SatNav for the soul®

In response to a comment on this post I thought I had better explain, in greater detail, my concerns about St. Paul’s Cathedral and its admissions policy.

Anton, your criticism is acknowledged and understood however, it is far too simplistic. My main criticism of the organised church is precisely that it is a business.

Imagine, for example, Mother Teresa working all day in the Calcutta slums and then going home to a palatial mansion with an Olympic sized swimming pool in the basement which has a magnificent mosaic of Christ on the cross at the bottom of it. At what point does Mother Teresa think to herself, “The cognitive dissonance is too much; surely all this wealth is better spent servicing the poor?”. Maybe she thinks to open the mansion to the public and charge an entrance fee. That way she can justify the extravagance of the mansion; the money will go towards her work with the poor. But the maintenance takes more and more of the money and her time and eventually she is forced to concede that she has simply become a real estate business maintaining its assets and nothing at all to do with the religion she was supposed to represent – the poor still go without.

She may even have a couple of servants working in the mansion. Her thinking is that she is providing a useful service, nay, a Christian service by helping these people out of poverty by giving them a job. But by that criterion, any business – banks included – are providing a Christian service by helping people out of poverty.

If you go to the fountain head of any religion the core message is to do good, to help the poor, to be of service to a higher calling, not become a sovereign state with fabulous wealth.

Or take the young man working at the till in the cathedral.

If he is simply an employee of the church, a hired, unbelieving hand, then he is simply part of a business like a bank or an accountant’s (you could argue that all businesses are charitable in that they ultimately help the poor). If he is a believer, a servant of the church however, at what point does he say to himself, “How is this doing good? How am I helping the poor? This money is going towards maintaining bricks and mortar, not life, and it is given by people who have no interest in the works of my church, only in its architecture”.

Equally, at what point does the head of the church admit that he is an administrator in a capitalist business with a profit and loss account and not a servant of God helping the less fortunate?

The cathedrals were built when the church was booming due to the rich trying to buy their way into heaven and so had money to spare. If all its remaining money is now being spent on bad assets, what is left to service the poor?

You quite rightly explain that during a normal church service a donation is asked for. But this is a voluntary donation and presumably if you have nothing to give you will not be turfed out by the choir boys. A flat fee is a regressive tax on the poor.

The time has come for the church, one of the biggest land owners in the country, to hand over expensive assets like St. Paul’s Cathedral to the National Trust and concentrate on what it is supposed to do, help the less fortunate.

Imagine an advert for a charity. It is shown on television and asks for donations. You donate a sum of money but wonder how much of it is going to the television company (a purely capitalist business) and how much is actually going to the poor (or whatever the charity claims to help?)

If the church is going to admit that it is simply a commercial business it might as well have gaming machines in the cathedral with bars selling alcohol and a desk where loans from the church can be arranged at competitive interest rates. If however, it insists it is true to the teachings of its founder then how can it justify these commercial practices?

Finally, the use of commas and the term ”for example’ indicates that i am aware St. Paul’s is not part of the Catholic church. The reason I mention the Catholic church is because I hope one day to visit Rome and see the religious buildings there. As I do so there will be a moment of frisson as I hand over my admission fee to an organisation that is one of the richest in the world and which also has so much blood on its hands. When I do so, am I part of the solution or am I part of the problem?

I started drinking when I was in my late thirties. I moved from being an infrequent drinker to a moderate drinker in the space of a few weeks. I had to force myself.

There was good medical evidence at the time that a regular tipple in middle age was useful insurance against heart disease and possibly some other common killers so I thought it might be worth drinking to this discovery.

Some people have a predisposition to alcohol addiction. I believe I have a predisposition which prevents me from developing one. A single drink is usually enough for me. On the rare occassion I have tried two or three I just feel ill.

It is a quirk of fate I guess that the two worst drugs in the world are the legal ones. Nicotine is the most addictive substance in the world (yup, it’s worse than heroin) and is a powerful toxin. Alcohol turns people violent.

That’s an oversimplification of course but the main side effect of alcohol intoxication is aggression as any drunk will tell you (even if they’re talking about something else).
Just take a drive along any arterial road of any large town on a Sunday morning and see for yourself the number of crystal mounds littering the now windowless bus shelters. These acts of vandalism have been fuelled by alcohol. Some of the vandals probably wouldn’t even remember that they had done something so mindless. The cost of alcohol abuse to the country in monetary terms is many billions of pounds, in emotional terms it’s incalculable.

Apart from the slight health benefits from moderate drinking in middle age (which could be easily made inconsequential if people ate healthily and exercised more), alcohol has nothing going for it.

Compare it with cannabis say, which has completely different side effects, the most notable being passivity. Or LSD which can expand the mind and thus connectivity with other people. Imagine how different the world would be if they had become the legal drugs instead of the two damaging poisons we have now.

Okay, all drugs have side effects and there would no doubt be severe cases of harm with the two alternatives I mentioned but you can be sure the costs would come no where near the current level of damage we have today.

It almost makes sense for a government agency to research and develop a brand new recreational drug which had minimal side effects and maximum buzz to replace the current legal ones. Then those people who are addicted could make a transition to the safer drug. The savings and benefit to society would outstrip any fiscal initiative that the government could ever come up with.

Imagine the outcry though if someone in authority suggested this rational approach. The official insanity is that we keep the two worst drugs in the world as legal, try to clean up the appalling mess created by them and combat the tide of illegal drugs (which could turn out to be less harmful if they were controlled properly) at the same time.

It’s no wonder people seek out mind altering substances to hide from such insanity.

Addendum: After posting this, the very next day, 3 Quarks Daily had this article.

This phrase has been doing the rounds in media circles and has been applied to quite a few companies; AIG, HBOS, General Motors etc.

What worries me is that it demonstrates there is no Plan B.

In a capitalist system, competition is supposed to be the evolutionary driver in business. Evolution is based on profligate waste. For every successful organism that reaches the stage of reproduction, there are sometimes thousands that fail.

And so capitalism demands that failure be part of its successful model, how else would you sort out the best from the worst? Which makes the phrase ‘too big to fail’ suspiciously anti capitalist and monolithic. It means companies are bigger than governments. It means the worst companies can persist in an environment that demands only the best survive. It means sacrificing valuable resources to sustain a bloated and dying organism.

And ultimately it means that eventually one of these companies will fail despite everyone’s best efforts and that means globalisation will have delivered its promise of catastrophe.

After reading some more about Ponzi schemes and their inner workings it didn’t take me long to figure out that the recent financial crisis was the result of the exact same principle.

In a Ponzi scheme, the early investors get a return on their money and persuade others, usually people they know, to invest in the scheme as well. Even empirical cynics are convinced by the evidence shown to them by their acquaintance or friend, so they too invest. For the scheme to work however it requires an unlimited supply of gullible investors. The flaw here, is in the word, ‘unlimited’. Any fool can tell you that unlimited is a theoretical property which fails in this limited world.

So, what about the banks? Well, let’s take the best example, the sub prime fiasco. Look at it as a Ponzi scheme. Empirical cynics (usual cautious bankers) are convinced the scheme works because their own property has doubled or tripled in value in a ridiculously short space of time. It makes sense then to pivot investment vehicles around this phenomenon. As property prices rise, more investors pile in. But the flaw in this scheme is that it requires an unending rise in property values if it is to succeed at all. Any fool can tell you that unending is a theoretical property which fails in this finite world.

The mainstream media have always referred to the financial crisis as a bubble or boom that suddenly ended. It was never likened to a Ponzi scheme. But it was a Ponzi scheme plain and simple, run by the banks. In any other rational universe, these bankers would now be waiting for trial in a criminal court of law.

Footnote. As I was doing some research on the web to find a suitable link that explained the Ponzi scheme I found this article. It appears there are a couple more huge Ponzi schemes out there run by the government.