the needs that society has for goods and services.
This is The Natural Order.
The usury virus, by introducing the notion that time is money into society, works to invert this natural order by subtly shifting the balance of action away from the eternal verities of beauty, justice, kinship and the summum bonum (the good life).
The end result is to degrade work from vocation and toil into jobs and labour, while placing a price on a man’s life.
Gradually there arises a class of men whose business in life is to make money, not in the good sense of creating new wealth by the use of their minds and making available a good or a service which has value in the eyes of their fellow men, but in the bad sense of devising tricks to force their fellow men in society to give back two when they were given one.
This is far from being the whole story because usury works in many a mysterious way when it becomes detached from some broader purpose such as might be provided by the taking of some speculative risk or the participation in some wealth producing discovery or the financing of the first cycle of some new good requested by society (for only the first cycle needs the moneylender as Henry Ford figured out quite early on in his practical education).
Francis Bacon pointed out the effects of usury in placing everything in the usurer’s box because only he incurs no risk. And before Francis Bacon’s essay on usury the schoolmen of the Middle Ages in the complexities of their multitude of canon laws were always most careful to distinguish the bad thing usury; from the right and proper thing interest, the reimbursement for some loss or other so that the lender was no worse off at the end than if he had not lent.
Even the Jews vilified throughout european history as moneylenders and usurers recognize the social evil of usury, contrary to popular myth, and have no place for it within their own communities and amongst their own people.
Usury was for the Goy and with the hindsight of history was probably not usury at all but interest, such was the debasement of currency and the expropriation of Jewish wealth by force of arms.
It is also sad to see how rarely the sanctity of the written contract so central to Jewish thought is rightly treated by historians as a source of wealth creation by the stability and confidence it creates in the industrial mechanism. The arguments of Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice are not to be dismissed lightly.
Not all money lending is usurious. Nor is all usury of a monetary nature. But the introduction of the idea of money into a society and the establishment of a debt-credit mechanism for the issuing of it will inevitably lead to the inversion of society.
No longer will society function like a healthy organism as it does in the natural order, but will be at war with itself, each of the seven mechanisms being compelled to work against its own intrinsic nature.
In The Inverted State, the power flow in society is reversed. explains Dr. Robertson. The financial mechanism releases credit for nuclear power plants and channel tunnels and through the structure of the currency system distributes money to corporate bodies; such as governments and limited liability companies.
Credit is unavailable for the elimination of scarcity; for products needed by those without money to pay for them; and for providing services which cannot be sensibly marketed as a commodity with a price.
The arts and the world of sport which should be organized and financed by those who participate in them and those who obtain so much joy from them are instead compelled to scramble at the table of the rich corporation because only they are issued with the money and can see a return for their investment.
How much better it would be, as G.K.Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and the Distributists argued, to issue money instead to people and let them determine if there were some public service for which some common organization was required.
How much better it would be to abolish the right of corporate bodies to be treated in law as legal entities, as Thomas Jefferson argued, instead letting people speculate in their own merchant adventures, be taxed (if any such should be needed) in their own right, and own (if they do not wish it to be thrown into the common stock) their own wealth.
Personal possessions and common wealth were the basis of the just society. Private property, argued G.B.Shaw, not personal property was what Socialism was intent on abolishing.
When the financial mechanism no longer provides society with the financial services that its industrial mechanism requires to carry out the tasks the society wants it to do, then the answer for R.H.Tawney is not to cut back the demands and throttle the supply but to throw out the financial system and replace it with a better one.
That after all is exactly what happens when a country’s survival is threatened. Putting a country on a war footing means overriding the financial mechanism and placing orders for goods and services with the industrial mechanism directly. It is the deliberate reversal of the power flow between the industrial and the financial mechanisms from that of the inverted state to that of the natural state.
That after all is exactly what will happen when The People’s Army opens fire on the five million citizens of Hong Kong for subversive counter-revolutionary tendencies. The Dogger Bank will be leased for ninety nine years to the people of New Hong Kong.
But why can this not be done for the people of Newcastle and Sunderland right now? Why can the industrial mechanism deliver on the opportunity in times of crisis what it is refused permission to deliver in times of calm?