We Are Driving the Financial Insanity…
admin October 11th, 2008
… And The Results May Be Good For Us!
“What we are witnessing may be the greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen…” – Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post, 9/18/08.
The Financial Crisis: We Dunnit!
There have been a lot of fingers pointed at “The Masters of the Universe” on Wall Street as the greedy people who caused all this pain. But who is it that is really greedy? I believe it’s all of us!
Oh no, not me! – Oh yes, me!
When we don’t live simply, based on the values Jesus taught us to live by, we get in trouble both practically and spiritually. We are tempted to think some other ‘greedy person’ caused the trouble, but the fact is, they couldn’t have done it without our complicity and full support. We caused our own trouble!
We’re all human of course. We all wish for a better life. But too many of us have come to believe that security and happiness are to be found mostly in our wealth and possessions. (Funny how, during the past 15 years or so in stock brokerage ads, the term ‘wealth’ has replaced less grandiose terms like ‘savings’ or ‘investments’).
How we support and abet the Masters of the Universe
I believe that we all do two things that support and abet Wall Street which makes us equally responsible for the economic implosion:
1. Most of us are out there buying stuff every day – much of it that we don’t really need, but we lust after it anyway (it’s so nice and shiny… and look what it can do!). Economists tell us that consumerism (and consumer debt) are what drive our economy, however it is our gross over-consumption that is the key factor driving the frenzy in the stock market, and finally its collapse. It’s a consumerism that is eclipsed by no other society on earth. Most of us have come to feel that we are either owed or deserve unlimited consumption of virtually anything our little heart’s desire, so we shop with abandon. Thank God for Visa and debt!
2. The majority of us have retirement plans, 401K’s, stocks, or mutual funds (except for those at the bottom of the economic ladder who have little money, no savings, and no retirement plan). I, like most other people, have hoped that my investments would not only grow, but grow a lot, and fast! How else are we going to put an addition onto the house and rehab the kitchen and add a home theater… and what better way than to tap into a little of that unearned income! Not too much to expect, right? It’s just part of the American dream. So grow, grow, grow!
I also hope for rapid stock appreciation because I want a nice retirement. Again, not too much to expect! But where we have gone wrong, in my opinion, is that we’re now expecting far more from our retirement than was ever expected before, and we tend to believe we are entitled to it. We want our retirement to be at least as luxurious (compared to retirees a generation ago) as our working lives have been, or better. We want to be ableto afford trips, cruises, and a variety of other perks the folks on Madison Avenue have made us believe we ‘deserve’. Retirement has become a very expensive proposition. So please go, Wall Street, go!
Without these two major drivers of the economy the Masters of the Universe can’t make a nickel! We give them all the money they need, but they’d like more… if you wouldn’t mind trying just a little harder.
So we are driving the insanity – we can’t just blame it on greedy stock brokers.
What amazes me is that even when I talk with ‘faithful’ church members who understand social inequity, poverty, sustainability issues, pollution, etc., I hear these words: “I deserve some nice things. Life is hard and I want to be able to buy a SUV, or bigger house, or plasma HDTV if I want to.” These are people who should know better – they’ve heard, and can recite, the Gospel message.
Somehow many of us haven’t been able to integrate the message into our behavior.
“I deserve it” – it’s the new American liturgy.
Oops! Time For My Twelve Step Meeting
In fact we are all addicts – some of us are in recovery, but others of us are still in denial. We have become addicted to consumerism – to having more and more stuff, and as a result our lives have become unmanageable… and now our entire economy as well. We desperately need to come clean.
For those of us in recovery, the recession is yet another opportunity to “take our moral inventory,” revisit our recovery plan, and talk about it with others. In doing this we may well identify ways in which we can live still more simply and a little more like Christ intended – which would be a very good thing!
As a society we’ve sold our souls (literally… to the Chinese and Walmart) to have ‘the good life’, so I suppose we now know exactly what our souls are worth!
We’ve wanted to be rich, but because most of us really aren’t rich, we’ve had to settle for the fantasy of being rich, i.e. the self-deception of debt. So a significant number of us are now deeply in debt and running out of cash along with the investment banks and the government.
Self-deception is what happens when we lose sight of our primary values: we lose control over ourselves and our behavior. Jesus told us what those values should be, but as Christians we seem to have left His humanitarian and economic teaching behind in the dust.
A Good Thing? Are You Crazy??
As painful as this recession may be, and it certainly is for me and many people I know, it may actually help save us from ourselves, practically as well as philosophically and theologically.
The recession is a practical, albeit harsh, reminder that we are all often unaware of our own greedy, self-interested, and short-sighted behavior and what it can do to us. So we need to once again take our own moral inventory, and this time, a little more honestly.