I’m always looking for really good explanations that I can share with others, and today I found one: “America’s Weimar Moment: What DoorDash Culture Says about Economic Decline“. Let me encourage you to read this analysis of culture and economics in America.
Here’s why it matters to us: People without the Covenant promises are at the mercy of every wind of sentiment. They are thermometers, reacting to the situation in predictable ways. Periods of economic decline coupled with social decline will drive people to act in ways that don’t make sense unless you understand despair.
The author traces through the history of western feudalism and how it rested on a rise in rent-seeking behavior. The social system becomes rigid as the wealthy classes lock in shared ownership of all productive resources. In the past, that was ownership of land. Today, it’s more abstract — ownership of financial systems. In the West, financial feudalism locks whole populations into stratified classes. There are rent-seekers and rent-payers, separate by a vast gulf that cannot be crossed.
People who are locked into the rent-paying class have no hope, so their actions betray despair. Why save and invest when you will not be allowed to keep anything? The American myth of rising by hard work is dead. Everything is priced on the basis that you cannot avoid debt. You are not allowed to escape debt. If you try, you’ll be punished.
Every time someone finds a market opportunity, the upper class will use government power to shut it down, or at least will allow the uppers to confiscate it. If you develop a talent the uppers can use, they’ll constrict you in ways to ensure you remain under their control. Part of that control includes favoring cultural expressions that herd people into frivolous consumption. Anything that might actually empower people is crushed by market controls.
It’s not as if Covenant promises don’t work, but that the system denies the Covenant exists. You and I should strive to see how the system works and keep portraying the truth. We cannot afford to slip and slide down into cultural habits the deny the Covenant.
Granted, the system will not allow us to exercise thrift, but the lifestyle definition of “thrift” was always bogus and materialistic in the first place. Rather, I’m pointing to the kind of choices that come from confidence in our God to provide for us. We invest in things we know we can use for God’s glory.
We don’t splash money on poke bowls (I don’t like raw fish, anyway). It’s not a question of whether we see a way out of the system. The way out is not getting wrapped up in this world in the first place. The rent-seekers can’t own us, only some measure of our fleshly existence. We are not trapped in their world; this will all be over soon enough.
Meanwhile, our God is in control. It just so happens, as noted in the linked article on RT, the system is growing rigid at precisely the wrong time, when the whole foundation is in doubt. The reason we never see the fictional dystopian nightmares come to reality is because none of those systems can hold very long. Our current notional credit system assumes political structures that are static; no political system has ever been static for very long.
That’s the bait-n-switch the Devil uses to lure masses of humanity into destruction. Every system of human oppression rests on assumptions that are false. The Euro-centric socialist concept of importing third world workers en masse to keep labor costs low assumes Muslims never try to take over. Anyone with half of a brain cell knows Muslims always try to take over. When they do, everything will be rendered down to the third-world hell-holes they fled to reach Europe. Some of the member states know this; the EU will collapse when they pull out to avoid forced immigration. The current elite EU leadership will be lucky to survive another decade.
If anything, Trump and his friends aren’t working even half as quickly as they need on deportations to prevent the US from fracturing. The tariffs target political, not economic threats. The US economy will suffer shocks in the near future as the spiteful rent-seeking class will run out of room and their virtual assets evaporate. While no one knows exactly where the limits are, debt is not unlimited. Finally, because of how our economy rests wholly on consumer purchases, we risk a currency collapse and the loss of the US dollar’s “reserve currency” status for the world — OR — a halt to inflation that crushes the credit availability for consumers. Either way, consumer spending is already plunging on the margins, and that will spread like cancer into the center. The rent-seeking class is determined to crush consumer wages.
But our God provides for His Covenant people.
