10 January 2024
In a previous post I referred to an article by Jayant Bhandari on Lew Rockwell's site in which the author tells the damning truth about his homeland, India. Obviously, Bhandari is celebrating Western Civilization, but the meat of his article was the core issue of a high-trust versus low-trust society.
In a follow-up article, Bhandari carries forward the same theme in order to point out the utter impossibility of India ever gaining a semblance of First World prosperity. The reason is that India is inherently Third World. In so many words, as long is there is no colonizing force to tame the beasts, they will always revert to their natural condition. That native condition is very near an animal existence.
There is no sense of honor, no sense of a moral imperative, only grubbing in the dirt for a bare existence. There is no tomorrow, no reason to save. A pay raise is no incentive to improve performance on the job; it simply becomes an excuse to ignore the job and party until the money is gone. The only reason anyone even spouts the propaganda of building for tomorrow is because they learned that it brings in foreign investment. That investment in turn is a bonanza for skimming and corruption. Thus, their infrastructure is wholly haphazard, projects ready to collapse before they are finished.
Basic economic truth: If the people value honor and competence, any economy will grow, even without investment and loans. It will grow more slowly, but it will grow. On the other hand, if there is no honor and no value in competence, no amount of investment will ever grow that economy. Indians believe in magic; if they can just mimic in the most shallow fashion what westerners do, they are convinced it will bring western wealth.
But it's a false dichotomy to assume that western materialism is necessary to impart honor, trust and competence.
What most western minds miss in the Bible is the centrality of feudalism. Not that it should reduce individuals to slavery, but it raises a high standard that says any man can be noble. Moreover, it is every man's duty to ennoble his covenant brother. The fundamental issue is not shame versus pride, but loyalty versus betrayal. The basic fact of life is that everyone is accountable to someone else. Not just functionally accountable, but they own you in a limited sense.
Your owner has a divine mandate to invest in your maturity and competence, because you are on loan from the ultimate Owner, God. You have a divine mandate to return on that investment plus, for the same reason. Your earthly duty is a model for how you relate to God.
If you are in a freehold society (like the West), you are your own god. This is the fundamental nature of the lie Satan told in the Garden of Eden. It's the "boastful pride of life" -- the arrogance that comes from thinking oneself competent to decide what is good and evil. This is the real reason places like India cannot rise above subsistence; they cannot imagine being accountable to anyone with a real moral standard. This is what their false gods have taught them (the rebel elohim on God's council).
When you see Indians pressing their palms together as a form of salute, it's not a greeting of respect, but of base fear -- "Don't hurt me." Their gods are as petty and ignoble as the people. Bhandari notes that Hindus will grovel reflexively because they have no sense of honor, no sense of nobility. They have nothing in the first place, and never have to think about whether they are anything except alive on the animal level.
Our God is not petty and brutal as their gods are. Nor is He an absent landlord the way westerners think of the Christian God. He is close and personal, but there are requirements. He opens the door, but the door is guarded by the Flaming Sword. If you do not seize that revelation and turn it against your fleshly self nature, you cannot expect peace with Him. If you but seize the desire to please Him, He will carry you through the whole thing.
Everything evil in our western world can be resolved by restoring the biblical image of God as He portrays Himself. Once we do that, we are in a position to understand how He calls all men to nobility as a the minimum standard, and as royal family if we will accept the obligations attached. The elohim council were infected with the Guardian Cherub's sin, that they should rightly hold divine privileges as beings higher than the rest of Creation. They are gods of their own making, departing from the boundaries God set for them.
The only path to peace with our Creator is to observe His boundaries. Peace with Him imparts nobility and even royalty, if we accept Him as the ultimate Lord.
Comments
Dan D.
"Your owner has a divine mandate to invest in your maturity and competence..."
This appears to be one of the reasons the book Ars Moriendi was penned. The feudal lord had a divine requirement to help those under his care even to triumph through the process of dying in the absence of a church representative.
Jay DiNitto
"He is close and personal, but there are requirements."
Ay, there's the rub, as the saying goes. Westerners don't want to trade in whatever they're clinging to for a foot in the door. God should be able to do what He wants, right? If He's all-loving, He'd be able to accept me as I am, right?
By the way, I never liked the idea of God being all-loving, because I don't think it's quite accurate in the way that we (Westerners) consider "loving" to be. I wrote something down that really nailed what I thought of it. I need to find that, wherever it is.
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