The Lies of Luxury

Joy is inside you. If you don’t find peace and love within, you won’t find it at all.
Luxury is a lie. It has nothing to do with the actual amount, and there is no real standard at all. It’s all perception. So no matter how much we have, we will always want more. It’s not possible to fulfill the luxury demands of the world. There are systemic limits on production. The only real progress has been in terms of moving information, not actually doing much. (Are we not back to the Tower of Babel?) Sure, we can produce more stuff with less, but as soon as a certain minimum threshold of production is crossed, a certain satiety of demand sets in and the product must be made cheaper in order to move it. Thus, mass production guarantees you’ll end up with less because what you have is junk. If they don’t make it cheap and wear out quickly, you won’t come back for more. Then you have to work in the disposal factor, because recycling seldom works out as imagined.
The only people thinking in the broad aggregate are the predators. The people who understand all this best are the folks who would rob you at gunpoint if it wasn’t so much trouble. They devise schemes to take your wealth systemically. The current global recession-depression was planned, foisted upon us by people who knew it was coming. The majority in any such scheme will never have any idea where things are headed; they’ll believe the lies they are taught because they have no external point of reference. They don’t see beyond their own immediate world. So most of the frantic gaming of the lending system, developing derivatives (fancy mathematical calculus) which justified skimming the accounts, was carried out by folks who actually believed it was honest business, even if not popular. The bottom fringes of these useful idiots have already begun losing their jobs and the whole thing will continue to unravel, as does the entire system. And we as consumers with a bottomless demand are participants in this lie.
It’s based on the fiction of credit necessity. The whole thing was sold to mankind on the assumption you can work to build a fortune by borrowing and investing and making more stuff to sell. More is not better. You can most certainly grow a bigger and better economy without credit, but it would be slower and less destabilizing. There would be few sudden profits and precious little room for predators to operate.
How many verses would I have to quote here to underscore this: God says credit is evil. When under a covenant of laws you make a loan to your neighbor in need, you don’t expect to profit. You expect to maintain social stability, and willingly take a loss because people are more important than stuff. You tolerate a certain amount of cadging and begging because you realize that’s how it goes in this world. That sort of “loan” is not credit, strictly speaking. It is in my best interest to expend resources on my neighbors. The moral fabric of the universe absorbs the loss and repays me in ways I can’t calculate. The give and take of social stability and kindness is what life is about; it’s the whole purpose. It goes to the core reason for staying around on this plane of existence.
There is not a single war in human history which did not arise from greed and hatred. None. Somebody wasn’t willing to let their neighbor be. They weren’t willing to take what could be offered peacefully. While it may require a bit of complex analysis to satisfy some, it’s easy to prove America has been greedy and abusive when she should have minded her own business. It’s not how most Americans operate, but we allowed people to lie to us about it. That we allowed psychopaths to gain control of our governmental leverage is our own fault. We kept passing the buck on the painful necessity of giving to our neighbors and restraining our own misbehaving children. We’d rather watch the Olympics than think about what a massive evil we perpetrate on people who threaten us not at all, or not enough to justify the vast waste of productivity.
It takes a return to the ancient ways of contemplation and otherworldly consideration to become wise enough to realize we have exported bloodshed we should have absorbed here at home. Except, it doesn’t work that way, as we have killed more of our own in war than would have died if we had simply absorbed the thrusts of greed and hatred from others. There is only so much you can do before you are going too far, and God is not pleased. The foundation of sin is arguing with God about what He said is good and just in this life.
We have demanded far too much, and soon we shall lose what little we have. Again, we got here because we refused to accept God’s revelation on His terms. We have demanded things on our terms, and then allowed those terms to keep drifting farther and farther afield. We have moved so very far away from whatever blessings He offered, wrath is all we can have.
It’s too late for America, but not too late for Americans. Turn, turn within and seek His face, seek His justice. Whatever it is you really must have in this world starts within. If you are empty, nothing in this world can fill the void.