Nobody's Consumer

Nobody's Consumer; Sucking Up Lies and Cash

By John Taylor; 2006 September 21

It was early this morning and the family upon awakening gravitated to the sofa while I prepared my breakfast. Twelve-year-old Silvie then threatened to enter into another of her interminable, sleep inducing accounts covering every detail of her dreams the night before; that prospect got even her mother off the couch and off into the kitchen preparing breakfast and lunches. Surprisingly, this time Thomas, hidden under a blanket, eagerly listened. As I ate breakfast I had no choice but to take much of it in. It started off in the world of Spongebob Squarepants and ended up with her walking the school grounds, which turned into a beach covered in starfish, which in her hands turned into pink slugs. "Now we are coming to the sad part of the dream. Parental guidance suggested." In the dream she then dropped one of the slugs and one of its antennae was damaged. "Is it blind?" I asked Mom in the dream. No, she replied... I took the parental suggestion and, my breakfast finished, unobtrusively guided myself out of the room.

The other day I came across this passage from the Bible,

"For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord is against them that do evil." (1 Peter 3:12, KJV)

This little reminder of the importance of combining prayer with a moral focus reminded me of the novels of John Grisham, which I have been listening to lately in audio book form. Until the mid-1990's I read the first half of Grisham's opus as each novel came out, but then for one reason or another lost touch. Since then he has written a half dozen more. Now I return to his legal thrillers with a fresh perspective and I find them surprising. In these new-for-me novels he retains his gift of suspense, his amazing ability to make the work of a lawyer, which is nothing but bureaucracy-for-hire, seem thrilling. At the same time he seems this time around to have misplaced his moral compass. Either that or things have become so astonishly corrupt in the American South, the locale of his stories, that a moral compass cannot be expected of a storyteller there.

For example, one story is about three corrupt and disgraced judges who come up with an extortion scheme, which they work from a minimum security prison. Only in the last pages does the reader sadly come to realize that these clever but base fellows are the protagonists and that, as must happen in a Grisham story, these are the "good" guys who win out at all odds. But the reader is left with lingering doubts about whether such dishonest corruptors of the law should have won out. If any social sin is unforgivable, it is a corrupt judge.

My current novel is even worse, the story of a professor of law who comes home to find that his father, an incorruptible judge, has died and in the house are stacked boxes full of cash, some three million dollars. It turns out that this was a sort of post hoc bribe from a dishonest lawyer who had made a huge fortune on one of his decisions. This judge is as close to perfect in his integrity as anybody you will find in the world of Grisham. He gives away all of his extra money and refuses every attempt to sway him. Yet he comes home to find boxes of cash dropped off in his home and does not report the bribe and have the money officially counted and duly turned in to the authorities. Surely that is the first thing an honest judge would do! Instead, he sits on it and intends to return the money to the giver along with a tongue lashing but gets sicker and in the end dies with the stash still stacked away. Then his son, the law professor, inherits the problem and fails the same test.

Surely, if anybody in the world would know enough to turn in a pile of cash found in his father's house it would have to be a law professor! But no, if he were to do that there would be no novel, no danger, no mystery. The author tries to give reasons for him not to report the money, including a brother who is an addict and who would no doubt kill himself with so large an inheritance. Also, half of the inheritance would have gone to taxes. Not convincing in my book. That would be small price to pay for the sense of doing the right thing that would come of turning in the money; as a bonus in this case it would also keep a group of cold blooded killers avid for the cash they had delivered to the judge off his law prof son's back.

Now whenever I think back to when I was a kid and for so many years longed to become a lawyer when I grew up, well, I start to break out in a cold sweat. Thank God I was denied that ambition! I conclude from Grisham that we are living in a profoundly corrupt place here in North America. It, we, are sadly, gravely, deeply rotted out. It is not the structure, not the setup but the people themselves, you and me, who lack our bearings. What used in the Sixties to be called "the Establishment" is just a machinery built out of stinking rot bubbling out of the heart of each of us.

Why do we allow cash at all in an age of computerized monetary transactions? Cash is a standing temptation, an open invitation to dirty tricks. We would all be better off doing all of our purchases and other financial transactions with smart debit cards. They would be far more convenient than cash; in stores we are forever counting change and fiddling with pennies. Why do we not do that? Do I need to say it? Because powerful people profit. Same reason illegal immigrants are openly tolerated in Canada and the US, because a few very rich and influential people gain from it. The CIA and Canada's Security Agency would grind to a halt if they could not do dirty tricks and perform underhanded acts with untraceable cash.

If that happened government intelligence would stop being an oxymoron, it would really have to be intelligent and, horror of horrors, national governments would be forced to come up with their information openly and honestly. In other words, they would be scientific, according to a definition of science that I just heard of last night. What is the opposite of science? The opposite of science is not ignorance, it is secrecy. It is proprietary data. Cloak and dagger activity is the reverse, the very denial of political science. Same way, an undercover cop may gain some information from criminals that otherwise may not be forthcoming but most importantly at the same time by using underhanded, secret tactics obscures the moral distinction between law enforcement and lawlessness. This is a devil's bargain that cannot be tolerated, openly or otherwise. Not that it is the only devil's bargain, the devil has been making thousands of such bargains wherever you turn. As the UHJ Agency that wrote One Common Faith puts it,

"Selfishness becomes a prized commercial resource; falsehood reinvents itself as public information; perversions of various kinds unabashedly claim the status of civil rights. Under appropriate euphemisms, greed, lust, indolence, pride -- even violence -- acquire not merely broad acceptance but social and economic value. Ironically, as words have been drained of meaning, so have the very material comforts and acquisitions for which truth has been casually sacrificed."

The only scientific way to security would be to unite all governments into one ruling body representing all human beings under one divine law. Only that could we be honest and expunge the millions of devil's deals we have made, en masse. Anything less is by definition unscientific, irreligious, immoral, and most to the point, a form of enslavement. Consider what Paul said, "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." (II Cor 3:17) Cash is false freedom, a satan in angel's robes. No cash would mean no secrets, no fighting, no opposition, open or behind closed doors. Among other things, without cash gambling casinos, those machines designed to suck cash out of the pockets of families, would slow down if not halt. Without a thriving cash-based economy we would start looking like those poor denizens of the Starship Enterprise, concerned only with what is good for themselves and everybody else, living a healthy life and performing their mission in life: manipulated and exploited by nobody, nobody's consumer. With free and open information (in other words, data ruled by wisdom) we would for the first time taste the sweet savor of spiritual liberty.

A scientific, spirit-led society would devise some clever device to root out lies, an open process, a sort of lie vacuum cleaner that would act in the reverse manner of a gambling casino, instead of exploiting the family it would bolster and enrich it. The anti-lie vacuum would start with our natural sense of guilt when we lie and do everything possible to bring truth to light and eliminate the shadow places were lies breed. After all, as the Master somewhere said, the secret to never telling a lie is never to do anything wrong in the first place. No wrongdoing, no cover-ups, no secrecy.

How do you vacuum up falsehoods? Begin by building an open process and then start with the professions most prone to lying, doctors and the police (lawyers probably fall under the law enforcement professions). Since lies are known to be most prevalent there, no doubt here are the worst structural wrongs. Encourage doctors and police to confidentially report every case where they felt they had to tell a lie. Every lie reported would then be fed into the anti-lie machine, statistically analyzed and consulted upon by experts and the public alike. Philosophers, psychologists and other experts would openly crunch in all new data and consult with everyone to come up with scientific ways to change the most common lying situations. Make it so that lies will never be needed in future. Such a falsehood elimination process, to my mind, would mark the first time we could really call the social sciences scientific.

Take our law professor in the novel. As soon as he decided to hide the cash stash, his prevarication had to start. Then came outright lies. As I said, a lie vacuum would not take long to pinpoint the problem here: cash. The lie eliminator would then pinpoint the most common situations where outward changes are impossible. Then, and only then, would it turn it over to teachers train the next generation to avoid lies in such difficult and unavoidable situations.

At this stage, religion would have a big role to play working hand in hand with law and the state. Consider the explanation of Baha'u'llah about the divine goal of moral testing in one of the most crucial passages of the Iqan:

"Meditate profoundly, that the secret of things unseen may be revealed unto you, that you may inhale the sweetness of a spiritual and imperishable fragrance, and that you may acknowledge the truth that from time immemorial even unto eternity the Almighty hath tried, and will continue to try, His servants, so that light may be distinguished from darkness, truth from falsehood, right from wrong, guidance from error, happiness from misery, and roses from thorns. Even as He hath revealed: "Do men think when they say 'We believe' they shall be let alone and not be put to proof?" (Qur'an 29:2) (Baha'u'llah, Kitab-i-Iqan, 8-9)

This is why religious property is not taxed. In effect, when we pray and reflect morn and eve and in houses of worship we are, from the point of view of the state, "working." It benefits because in this apparently idle time we are really gaining the spiritual energy to face such moral dilemmas. Nonetheless, the state, in the teaching of the Master, has primacy in deciding what specific measures to take in enforcing moral change. Let us finish with a selection from a provisional translation of Abdu'l-Baha's Tablet on Politics, perhaps His least known work at present.

"The divine revealed law, which is the life of existence, the light of the visible world, and is consonant with the ultimate goal, requires an agency that will implement it, decisive means, a manifest protector, and a firm promulgator. There is no doubt that the wellspring of this mighty institution is the edifice of the state and the sword of rulership. When the one becomes strong and triumphant, the other becomes manifest and refulgent. Whenever the one achieves paramountcy and radiance, the other is rendered perspicuous and luminous.
"Thus, a just government is ipso facto a government in accordance with the divine law, and a well-ordered realm is an all-encompassing mercy. The glorious crown is wrapped in divine confirmations, and the regal diadem is adorned with the gems of heavenly bounty. In the manifest book, it is clearly said, "Say: O God, king of kings, you bestow rule on whomever you please, and take it away from whomever you please." Therefore, it is evident and obvious that this bestowal is a divine gift and a grant from the Lord. In the same way, the authentic saying of Muhammad has it that "The ruler is the shadow of God on earth." Given these texts, which are like a mighty edifice, how clear is the falsehood of the words of any vexatious usurper, which are mere imagination unsupported by proof or evidence." (Abdu'l-Baha, Treatise on Politics, Risalih-'i Siyasiyyih, tr. Juan R. I. Cole)