Still, perhaps, nothing offers an argument for theism better than wealth. Like the concept of god, wealth is something we can believe in and feel its impact - its influence in our lives - but what is it?
What makes some people richer than others? The simple answer is some have more money than others. They can buy more than others, but what is money? Is it really tangible, apart from the manufactured symbolism of its currency? Who decides the value of money? The answer to that is equally simple - people decide the value of money. But from there the simplicity stops.
Metaphorically speaking, economics is the theology of wealth. Like theistic religion, the religion of wealth evolved over the millennia. Like theism, the dawn of wealth proceeded from need of the other. As with theism the need of the other led to difference, which I have broadly identified as the differentiating paradigm of religion, which effects every human enterprise. What we identified as mutual needs led to identifying tools to meet those needs and soon enough we started assigning value to our needs and the tools necessary to meet them. This ultimately led to barter and trade.
As is true with all religion, the religion of wealth is about power - the appeal, generation, and use of power. As the value of goods and services exceeded the ability to barter effectively, currency was developed as a feasible means to assign value, first as weight and then symbolically as coinage and printed paper money. Today the use of coins and printed money is becoming a thing of the past, as value is now being assigned digitally. I am usually without cash in my wallet and rely heavily on my plastic credit cards. Check writing is quickly going the way of tangible currency as we pay bills in timely fashion electronically.
The religion of wealth has seemingly made more advances than theism with regard to human interconnectedness. Everybody's economic well-being is connected to the economic well-being of others in every corner of the globe. There is a truer, more observable sense of the religious impulse found in the religion of wealth As such, wealth is also connected to the differentiating paradigm of religion. The religion of wealth is, as I will attempt to explain, an essential player in defining and bringing about religious singularity.
The concept of wealth is, like the concept of god, rather ambiguous. For example, a person who is monetarily wealthy, may feel deprived, lacking, and impoverished at some level; whereas a person who has very little money has an appreciation of personal worth that imbues that individual with a sense of wealth. Ultimately, wealth is a measure of the things one values. That is all good and said on a personal level, but what about a global level? For the purpose of this post, wealth will be viewed as a means to preserve individual dignity, happiness, and worth.
SELF INTEREST AND WEALTH
Like reality, wealth is largely a consensus of perception. The value of money and it's currencies are in a constant state of flux, depending on the equally ambiguous concept of the market. The religion of wealth has a mystical side, just as theistic religions do. The market, itself, is a rather mystical entity that measures the value of things bought and traded, including the value of the currency by which things are sold and paid for.
The prophet of modern day capitalism, Adam Smith, in his discussion of the wealth of nations described a force related to wealth which he identified as the invisible hand. His concept of the invisible hand was based on a phenomena he observed; that those who acted from self interest in the accumulation of wealth often resulted in an unanticipated outcome that benefited society as a whole. What Adam Smith observed is what I have been describing as the religious impulse inherent in any pursuit addressing a need that appears as self interest, but which, in essence and of necessity, is related to the needs of others.
The principal at play here is that even in cases where one is working under the presumption of self interest, that interest ultimately, if based on a true sense of self, cannot be an isolated interest. Ironically, a true sense of self can only be perceived against the backdrop of an other or, in this case, the interest of the other.
Here I must differentiate self interest from a selfish interest. In other words, what is beneficial to one's true sense of self, is likely to benefit the interests of others. A selfish interest is not a true self interest. As I have explained in another post, selfishness is not one's true self.
There is, as Smith described, an invisible force in the religion of wealth, that produces unpredictable economic results (either good or bad) depending on whether the action of the individual or the ubiquitous market acts from a true self interest or from a selfish interest. Here I must associate the concept of the ubiquitous markets with the concept of self; as in the market acting as a self interested entity.
Let me further tie self interest to the impulse of religion, the concept that we need each other. For example, one of the basic teachings of Jesus is that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. The problem we encounter in making a connection between Jesus's teaching and the unintentional benefit self interest has on society is in Jesus's use of the word love, a word that connotes emotional subjectivity - a word rarely applied, in a positive sense, to the concept of monetary wealth or its acquisition.
Jesus's use of this word, however, has to be understood somewhat objectively. If I were to paraphrase Jesus's teaching in strict economic terms, it might sound something like this, "What benefits others, economically, is directly related to the actions I take in my own economic self interest, " or "What ultimately benefits my economic self interest is, when acting from my own interest,there results a benefit to the economic interests of others." Ultimately, one cannot separate one's own valid interests from the valid interests of others.
A universal teaching found in theistic religion that has application to one's self interest is the Golden Rule, doing unto others as you would have them do to you. The premise of the Golden Rule is based on self interest as the primary factor in producing actions that benefit the greater social good.
While we may not like to admit it, we are bound to each other by the concept of wealth. For example, as the monetary market narrows (becomes more interconnected, more singularized), the more global its impact. This is not to say we perceive wealth in the same way, but rather that the concept of wealth is universal. Ultimately, wealth is the measure of things valued and the things we value are becoming more global or in the terminology of singularity, more narrow.
Adam Smith's invisible hand is, in my opinion, a metaphorical realization of the unseen interconnectedness that exists between the interest of self and the interest of others; that what one sees as a need or what one values is fundamentally based on shared needs and shared sense of value. If not, the question would be whether one has a need that no one else has or one values something no one else values, would it truly be a need, truly a value, or would it be some type of obsession or mental illness?
POVERTY
If I am going to talk about the religion of wealth, what about poverty? After all, the vast majority of people in the world are bound together by poverty.
Is poverty a religion?
No
Here I must offer another observation about religion as a whole. I am compelled at this point to say explicitly what is implicit in all my discussions on religion. Religion is about the choices we make, about the ideologies and ideals we clump around. As such, poverty is not a religion, as true poverty is not a choice. It is a condition into which people are born or thrust.
I can sense the questions, what about those who choose to live in poverty, what about monasticism or those solitary yogis who live their lives as beggars?
Poverty might be a religious choice proceeding from a religious ideology, but I would maintain that such a choice is not true poverty, since poverty as a choice can be viewed as a luxury.
Consider for a moment monasteries. Many of them acquire vast sums of monetary wealth. It seems to me that it is relatively easy to take a vow of poverty when one doesn't have to worry about money or where one's next meal comes from. This is not true poverty. Poverty in this sense is a luxury proceeding from a detachment to personal wealth and a personal responsibility to in providing communal wealth.
This is not meant to be disparaging comment about monasticism, as many monastics address the issues raised by true poverty. To choose solidarity with the truly poor of this world is a noble cause when such solidarity is done from a sincere desire to raise the truly poor from their poverty.
True poverty, however, is a distortion of religion. Poverty is simply a fact that religions of every type confront in one form or another, whether it is theism, the religion of politics, or the religion of wealth. Poverty exists as an antithesis to the religious impulse.
Like peace, many consider the eradication of poverty as unrealistic dream; that at some level poverty must exist for there to be wealth - that there will always be those considered poor. As Jesus is famously quoted in John 12: 8, "The poor you always have with you." After all, isn't poverty, like wealth, a relative term?
Is it?
Ask the billions who face starvation every day, those who are deprived of medical care, who lack clothing, or those who sleep without a roof over there head. All religions find poverty abhorrent, especially the religion of wealth.
In religious terms what plays a role in the reality of poverty is the differentiating paradigm of religion, which fosters an "us and them" perspective to everything we humans do. In actuality, theism has done little to erase the plague of poverty that has affected humankind throughout its history. In my opinion, what has addressed poverty more efficiently and effectively is the religion of wealth.
As Adam Smith predicted, an unintended result of the pursuit of wealth as self interest has been the rise of a middle-class, as labor based production at the dawn of the first technological era we call the Industrial Age created a consumer driven supply and demand economy that resulted in the flow of wealth we call capitalism.
Poverty was no longer a given class in which people had no choice but to be born into and from which they could not escape by their own power. With the dawn of the Industrial Age, the individual could theoretically do something about rising from poverty through one's initiative, through one's labor, which had an identified monetary value increasingly determined by a commercial market as opposed to the whims of one's employer. Mass production resulted in mass consumption and money was no longer the reserve of the noble classes or landed aristocracy as the need for and the value of labor rose created a monetary flow as remuneration for labor which, in turn, created a broader consumer market.
As money began to pool in increasing quantities; banks and business owners found that money could generate wealth in the form of investments to enhance production and consumption and increase personal profit. Investment in the labor of others resulted in laborless middle class known as the bourgeoisie, who lived on the profits earned from their capital investments. Wealth begat wealth, or as the saying goes, "The rich get richer, while the poor get poorer." This resulted in an imbalance in the acquisition of wealth. The laborers salaries became stagnant as the supply of labor increased and the need to maintain a profit for the investors became a paramount concern for industry owners.
As labor became cheapened to enhance profitability, there arose a labor movement to correct this maladjustment and gave rise to labor unions and the philosophy of Karl Marx to counter the impoverishment of the laborer by his or her employer. "Workers of the world unite" was Marx's economic theology known as Communism. Marx was an astute observer of the conditions of workers, particularly in capitalistic England. He also observed that poverty was too much accepted as the status quo by Christian churches and commented that religion is the "opiate of the people;" that it sidestepped addressing the suffering present in this world by promising a better hereafter in the next.
COMMUNISM
The problem that Communism faced, unlike Capitalism, was that it relinquished the role of self-interest as being beneficial. In my opinion, this was its Achille's heel. Ultimately, one's self interest was subordinated to the self of the state, and the human individual became increasingly valueless as the needs of the proletariat, outweighed the needs of the one. In this sense, Communism is and was purely anti-religious.
It's economic theology is flawed in its passion to make all things equal, by eliminating the differentiating paradigm of religion. The fact is, communism was and is not sustainable. Wealth as a religion disappeared along with theism in communist countries. Poverty became the status quo of the proletariat as the state became omnipotent, a religion to itself. Ultimately, communism collapsed under its own oppressive weight and the lack of individual worth necessary to support any functioning society.
At any rate, Communism was doomed to failure because the fate of human labor is doomed to become a thing of the past. In this regard, Capitalism is also facing a fast approaching economic shift that will effect the religion of wealth.
THE TRANSCENDENCE OF WEALTH
We are on the doorstep of another technological age, the age of Artificial Intelligence, which I prefer to call Augmented Intelligence. Intelligence, whatever its source, is simply that, intelligence. As technology advances and we are faced with the likelihood of manual labor being replaced by intelligent robotic systems in the not too distant future, the economics of wealth will face an enormous paradigm shift. As the cost of labor will become increasingly negligible and the conditions for human employment become increasingly specialized, large numbers of people could find themselves without gainful employment.
Capitalism, the predominant economic driver in the world market today is based on both human productivity and human consumption. Goods and services that are by produced by human labor is bought with money earned by the humans who produced such goods and services. What happens when humans are no longer needed to provided the bulk of goods or services, as is quickly becoming the case? What happens to wealth when the need for humans to produce goods and services diminish - when the need for an other is no longer a functional necessity?
Stephen Hawking and Sam Harris are among a host of scientists and economists who are warning of dangers Artificial Intelligence poses to humanity. There is no small amount of irony in the current political atmosphere here in the United State's presidential election with talk on all sides of the political spectrum about bringing jobs back to the United States. The likelihood is that industry will inevitably return to our shores, but jobs may not. In this regard I find our economic politics very short-sighted, if not short-minded.
As I write this post, there are computers being developed that can think on their own, learn on their own, and adjust skills as needed. In essence they will do everything our intelligent minds can do, only much faster and more efficiently.
Consider the likely scenario we face globally in the near future. Corporate and private industry will likely opt to employ intelligent automation that can out perform their human counterparts, be more reliable, without the need for a payroll or providing work befits like insurance. Production will become more efficient, but the question becomes what will happen to consumption? Who will purchase such goods as wealth pools and the vast majority are faced with a dwindling financial resource?
Capitalism is largely dependent on the flow of wealth, in terms of a monetary flow. When money begins to pool, is possessed by a wealthy few, economies slow as consumption slows and debt for the vast majority grows. What has emerged over the past several decades is a whole new monetary industry based on credit. Credit has kept capitalism alive and has kept a middle-class viable but it is largely a patch job. The fact is value has exceeded the ability of most to afford consumption without a reliance on credit - borrowing money and paying as one can afford with an accruing interest rate.
The problem with credit is that it has allowed people to live beyond their means and in the long run has contributed to a decline in the middle-class. Consumption was at one time based on the production of necessities by a human labor force, but innovative technology is not only changing the concept of labor, but also the commodities consumers need in a ever changing technological world.
AUGMENTED INTELLIGENCE
In my opinion, this is not a hopeless situation, but rather one that calls for transitional preparation. There are many ethical issues related to Augmented Intelligence. It is not only possible to make intelligent automation and machines, but we can also augment human intelligence via digitalized and Nano-technologies to increase our knowledge and problem solving abilities. Many scientist and economist fear that this could result in the end of the human race as we know it today, that we will morph into incarnated technological creatures of our own making. Some see it as the ultimate course of human evolution, the merger with mankind with mankind's creation, a new form of technological incarnation, if you will, which is the singularity of such innovators and thinkers as Ray Kurzweil. Others see this as a human disaster waiting to happen.
This will a be good topic for another post down the road, but for now I wish to consider the implications of Augmented Intelligence on the religion of wealth. As the need for factory laborers decreases, for example, what will happen in areas where such labor was the mainstay of their economic stability? As productivity becomes increasingly based on technological sustainability, what happens to the consumption driven market when earned money is in short supply?
We are already seeing the effects of people being laid off of jobs in both in the manufacturing industries and fuel industries. The dependence on commercial labor is waning and it is one of the reasons, in my opinion, why wealth is pooling at the top. The short term fix is touted as bringing jobs back to our shores, but the reality, I fear, is that technology is making human labor increasingly obsolete.
This looming crisis has given rise to what some economists are throwing around the water cooler as Universal Basic Income (UBI) - social security for all. Personally, I'm not sure what to make of UBI. The premise of UBI is to keep money flowing at a basic level which seems to be an attempt at keeping capitalism alive, but it also strikes me as putting traditional capitalism on a life support system. And we all know what life support systems mean, the original system is about to die.
SOCIAL CAPITALISM
On the other hand, UBI has the potential of creating an augmented form of capitalism, what I would call social-capitalism. Social-capitalism, in my mind, attempts to do two things that are very consistent with principles of this nation and most democratically orientated nations are founded on - preserving the common good and preserving the dignity of the individual.
People in the United States fear anything that smacks of socialism because we have been so indoctrinated against the concept. We are victims of a stringent work ethic instilled in us by our Protestant founding fathers who thumped the biblical notion into our heads, that those who do not work, should not eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10). As physical work was abundant then, it was easy to say this, but we live in a world where physical labor is diminishing.
We are entering into a world, (provided we don't blow ourselves up first) in which we can augment our physical bodies, address physical disability, cure what was incurable in the past through technologies never thought of when the Bible was written or when our founding fathers reached these shores.
Self interest must be preserved as a necessary component in facilitating both innovation and social benefit. True socialism cannot negate the individual, but rather must treat the individual as an integral component in fostering social benefit and contributing to the common good. Individual dignity, happiness, and worth is foundational to any well functioning society.
Social-capitalism augments Adam's Smith unintentional result of self interest as social benefit by intentionally relating self interest to social benefit. In this sense each individual has an intrinsic value, the sum of which is the measure, not of a nation's gross national product but as a measure of societal health.
Social-capitalism recognizes the need for social stability as a vital component in promoting innovation and free enterprise. The driver of social stability is individual self interest (dignity, happiness, and value) that generates innovation and free enterprise. The driver of individual self interest is to engage in innovation and social productivity by tapping into the flow of wealth ensured by social stability.
What creates social stability, economically, comes in the form of an augmentable UBI for every working age individual. Augmentable UBI must be viewed as a right with no strings attached and can be used by the individual as the individual chooses and does not limit or prevent the individual from earning other wages or income from investments. Social stability is also sustained by a right to health care, parenting rights, a right to free education and affordable housing.
Money as we know it today would become intangible and wealth more transcendent - as the value of goods and services will exceed any tangible measure. Interest free credits, as opposed to tangible currency, will be the means of conveying value and earned wages. Taxation will not be based on earned credits, but rather on spent credits. For every credit spent there would be usage fee attached to it, a standard percentage that would be sent to centralized credit administration.
To offset costs, credits are earned by simply being productive. For example, basic housing would be funded by a central credit administration, that would purchase materials at a cost through a centralized credit system. Any human labor associated with building would come in the form of earned credit, however, it is likely that most building will be done by intelligent technological labor. If a wealthy individual wanted to build a mansion, he or she could do so. While a percentage of the credits spent on the project would be collected, the cost of any human productivity associated with it would receive a percentage of that credit from the credit administration and the owner could receive credit for building and maintaining housing and upkeep. In other words there would be an incentive to be independent of administrative housing.
Credit usage would have a ceiling, a point at which an individual would have to bank earned credit that exceeded the ceiling and would only be allowed access to such banked credit if the individual's useable credit decreased below a certain level below the ceiling. Only then would the individual be able to access a percentage of his or her banked credit which could not exceed the credit usage ceiling. In other words, wealth could not be pooled as it does today by a few, because such wealth would be pooled socially at a certain level, which then would be doled out as needed. No one really would own wealth in a tangible way that today's money markets encourage. Self interest would be ultimately tied to social benefit in way that is totally opposite of how we view wealth today while preserving the motivating force of self-interest to be innovative and productive. This of course would require a well planned and well managed credit system that allows for a limited degree of uncertainty (flux) to keep self interest interesting,
The fact that I'm not an economist is abundantly clear by now to any reading this post. I'm almost positive that others have thought of the same scenario and could describe it much better than I have. In fact, while I was looking at this and wondering what people would make of such fantasizing on my part, I recalled that Jesus, some two thousand years ago, suggested a similar system in one of his parables, the parable about the hired laborers, which is found in Matthew 20. So allow me to sidetrack for a moment to take a look at it.
A PARABLE
When Jesus told his audience the parable of the hired laborers he was not thinking about wealth or economics. He was talking about the generous equity of God. Yet, it seems to fit well with what I have written in this post. So permit me some license to play with this parable and treat it as parable about social capitalism.
Putting a twist on the metaphors used in the original story, the vineyard represents the goods or commodities that benefit society. It symbolizes social benefit. The owner, the person hiring the labors is the credit administration, whose function is to facilitate the production of goods and services by ensuring the flow of credit by which goods and services are affordable and purchased.
The interesting thing in the original parable that relates to my extreme paraphrase is the owner, the administrator credits each worker with a days wage no matter at what time the individual enters the work force or is at the age of productivity. All are paid the same basic income by which to afford the goods being produced.
Jesus's parable foreshadows the concept of Universal Basic Income and it addresses the inevitable argument against it:
Those who have been working longer feel they should be paid more because they worked more and complain that those entering workforce and have worked less receive the same daily credit.
In my paraphrase, this argument is somewhat muted as insured basic income allows the individual the freedom to do more to increase personal wealth, if desired, by innovative entrepreneurship or service that benefits society. Such a system would not eliminate all the ills associated with monetary wealth and the pure unfettered, self correcting view of Adam Smith's capitalism, but it would curb it. Poverty and a sense of social class would likely exist due to the differentiating paradigm of religion that is omnipresent in every human endeavor, but I would suspect it to be greatly mitigated and modified.
As the concept of human labor and work, of human productivity, will change in an age dependent on intelligent technology to produce the vast bulk of goods and services, the concept of wealth must also change or abject human poverty will increase on a massive scale. Monetary wealth, in my opinion, has been narrowing over several decades as nations are slowly trending towards a more social benefits model of wealth to ensures the flow of wealth while preserving the entrepreneurial spirit of self interest by connecting personal wealth to social benefit.
The United States has lagged in this endeavor largely because it is monetarily very wealthy and clings to the notion of using money to make more money. Increasingly individual self interest is subordinated to corporate self interest and the money market tends to foster selfish interest by market manipulatives who are more focused on acquiring personal wealth through the use of other people's money and equating such manipulation as being productive when in reality it is nothing more than a selfish enterprise that benefits no one other than the manipulative because it does not generate wealth as social benefit as a means to preserve self interest, innovation, and a free market.
Concern about AI is valid from an economic perspective. While the benefit of AI will undoubtedly increase production and eventually lower cost, it could create an economic crisis that is already upon us. This is not an appeal to stop AI from being developed. For one thing, I doubt that it could be stopped, but rather to begin paving the way for a new social paradigm that protects individual worth, happiness, and self interest. Augmented intelligence will likely become an incarnated reality as human life and functioning will be enhanced by such technologies.
As such, religion as a whole, will experience a theological shift as well. In my opinion, it will and must move towards religious singularity.
Until next time,stay faithful.
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