Prepare For a Great Blessing

By Charlie Johnston

Long ago I saw that, at a decisive moment, our technology would fail. I’m no Luddite. I do not regard technology as either intrinsically evil or intrinsically good. It is just a tool which, like any other tool, can be wielded by its user for either good or evil. But we withhold some tools from people until they have reached sufficient maturity to use them wisely and well. You don’t set a toddler loose with a hammer or an ice pick. Giving a 16-year-old a car with a high-powered V-8 engine is asking for a catastrophic, perhaps fatal, crash.

Similarly, most of the most deadly disciplines in life can only be achieved after the mastery of restraint and prudence. The various martial arts are primary examples of that principle, as are the medical arts. These are disciplines that can just as easily (probably even more easily) kill than save lives – but can be vital to saving lives in extreme situations. They, too, are tools. All are dependent on the wisdom, maturity, restraint, and prudence of the user to provide the benefits, rather than deadly dysfunction, in their use.

Thirty years ago I was deeply concerned that we were becoming technical whiz kids at the same time that we were also becoming moral and philosophical pygmies. We were developing ever more sophisticated and dangerous tools at the same time we were becoming progressively less fit to wield those tools. Now, culturally, we have entered a period of frenzied fanaticism. Even normally sedate fields of criminal and civil law are used extensively as weapons to provide the margin of victory for narrow political views.

Fanatics do not consider the world in terms of necessary trade-offs to accomplish good policy – the trade-offs necessary because all policy involves some good aspects and some downsides. Trade-offs strike a balance to get the most possible good and the least possible downside. Fanatics see the one good they want, are blind to all the bad it entails, and demand that only its favored policy be adopted. As fanaticism metastasizes it becomes increasingly incapable of judging things prudentially and only wants victory. It becomes almost entirely self-referential, seeing everything as either a validation or repudiation of its superiority.

Fanaticism is always among us – and usually even has a portion of a truth to it – which it wields in a way that prevents that truth from ever becoming a reality. When it reaches critical mass, though, and enough of society is infected with it, that society is headed for collapse…or even extinction, as it is no longer capable of clear-headed rationality, only consumed in a war of all against all. Too many social actors have assumed that intelligence is not a matter of making good choices, but a characteristic they claim as part of their identity. If they choose it, it must, by definition, be intelligent because they have mistaken intelligence as an identitarian characteristic, rather than prudent, restrained judgment. Any failures of their choices must be the result of the machinations of their enemies, real or (mostly) imagined – for their fanaticism assures them of their own intelligence, whatever the results of their choices.

This must seem a strange opening for a column encouraging people to prepare for a great blessing. The late economist, Herbert Stein, in an inspired moment said that, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Frenzied fanaticism cannot go on forever. It will stop…but the stop may be notably violent. In the meantime, it is so over the top that it provides cover for the lesser fanaticism that reigns in less frenzied cohorts – and that has distorted our entire culture badly.

Let’s start with some basic, unemotional things. The American economy and, by extension, the global economy is sitting on the biggest bubble in world history. For most of the last century, it cost the average wage earner 2.2 years worth of wages to buy a home. Now it costs six years worth of wages. That does not tell the true story of how bad things have gotten. Because of the wage gap disparity between what were once called blue collar workers and modern elites, housing is actually completely beyond the reach of the average young blue collar worker.

Everything is vastly overvalued. About 15 years ago I noticed that the price to earnings ratio, used to determine stock prices, was getting seriously out of whack. People were routinely paying more for stocks that provided less return. That told me that the stock market was getting more and more overvalued. Since there are a lot of very sophisticated traders paying these inflated prices, it made me wonder why we had thrown historical norms right out the window. Then it dawned on me: the most sophisticated investors all had heavy stakes in the market. If they called down the needed correction, they, too, would lose a massive amount of value very quickly. We had all become co-conspirators in covering up the massive bubble because we had too much to lose if it was revealed.

During the Biden years all manner of supposedly competent economists proposed “modern monetary theory,” which was just the old trick of printing up massive amounts of currency – and which always and everywhere has resulted in massive, often ruinous, inflation. Currency is not wealth. Never has been and never will be. I often liken it to the encryption key to a hard drive. If there is nothing on the hard drive to decrypt, having an encryption key won’t change that. This was the result, no doubt, of the leftist delusion that government is the creator of all wealth. The only lasting wealth there is are the goods and services created by individuals. Thus, the source of all wealth is that which is created by the subordinate creators of the one, Great Creator. The delusion the left has about wealth leads to all manner of error, each feeding on the last to deepen the delusion.

Imagine you have one pie and 10 consumers – and the “boss” carefully limits who can make pies and how many they can make. In such a situation, how to distribute that pie becomes the most important question. But let us say you have one pie and, among the 10 consumers, three bakers, five farmers and processors, and several craftsmen – and no boss. Then the fundamental question is facilitating the ease with which these people can cooperate to create more pies. The left imagines a static, limited pile of wealth; exerts a monopoly over what others have created; sets up safety regulations and qualifications tests (which are really mostly barriers to anyone competing with the self-anointed leftist distributors); creates permanent shortages when there is a cornucopia of potential creators; and pretends to compassion by allowing some of the little people access to some of the wealth they jealously hoard, while preventing others from creating.

In civilized ancient times, the Emperor of Rome was considered to be Divine. The citizens and serfs of Rome supposedly received all their meaning and their very being from and through the Emperor. Pretty silly stuff, when it was perfectly obvious to anyone who paid attention that the emperor was just a mortal man, however temporally powerful he might be. Is it any sillier than our current belief that all meaning and creation comes through the government? This belief is downright religious on the left – including secular sacraments and heresy. It opens with the notion that all wealth comes by and through the state and continues to the notion that all problems can only be resolved by the state, always veering towards absolute control by the state. America was founded on the proper notion that government was not central to culture, but was largely its clerk. Wealth was ours to create; problems were ours to solve; opportunity was ours to be had. Ah, but the state is the most ambitious and oily of beasts – always taking more control, seizing opportunity and autonomy away from citizens in the name of compassion. I remember, several decades ago, doing a study where I was astonished to find that to merely open a hot dog stand in New York City required more than 20 individual permits. Do you think it has gotten better since then? I have no doubt it has gotten far worse. Government is a notably jealous, vengeful, and capricious god.

Real intellectual acuity has gotten far poorer, helped largely by the many crutches technology affords us. I shudder every time I hear some faux intellectual opine about virtues of socialism while acting under the binary notion that there can only be anarchy or statism. Such dimwits consider any collective activity to be a form of socialism and usually are entirely unacquainted with basic principles, like subsidiarity. But, oh, are they proud of their supposed refined wisdom. They are too stupid to know basic philosophical principals of governance and liberty, think their elementary school understanding of the same is superior wisdom and, so, make themselves too arrogant to believe there is anything they do not know. If you have ever had someone tell you you are an incipient socialist because you support having fire departments (collective action of any sort), they intend to show you how stupid you are while merely revealing how stupid they are. Alas, their stupidity is impenetrable because they think it wisdom and proof of their own superiority. For so many of our vain philosophical pygmies, the commonweal is NOT the commonweal, but the palette upon which they project their arrogant (and pathetically desperate) acts of self-actualization. They are not concerned with accomplishing any common good, only proving to all (but most especially reassuring themselves) that they are a superior class of being. They flatter themselves that they do all this self-worship in the name of compassion. We have an entire generation of midwits convinced they are intellectually refined because they know how to use the technology that an earlier generation created – and regard that earlier generation that actually created the tools they use with utter contempt.

It is a seductive delusion. Several decades ago I was speaking with a Priest who was a pretty good man about Christian compassion. He commented that it is certainly our duty to care for the less fortunate. It hit me wrong and I hotly replied, “It is not. We are all the less fortunate, and our Christian duty is to treat each other as brothers and sisters in loving solidarity, whatever our circumstances.” He was startled by the force of my retort – and then quickly agreed, noting sorrowfully how seductive it is to imagine ourselves at a superior level dispensing alms. How much worse it is when we worship at the false god of government, with its many idols, separated from the very heart of what makes us human!

The collapse in basic civics education has facilitated the process. Young people, many of whom have had no formation at all, only know that the promise of the American Dream has been abrogated for their generation. Because of the impoverishment of the educational system, most cannot begin to know why or how. Only that the generational promise that has sustained American growth and prosperity for a quarter of a millenium has been ripped away from most of their generation. So, many of them flirt with the false promise of socialism and the like – intensifying the deification of government as the source of all answers. It has blown my mind to see this in real time, so very close to the 20^th century, in which the promises were the same and the result was well over 100 million murdered to achieve the “workers paradise” that only resulted in clawing misery for those who survived the depredations of this false system of worship. Socialism is the opiate of the faux intellectuals and aggressive social climbers.

A wag has said that leftists don’t care what people do, so long as it is mandatory. There is a wealth of wisdom in that. Yet far too many on the political right and in Christian circles do not object to cultural imperialism so much as they earnestly desire to turn it to their own ends, completely unaware of how deeply infected they are with the same secular poison that has brought our system low. Instead of teaching and preaching opportunity, they offer competing benefits from the left, still fully vested in deification of government as the answer to all problems.

I look at a populace that thinks, in large measure, it can triangulate between Democrats and Republicans as if the argument is still about who can provide the better water system (as it was when I was young) rather than deal with an existential crisis. With the way that the divide has opened over the last 20 or 30 years, one side must prevail and the other must lose entirely. There is no splitting the difference to be had. It is like when one part of your group wants to go east and the other west. One side must prevail or the group must split. There is no splitting the difference. I do long for the days when liberals could emphasize collective action without venturing deeply into communism or any other form of authoritarianism – and rightists could emphasize individual liberty and autonomy without venturing into anarchy. But those days are gone. We have reached a time of choosing. The choices we make will determine whether we, “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope on earth,” as Lincoln said in his annual message to Congress in 1862.

I do respect what Pres. Trump has been doing to inject our society with real substance again. Using tariffs to leverage the return of manufacturing to American shores is a great boost to the idea of real wealth – production of goods and services and will bring the American Dream a little closer. It – and much of his better efforts – are merely islands in a sea of social dysfunction, though. It appalls me that so many think he is responsible for the skyrocketing prices and dysfunction of the four years before he got back. Has our institutional memory really become that enfeebled? It probably has. I think only a pittance of the country realizes that we are in revolutionary times globally and that the problems before us are existential rather than operational.

Various genuinely insightful people grab hold of one portion of truth, think it is the sum and substance of all truth, then magnify it out of all proportion until it becomes actual vice, rather than virtue. That is one example of something that cannot go on forever.

I see things Trump is doing and see an effort to cushion any sudden crash, economically and otherwise. I don’t comment on it unless a friend says something to me that demonstrates insight into the peril we are in. But I have great respect for Trump, by his actions, doing things that will help. I actually think the president thinks (or at least hopes) that we can avoid it – but knows at the very best, there will be a massive correction. He is adding substance back to our economic life and, in some ways, cultural life. He is working to get rid of the fluff that hurts or, at best, advances nothing. While pure analysis can plausibly reveal what deep financial trouble the whole world is in, I had long ago been told that, at a critical juncture, our technology would fail. I see some mechanisms by which that can happen now emerging – but frankly, I don’t much like talking about that, either, unless someone stumbles onto some specific insight and seeks me out for comment.

It has long struck me that, before the really big things, God begins with quiet. People later impose meaning and portent on that quiet, but the people who live it are usually caught completely off guard. Take, for example, the birth of Jesus Christ. I always struggle to keep from shouting when some homilist describes the Star of Bethlehem as the brightest, most noticeable star in the sky. Really?! If that was the case, why was it that only three obscure magi from the east noticed it at all, much less knew what it portended? Frankly, the description of the Star of Bethlehem sounds like a retrograde planet, which sometimes seems to reverse course and move backwards. A natural explanation, you object? God created nature and nature’s laws. It often pleases Him to use such things as subtle portents of major events. I weary of people who seem to think that God can only act through supernatural means, when the reality is that most of the time He acts through the natural means He created. It reveals who is actually paying attention and who needs to be slapped upside the head to get their attention. And it is a signal to those who actually are paying attention to prepare – in order to help others as events unfold.

I think we are, at minimum, come to a pass where we will have to live as people did in the mid-1800’s. God may even change some of the rules of natural law on us. Believing that, why would I consider that a great blessing?

Because our priorities are all messed up. And I think God is going to help (or force, if you will) us to get them back into line – so that we may move towards light and life rather than continue to careen towards the abyss. Besides sitting on the biggest economic bubble in the history of the world, we now consider rank sophistry to be refined wisdom. Most in power have ceased to think about what is the good, and only about what will give them transient advantage in their effort to retain and expand personal power. By its very definition, that cannot continue. It will stop.

Our most fundamental wealth is in how we interact with each other, how we collaborate to make a functional society. In a very real way, I think that will soon become the fountain of ALL wealth in America and in the world. Much of the world has gotten well past the point of no return in revolutionary dysfunction. In America, there is still a real fight over it. I think we will come right up to the verge of the revolutionary destroyers prevailing – and then America will be spared by a great blessing that, at first blush, looks to be terrible tragedy and atrocity. But it will set America right – and then it will be America’s job to lead the world back into the light; the light that only comes from true Godliness.

That is why my “Go Forth” program, so long in development and with so many revisions along the way, is so important. For the people of the world, I think it will soon be the only wealth they have – and the source from which all other wealth must spring. There has been no little confusion about what “Go Forth” means. It is not any display of personal piety (though those have some value). Rather, it is seeking out the needs of those around you, then marshaling others to help meet those needs. It is about forming the sort of self-sustaining communities that literally, in just a few generations, made America great and spread that greatness from sea to shining sea – a greatness we have squandered on absurd vanity projects.

Before the first Christmas, people looked forward to that which they did not know: the manger. Now, we must look back to that which we have forgotten: the manger.

On Sunday, Dec. 7, the Eve of the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception – and the 30^th Anniversary of the most pivotal visitation of my lifetime – CORAC will host a global ZOOM call. I will speak more plainly about many things I have alluded to or hinted about. I will tell you more than I ever have before about how we can Go Forth – and how the heart of it all lies in looking back to the manger.

I pray that you will join us.

If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

Find me on X at @JohnstonPilgrim

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