Crime of Millennium

Solving the Crime of the Millennium

By John Taylor; 18 September, 2005

In the slightly more than three decades since I became a Baha'i in the
spring of 1973 the crime of the millennium took place. We have all
read the shocking statistics. We hear them over and over. For example,
the difference between the lowest to the highest paid worker in the
average American corporation went from a ratio of about thirty to one
to hundreds to one, and now it must be over a thousand to one. Nobody
literally put a gun to anyone else's head or even broke any laws but
this transferal of wealth surely dwarfs all violent crimes by all
criminals for all time.

How could such an injustice happen? How did we go from inequity that
is merely obscene to injustice that is truly exponential, astronomic,
out of the realm of conception? How did it come about so quickly, in
less than a single generation, and so easily, without a sign of
struggle or violent upheaval? And most of all, how could this economic
humping occur in an age when legal and moral equality were the
universal concern? The word "equality" was on everybody's lips, it was
laid out on every op-ed page in every newspaper ever since I can
remember. There was endless discussion of equality between men and
women, between the races, between this and that, but all the while in
economics equality squirted up like an ornamental fountain. Real
wealth and power bled out of the middle, out of the bottom, up, up and
away, and now literally billions of people are dirt poor, so indigent
that they must leave their babies to die off by the dozens every
second from easily preventable diseases while a tiny few swim in
funds, pulling the strings of more concentrated wealth than past
generations could have imagined existing even in their wildest dreams.
How did this happen?

I think that the solution to the crime of the millennium is right
before our eyes. It is to be found in the very nature of equality
itself. The quack cure prescribed in our time is not a cure, it is the
disease itself. The fundamental contagion of equality is the balance
of nature. How is nature the problem? Well, John Lock, among others,
held that it is man's nature to desire equality as our natural state.
We all want one equal right with all other human beings -- the right
to be left alone. He said that equality is for one and all,

"a state of perfect freedom to order their actions ... without asking
leave or depending upon the will of any other man." (Locke, Second
Treatise, p. 4)

What is wrong with that, you ask? Does not Baha'u'llah define justice
as seeing with your own eyes, knowing with your own knowledge? Is not
equality and independence from others a big part of the Baha'i
principle of search for truth?

Actually, there is a crucial difference here.

Lock's equality is one of action, Baha'u'llah's equality is of
thought. `Abdu'l-Baha taught that the reality (not the nature but the
reality) of man is his thought. It is not outer actions that matter
but the inner life, the heart. As long as we confine equality to the
freedom to order thoughts, not outer actions but invisible, spiritual
desires and thoughts -- then not having to "ask leave or depend upon
the will of any other man" will be a very good thing, our salvation,
complete paradise.

But think about it. What happens when equality extends outwards, into
action? What if everybody left everybody else alone, as natural,
Lockean equality dictates? What happens when one stops "asking leave
or depending upon the will of any other man?" Why, death, sudden
collapse. Unlike animals, humans depend wholly upon one another for
all of our goods and benefits. This is obvious.

While the generality sink in the mud of their own equality, a few are
propelled upwards to extreme profit. Without consciously planning it,
a policy of divide and rule comes into being, created by our concern
for equal rights itself. The Master pictured the result:

"A financier with colossal wealth should not exist whilst near him is
a poor man in dire necessity. When we see poverty allowed to reach a
condition of starvation it is a sure sign that somewhere we shall find
tyranny." (Abdu'l-Baha, Paris Talks, 153)

Again, compare Baha'u'llah's words: "The heaven of divine wisdom is
illumined by the twin luminaries of consultation and compassion," with
Lock's definition: "perfect freedom to order their actions ... without
asking leave [consultation] or depending upon the will [compassion, or
feeling as one] of any other man." Here is where the theft, the crime
of the millennium, was conceived and nurtured. Equality was carried to
its natural consequences in outward things, inner energy and vitality
evaporated and wealth, the sign among us of God's ability to serve,
act and benefit creation, dissipated, squirted upwards and away.
Hearts and thoughts concerned only with material equality grabbed at
the forbidden fruit but held only powerlessness. We were cast out of
the garden.

The Master, like Sherlock Holmes, uncovered the perpetrator of the
crime of the millenium in 1913, while it was in its early stages. He
prescribed a perfect structural solution, one both personal and
scientific, one born of both luminaries of wisdom, consultation and
compassion. The few must feel compassion and act for true, inner
equality by coming together to consult and find permanent ways of
ending structural economic injustice. The Master said in Paris:

"Men must bestir themselves in this matter, and no longer delay in
altering conditions which bring the misery of grinding poverty to a
very large number of the people. The rich must give of their
abundance, they must soften their hearts and cultivate a compassionate
intelligence, taking thought for those sad ones who are suffering from
lack of the very necessities of life." (Abdu'l-Baha, Paris Talks, 153)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com