christiannonduality.com Blog

In an effort to better contextualize some of Obama’s budget-cut proposals and clearly to caricaturize them as insignificant and politically cynical, a video was posted to YouTube.

Here, take a look at it: Obama Budget Cuts Visualization

The author writes:

How much is the $100 million dollars in budget cuts compared to the federal budget as a whole? This video imagines the budget as $100 in pennies to provide the answer.

Now, allow me to draw a picture, too.

On that table were about 1,750 penny stacks measuring about 35 stacks wide by 50 stacks long.

The $1.6 trillion healthcare estimate (the most conservative estimate, or, in other words, pessimistic & costly) at $160 billion per year would be represented by 400 pennies, or 80 of those 1,750 stacks, or in other words, one row off the end and one row off the side of that table, indiscernibly leaving 34 X 49 stacks of the original 35 X 50.

The $60 trillion in recent worldwide wealth destruction could be well illustrated by wiping ALL of those pennies off of the table onto the floor SIXTEEN times!

… and suddenly the outrage aimed at the possibility of social services spending run amok did not seem as big to me and might better be directed at the reality of a failed laissez-faire approach to financial services regulation run amok!

So, however well-intended all the tea-partying is and however much buyer’s remorse they’re trying to instill in Obama voters, the plain fact of the matter is that they sound like this:

“You’ll regret ever renting this apartment to THAT new tenant, whose dog will chew up all your furniture!” derisively snarled my angry ex-tenant, whom I’d just evicted for burning down the rest of the complex.

Yes, as my ex-tenant, oblivious to his own role in burning the place down, tried to scare me regarding the new & considerable debt we’ll possibly be passing on to our great-grandchildren, as my new tenant’s dog chews up the furniture, I could only stare past him incredulously at the still-glowing embers of the ashes of those children’s formerly substantial but now lost inheritance.

Who’s afraid of an acorn when the sky has already fallen?

Thanks for the video illustration, it IS revealing.

In all honesty, I’m a classical liberal, who embraces a subsidiarity BIAS and believes that, all things being equal & in a perfect world, BIG GOVT should stay out of our BEDrooms,  LIVINGrooms, CLASSrooms, BOARDrooms & WARrooms.

However, enshrining subsidiarity as an ABSOLUTE is a BIG problem. When the only tool one has is a hammer, every problem suspiciously looks like a nail.

The NeoCons are eternal optimists re: what BIG GOVT can accomplish building nations 10,000 miles away in tribalistic cultures overseas and infernal pessimists re: what it could do, if we only had the will, at home here in New Orleans.

The SocialCons / Theocons want to keep BIG GOVT out of our CLASSrooms (and religion in) but then, inconsistently, invite its intrusions into our BEDrooms and  LIVINGrooms.

The PaleoCons want to keep BIG GOVT out of our BOARDrooms but have been generally sympathetic to the NeoCon cabal that has inhabited our WARrooms of late. They’re also the ones most responsible for laissez-faire capitalism run amok.

Enough with the tea parties! Where’s the justifiable outrage at … oh, never mind.

Liberal extremists fare no better in that they want to keep BIG GOVT out of our BEDrooms &  LIVINGrooms but have no problem, whatsoever, with it taking effective control of our corporate BOARDrooms. They have a curious tendency to enter the WARrooms only when their party is in control and to fight wars that are problematical (vis a vis centuries of ethnic strife) and not in our strategic interest.

The Libertarians, however, are THE most ideologically consistent when it comes to applying subsidiarity principles in that they want BIG GOVT out of our lives completely, out of our BEDrooms,  LIVINGrooms, CLASSrooms, BOARDrooms & WARrooms. The problem is that they treat these principles as an absolute, as if BIG GOVT could never have a role in our lives, when, clearly and unambiguously, it often and pervasively does have a most efficacious role, all in the advancement of the common good. See this inventory of BIG GOVT “intrusions” into our lives, tweeted me by Kevin Beck. Furthermore, they confuse license and liberty, the latter which Lord Acton instructs us is the freedom not to do what we merely want but what we simply must.

The only approach truly consistent with my catholicism, then, is that of the Classical Liberal approach, which applies subsidiarity as a bias but not as an absolute. Of course, this approach is nowadays more so characterized by an authentic conservatism, which also resonates with the philosophy of the American pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce, who instructs us to speculate boldly on theoretical matters but to move tentatively on matters of practical and vital concern. This is also consistent with my theological vision of Radical Emergence, which advocates a careful cultivation of our roots, radically, and a tender nurturing of our shoots, emergently.

What it seems we are faced with ON ALL SIDES is dualistic, over against, thinking run amok, where the only virtue seems to lie in picking one side or the other and then clinging to it tenaciously so one can call one’s ideas principled and one can cling to a sick identity structure, defending it at all costs, most especially at a cost to civility. See Tim King’s The End of Civility. Overcoming this type of approach is what Christian Nonduality is all about.

Take this test and see what your theological worldview most resembles.

Note:

At their peak, global stock markets had a market capitalization of approximately $60 trillion. Since then they’ve dropped by half, resulting in $30 trillion of lost wealth. That’s just stocks! The other major source of wealth for people is houses. Taking the US as an example, the latest Case-Shiller readings show that housing prices are down almost 25% from their peak. There are over 100 million homes in the US, and they once had an average price of just over $300,000. Multiplying the three numbers together we get $7.5 trillion of lost wealth in the US from the fall in housing prices. Since the housing bubble was by no means confined to the US (where, it was in fact quite tame compared to other markets), let’s multiply that number by four (the inverse of the US share of global GDP) to get a conservative estimate for the global fall in home values. That, coincidentally, equates to another $30 trillion, for a total of $60 trillion in lost wealth, give or take, just from stocks and houses. This doesn’t even include the losses from other asset classes that have been decimated, such as corporate bonds, commodities, and commercial real estate. Eric Sprott and Sasha Solunac