A lot of us are broke. With rising inflation and stagnating wages, we can’t get a leg up. Kids are born into debt and it only gets worse. “They” are keeping us down.
Dust and Tribe has little interest in conspiracy theories. In fact, we subscribe to exactly one, the Iblisian plot wherein the rebel states:
For leaving me to stray, I will lie in ambush for them on Your Straight Path.
Q 7:16
Every disempowering notion, real or imagined, flows from this. We can’t get excited about the Illuminati or the Rockefellers or the Freemasons or Jewish Space Lasers, or really any of the things that people kick around as agents of global manipulation. There is only one Cause, and our sole concern lies with our response to His unfolding Divine Decree.
This is because we learn important patterns and correlations through our responses. This learning is the foundation of personal growth and awareness. Blaming shadows does nothing for us.
Tellingly, people invested in conspiracy theories use them to explain circumstances they find generally disagreeable or personally problematic. If my team is winning, the thinking goes, there are no conspiracies at play. If we are losing, there are dark and mysterious forces afoot. Rather than seeing God’s Wisdom in the trial of disappointment, many of us opt for this attribution error.
To the extent that it can be discerned, most of us are not interested in truth. We seek validation. And when things are not going our way, our impulse is to distance ourselves from any responsibility we might have in our own frustrations. We refuse to see the patterns. We refuse to learn from important correlations between our ideas, words, and actions and the manner in which God’s Decree is playing out in our experience. And so we stagnate, throwing up our hands and shaking our fists at Bohemian Grove attendees.
An Important Distinction
Conspiracy theories lead to disempowered communities of commiseration, while pattern recognition creates empowered communities of activism. We’ll illustrate this with a couple of examples.
An elite group of satanic pedophiles runs the world.
This is a conspiracy theory. It’s a great story, but there is not a lot we can do with that information. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not. We can express our outrage at the notion, and our righteous indignation might release a little dopamine, but that’s about it.
Let’s rephrase things.
Money and power allow for opportunities to live beyond social constraints. Without any checks against our whims, we are more likely to explore them, delving into taboo behaviors simply because we can. This is still more likely when we keep the company of others who celebrate and encourage such unseemly exploration. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that the rich and powerful frequently get up to nonsense.
Nothing conspiratorial there. An observation about wealthy privilege followed by rational deductions, the correlations between money, power, and corruption are obvious and ancient. Within the Christian tradition, Jesus is reported to have said, may God’s peace be upon him:
. . . it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!
Matthew 19:24
Merchants are outed as broadly dishonest in this quote attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of God be upon him:
The merchants will be raised on the Day of Resurrection as immoral people, apart from those who fear God and act righteously and speak the truth.
Sunan Ibn Majah
These admonitions are complemented with direction:
O people, fear God and be moderate in seeking a living, for no soul will die until it has received all its provision, even if it is slow in coming. So fear God and be moderate in seeking provision; take that which is permissible and leave that which is forbidden.
Sunan Ibn Majah
An increase in wealth, the sages say, brings a greater likelihood of corruption. In order to avoid the latter, we are wise to temper the former. If we are successful in socializing this idea (in contravention to growth-obsessed mainstream capitalism, for example), we don’t really need to worry about satanic pedophiles.
In the first place, we are discouraging wealth accumulation as a priority. If taken seriously by others, this limits the number of persons potentially corruptible through wealth. Secondly, the wealthy are far less of a threat because we don’t want what they have.
The difference between recognizing patterns and the implications they carry for our personal development, and the blind-fire of conspiracy theorizing is plain. In religious language, the latter takes us further and further astray as our wonder at ghostly collusion gives way to frustration and hopelessness. This is the beginning of despair and little good comes out of desperation. How different this is from recognizing God as the Cause of all Causes whose Decree unfolds in patterns and correlations that offer each of us precious feedback and powerful guidance.
The Debt Trap
It is not hard to find people who are financially struggling. Conversations about the rising costs of food, fuel, rent, and medical care are ubiquitous. That hard-scrabble perception is a talking point among American politicians as they clamor for the votes of working people, “We know how hard it is out there and we’ve got a plan to make it better!”
However, pinning down statistics on debt is a much more challenging endeavor. The numbers are all over the place, but there are two easily verifiable points salient to the intent of this post:
- Our personal debt is primarily tied to mortgages, car loans, student loans, and credit cards
- The psychological effects of debt include poor sleep, social isolation, and an increase in anxiety and depression
With an eye toward discerning patterns and correlations to arrive at empowered solutions, let’s take a closer look at what this data means.
The basic necessities of shelter, transportation, and education are the primary drivers of personal debt in America. It is virtually impossible to survive in America without debt and that suggests a systemic root. The machinations at play are very efficient, and the majority of the population is therefore affected.
Then if most of us carry debt, and along with that debt a statistically verifiable level of psychological dysfunction, how is that managed?
Conspiracy theories are introduced to gaslight the public into more debt and disempowerment.
During national election cycles, candidates blame hostile “others” for our collective misery (the super-rich, special interests, immigrants, non-European foreign governments) and promise to alleviate our suffering by taking on these nebulous forces. We’re going to drain the swamp! Build a wall! Take on Big Business!
We vote, nothing changes, and we repeat the cycle with ever more suspicion and animosity, often directed at fellow countrymen who voted for a different party with the same conspiratorial message of blame and retribution. After all, it’s clear they are the ones holding back progress and tearing the country apart.
Now, in addition to debt and despair, we have division. These are the essentials of population management. Broke, demoralized, and unable to trust our neighbor, we look increasingly to the very agencies responsible for our plight to protect and deliver us.
Our pleas for basic securities like housing and healthcare are woven into the rhetoric in support of increased policing and militarized expansionism. Rights are stripped away and bombs are dropped in foreign lands to “protect our way of life” and to “guarantee our freedoms” in another example of conspiracy theorizing to disempower, control, and manipulate the public.
The Solution
As ever, the solution lies with us and it’s dead simple.
We solve the problem by dismissing the conspiracies and examining the patterns.
By normalizing young people staying at home and leveraging community colleges, we can eliminate personal debt in a single generation.
There is a uniquely American emphasis on driving young people out of their childhood home upon graduation from high school in order to prioritize a remote four-year college experience. The language around this emphasizes independence, freedom, bootstrapping, and the need to develop self-sufficiency. Our counterargument turns on the recognition of this language, reinforced in the conspiratorial ramblings of political candidates, as fundamentally coercive.
Because if young people believe it, they will dive head-first into the debt trap, likely taking their parents with them. They will do this in the name of freedom and privacy and independence, deeply held cultural values (read propaganda) and the founding principles of our beloved country!
And just like that we’ll have another generation of broke patriots, bitter, confused, and looking for someone to blame.
Cooperation, compromise, interdependence, and community are the way forward. Sharing resources, sharing space, learning how to navigate intergenerational dynamics, and working together for our collective betterment are all tremendous personal growth opportunities that simultaneously allow for the preservation of family wealth. Mortgages are paid off, vehicles are maintained and passed down, and educational expenses are offset through these savings.
With no debt to constrain them, young people are liberated to innovate and incubate new and exciting business ideas. They are no longer forced into entry level jobs to manage accrued financial obligations. Young people reclaim their time and their vitality to build a better world.
Of course, not everybody is in a position to act on this.
Some of us have exceedingly strained family dynamics. Many of us lack space. But there is still tremendous opportunity to socialize these ideas, to build aspiration around the notion of staying at home and attending community college as countercultural acts of defiance.
We have two couples living here at Camp One. My wife’s daughter and her husband share a home with us. It’s not always easy. There is friction. They reasonably dream about having their own space. But the programming runs so deep for most of us that it’s hard to say if such dreams are innate or manufactured. Is our bid for independence a response to biological cues or divisive social engineering?
Regardless, they have time and money that they would not have had otherwise. They have real opportunities today that they can weigh against the imagined benefits of a more autonomous arrangement.
And who doesn’t like options?
Leave a comment below for posterity or join us in the D&T Chautaqua Discord to discuss this post with other adventurous spirits from around the world.