America, the new Amaurot: Utpoia awaits us
First posted July 3rd, 2010
By William J. Murray, Chairman, Religious Freedom Coalition
A short time before the passage of what is now known as Obama Care, I was one of a few people at a private lunch with Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN), one of the premiere conservatives in the House. She is pro-life and pro-family, as well as fiscally conservative. She has a firm understanding of how the current entitlement culture is destroying not only the financial foundations, but the social foundations of our nation. During the lunch Congresswoman Bachmann asked me what might seem an odd question to some, unless they knew that I had myself been raised in an atheistic, Marxist home in the 1960’s. She wanted to know why liberals can maintain such an attitude of superiority even when their concepts have been proven wrong so often and have led to such disasters.
I responded to Michele that the liberal mind functions according to “magic thought” which allows them to believe that their very opinions prove they have “evolved” further than other humans. Ultimately, I told her,
they believe they are so intellectually superior that they have the ability to create a utopian existence for all humanity. I gave her as proof, the fact that liberals often refer to those who disagree with them as “Neanderthals.” They actually believe their minds are further advanced. And they sell their ideas with great success to the young, the poor and the uneducated, who are promised they can be part of an intellectually and morally superior movement while also feeling entitled to be taken care of.
My conversation with Michele Bachmann on the subject ended there, but it made me think about where the concept of utopian society comes from. Utopian ideas go back at least as far as Plato’s Republic in which Socrates described a form of government called “timocracy” in which politically disinterested, honorable, wise men would govern society justly. Unlike modern utopians, Socrates understood fallen human nature. He said timocracy, even if attainable, leads inevitably to a state of oligarchy, which is eventually overthrown by a democracy. Lastly, in the democratic state the people themselves become drunk with their own power and entitlements, and society ultimately collapses into a tyranny.
WHERE WE ARE TODAY
Currently our government borrows $1.2 million every minute to finance itself. Most of that $1.2 million a minute is spent on entitlements the people of our “democracy” have demanded at the voting booth. The entitlements include funds for millions of people receiving free medical treatment through Medicaid and other programs; funds for schools and universities including everything from free lunches to transportation; funds for the “arts;” welfare payments including food stamps and subsidized housing; and, of course corporate welfare that includes bailouts. The gold plated retirement payouts for government employees add trillions to the future debt of the nation. Social Security and Medicare have a $32 trillion unfunded mandate, bills that come due in the future, for which the only possible source of funding is additional borrowing. Under the Obama-Pelosi regime this has been expanded to assisting with everything from mortgage payments to waiving the payments for student loans. The people have become “drunk” with their entitlements, and to buy votes the political class is willing to offer even more. If every billionaire in the world had all their assets taken from them, the sum would not pay for one year of the entitlements the American people have voted for themselves.
UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHY
The liberal mind would make a wonderful land in which to live. It is a place where times of imagined perfection from history are placed in a perfect order to form a utopia that far exceeds that of the city of Amaurot in Thomas More’s Of a republic’s best state and of the new island of Utopia. Although a devout Catholic who probably wrote a satire about a perfect society as a means of criticizing Protestant thought at the time, Thomas More accidentally produced the model for utopians from Karl Marx to Al Gore.
Utopians pick certain moments in history and imagine them as ideal situations that can somehow be recreated in the present to form a perfect society. World peace will ensue they say, and Muslims will embrace both Judaism and Christianity if the border of Israel is reset to its exact 1948 position. And should the United States destroy all its nuclear arms and return to its pre-World War II status, no other nation in the world will ever again pursue nuclear weapons. The proper world temperature was reached sometime in the late 1800’s, according to Al Gore, and any variant from that is caused by the evil actions of mankind. The perfect population of the planet is just a few million, according to the environmentalists, and the ideal for all nations would be villages of just a few thousand people each, much like in Sir Thomas Malory’s Camelot of feudal times.
The belief that a perfect, static environment can be realized is a hallmark of liberalism. Like all the utopians before them, President Barack Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi envision a government that can provide all the basic needs of the people including housing, food and medical care. All those in need should be supplied their needs by government. This is “social justice” just as conjured up in More’s fantasy island of the 16th century.
In Thomas More’s utopian society a central warehouse held all the staples necessary to life, and each person withdrew only what was required. Oddly, no one took more than he needed. The philosophers and educators, of course, could have the better stocks. Only the hilosophers could make the rules and run the perfect society. No one had a kitchen; all ate in harmony in communal dining halls. Everyone worked just six hour a day. Travel was restricted by internal passport to make sure that there were no population shifts because the society had to remain static at 6,000 per town to remain utopian.
Sound familiar? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” was the phrase made popular by utopian philosopher and political writer, Karl Marx.
The fantasy persists today with the liberals who gave us Obama Care: Need medical care? Don’t worry, you can take from the medical warehouse according to your need and those who have the ability will pay for it. Your children need an education? No problem, take according to your need from government and those who have the ability will be taxed. Didn’t provide for your retirement? No problem, take only what you need and those who have ability and can still work will be taxed to supply your need. Can’t find a job you like? Take from the warehouse according to your need and those with ability will provide for you through the benevolence of government. Want to enjoy the natural beauty of the planet? Hold off on that; only the educated environmentalists can travel to the “protected areas.” And don’t drive that SUV because it could change the perfect temperature of the planet from what it is “supposed” to be. Forget that single family home if you are just one of the masses; an apartment will do less damage to the utopian environment.
There is a reason Thomas More coined the term Utopia; it comes from the Greek meaning “no place.” The main river in his fantasy island was called “Anydrus” meaning “no water.” The narrator in the novel was named Hythlodaeus meaning “dispenser of nonsense.”
Utopia may have been a fantasy for Thomas More, but it is a very real place for Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi; it is a place they believe they can create through their superior intellects right here on Earth. They join other utopians who believed, honestly, that they could create a perfect society. They include the anarchist leaders of the bloody French Revolution, as well as Napoleon Bonaparte, Kaiser Bismarck, Karl Marx, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and Chairman Mao. All believed that using their superior intellect they could manipulate mankind to produce a static and perfect society in which all would be provided for.
Each attempt at creating a utopian society has resulted in nations awash in human blood. In the case of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao, millions were murdered to supply the needs of others. In every case of an attempt at creating a utopian society one group of individuals had their wealth taken from them and distributed to others. Most often those managing the redistribution of wealth lived like story book kings and queens, much like Nancy Pelosi or Al Gore with their mansions, private jets, high dollar liqueur cabinets and fine organic foods. In Thomas More’s Utopia this was true as well; the intellectuals, who never actually worked a day in their lives, ruled with “wisdom” and took from the best stores of the warehouse.
Every attempt to manage human productivity and consumption, including central bank manipulations in so called “free market” nations, has ended in disaster. Communities and nations reach their pinnacle when the people are the least burdened and the least governed. Utopian society is as impossible today as it was when Thomas More conjured up “no place” yet there are still those today that seek the fantasy as reality. Unfortunately, those seekers of utopian fantasy are currently governing the United States.
THE FUTURE
Currently about one-third of the money our government borrows comes from foreign sources. The biggest sovereign holders of our debt are the governments of China and Japan; most of the rest of the debt is held by the despotic royal families that rule the Middle East. China uses its vast wealth in US dollars to buy natural resources all over the world. China has purchased the ports at both ends of the Panama Canal and its state run oil companies have bought the rights to drill for oil within just 60 miles of our border. Beside Caribbean oil reserves, China recently bought the offshore oil rights in Angola and other African nations.
If China were to “dump” the holdings it has in US government issued bonds and fail to buy more, our nation would go into a financial tailspin. It is not just families and businesses in the United States that are hooked on debt; the nation itself cannot pay its bills, not even its payroll, without borrowing. Keep in mind the figure given above: The United States government borrows $1.2 million dollars a minute to pay its bills. Therefore, for our government to survive there has to be a willingness of others to loan our government $1.2 million a minute.
In March of 2010 bonds issued in the two to five year range by the United States received a “weak” reception. The US government was forced to offer a higher interest rate than expected to sell the bonds. Former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan said it was a “canary in the mine” warning and that, “I’m very much concerned about the fiscal situation …” which he said was caused by “…this huge overhang of federal debt which we have never seen before.”
THE CONNECTION TO RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
By now you may be asking yourself why the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition would be so concerned and spend so much time writing about national financial concerns and the utopian dream world of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. In reality the debt of the United States, caused for the most part by utopian thought, is directly affecting the liberties of hundreds of millions of people. Because the United States is a “debtor nation” it cannot tell those it borrows from to allow liberty. When China cracks down on religious liberties our government says nothing. Our government takes no action to help the repressed Christian minorities in the Middle East. Indeed the United States, wanting to appease rich Middle East royalty, gives immigration preference to the Muslims who repress freedom while turning its diplomatic back on persecuted Christians.
The United States has such a huge debt that it has just about destroyed our international influence altogether. We can’t wag our finger in the face of anyone, not even Mexico. Indeed, about the only nation left in the world we can threaten is our small ally which is the only democracy in the Middle East –and that is Israel.
President Barack Obama walked out of a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March to have dinner privately. The PM and his aides were directed out of the Oval Office to the Roosevelt Room, which is rather small, to wait and confer. The Israeli delegation, fearing that their conversations were being recorded, said little of importance to each other while waiting for Obama to dine. After Obama finished dinner he summoned Netanyahu back to the Oval Office and further insulted him by refusing to have their pictures taken together. Obama has no problem doing cuddly smiling photos with murderous Saudi royalty who trample the rights of their citizens or with Chinese communists. The reason is rooted in the Word of God and I have expressed this before:
Proverbs 22: 7 says clearly:
The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender. (KJV)
Sadly, the United States is no longer a rich nation. Real wealth is created by mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. We have virtually no manufacturing base remaining and the environmentalist mindset of those in power will not allow us to mine our most important resources including oil. What little manufacturing we have is for the most part assembly work. Clothing in our stores is made in nations such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and Pakistan where Christians are repressed and murdered. Most imports into the United States come from nations that repress freedom such as Vietnam and China. Because we are a debtor nation, there is not much we can say or do as we watch repression and murder. We are the borrowers, and as such we are the servants of the lenders.
WE MUST STAND
We cannot count on our government to help a single repressed minority in the world and certainly we cannot expect a government led by Barack Obama to help repressed Christians. We must work on our own to help ourselves and our brothers and sisters in Christ throughout the world.
UTOPIAN SOCIETY WILL FAIL
Here are some core philosophical arguments on why the current trend in the United States to create a government centered utopian society will fail.
Both Barack Obama and I were both raised in Marxists homes. Both of us had mothers with questionable morals who believed in the Marxist utopian dream in which human nature could be altered and all selfishness abolished, resulting in equal materialistic benefits for all. While Barack Obama attended private schools and Ivy League universities free of charge because of his racial and political background, I went into a life of private enterprise and discovered that the harder I worked the more I earned. While Barack Obama learned to live off of tax money, I learned to live off my own labor and I turned away from my Marxist upbringing. Barack Obama did not. He is still at his core a utopian dreamer, someone who believes government can provide for all the needs of the people by managing their lives and their labor.
There is not much room in a utopian society for free speech, particularly religious free speech that is Christ centered. The conflict is between Judeo-Christian beliefs which center on God, and utopian thought which centers on government. Christianity promises that God will fulfill the needs of the faithful for eternity, whereas the Marxist utopians promise to fulfill all material human needs now. Freedom of religion and Marxist utopianism are not reconcilable.
Those who labor and suffer for Christ cannot wear the yoke of government and accept Caesar as equal to Christ.
Our brothers and sisters in Christ are being repressed, tortured and murdered in Muslim nations such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iraq and elsewhere. Their churches are bombed, their homes burned and their daughters stolen. The United States and Western Europe do nothing to stop the carnage because of their debt. The entitlements that support the West are paid for by money borrowed from those who persecute Christians.
As Christians we have Christ to rely upon, not government. We must do what we can to help each other. Right now the Religious Freedom Coalition is working to replace the water system at Camp Gilead in Jordan. It is a small step, but we will furnish clean water to the Christian kids at camp this summer in the Muslim nation of Jordan. Perhaps next year we can do more. But, we cannot wait for our government to assist the persecuted Christians in the Middle East. Our government will not step forward to help because as a nation we are too far indebted to those same Muslim nations that persecute believers.
I leave for the Middle East to inspect our projects and deliver further aid in just about two months. Please pray for the success of the mission and please pray about what you may be able to do to help Christians in Muslim nations.
Editor’s note: William J. Murray is the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition (www.rfcnet.org ) 601 Pennsylvania Ave, NW #900 , Washington, DC 20004 * (202) 543-0300). Blog located at www.MurrayontheHill.com .
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