The defense of mankind in the 3rd column
Board of Education
Teaching Christian Science
The Christian Science Publishing Society
Guardianship of Funds
This is logically the first column in the dimension of Church. The mythology
that we face here is the ancient mythology of the right of property -- the
feudal platform for looting society expressed in the modern financial empire, a
looting that has become so intense that it threatens to collapse the entire
world-financial and economic system. We are told that Christ Jesus
overthrew the tables of the money changers. Even the Decalogue states: "Thou
shalt not covet 'property'."
The Decalogue doesn't actually use the term property,
because the term probably didn't exist at the time. Since the commandment, not
to covet property, is the last of the ten, the scriptural writer went into a
long explanation as to what property is by explaining what one would claim for
oneself (or steal from society) if one falls into the mythological
property-trap, a trap that inspires a sense of lack and incompleteness in life,
a sense of such emptiness that one would use force in order to get fulfilment
for one's perceived emptiness. The scriptural writer lists a few examples for
property, in terms of what is valued as property, like a house, a wife, a
servant, an ox, an ass, or anything that is ones neighbor's. In today's world
the convention of 'stealing' from one another has become an unwritten covenant.
We say to one another, "I like your house..." "Oh, it's not for
sale." "I'll give you a million." "It's still, not for sale,
there is a housing shortage." "I'll give you two two million!"
"OK!" Thus a benchmark has been established for the value of houses.
All other buyers have to meet the benchmark price, whether they can afford to do
so or not. And so the world gets poorer.
After the sale of the house the two parties go to a
bank. A mortgage is written to cover the two million. The seller is happy. The
Buyer is happy, The bank is happy, because it now owns a debt, which it calls an
asset. It counts the asset as collateral, which enables it to create more
credit, in most cases three times as much. "Is anybody wanting to buy a
house?" the bank cries. "Money is plentiful." And so more houses
are sold, and their prices go up, and bigger mortgages are written, and society
gets purer still.
Ironically we call this an economic system, while in
real terms it is a mental sewer in which society becomes degraded, a sewer of
empire, a sewer that feeds a small group of a wealthy elite that lives on that
stuff, whom the American Economist and international statesman Lyndon LaRouche
termed a slime mold, a mold that spreads across the world and eats up the
healthy fabric of society. Right now the whole swindle is collapsing, since a
debt is never an asset, which becomes rather plain when the mortgages written
become unrepayable as society becomes poorer, and poorer. Thus people get thrown
out of their houses, while the toxic stuff of unrepayable collateral gets
concentrated in the sewer and wipes out the banking system.
By seeking property as a value society places value
outside itself. The self-defeating process works so well for the sewer rats that
public now happily pays $100 for a barrel of oil that costs less than $10 to
produce. That whole sewer stinks to high heaven. The rotten stench reflects the
actual value, which a false sense of value invariably creates. It's a parody on
God, a medley of insanity, that Mary Baker Eddy defines under the term Adam
respective of God, saying: "The name Adam represents the false
supposition... that immortal Mind results in matter, and matter in mortal mind."
Let's take a look at how a real, a Sublime, economy
works that reflects divine Principle. We have seen a bit of divine Principle
reflected in the principle of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The principle
was simply termed, "the advantage of the other." This principle
understood and acknowledged ended an eighty-year-string of war. It is basically
an economic principle. Let's look at it as such:
Human activity is precious. It is all that
we have with which to enrich our world. How is it best used? By what processes
do human actions produce the greatest benefit to society? Let's compare.
In a service economy a worker serves up a
cup of coffee in a coffee chop. While the receiving person derives a certain
benefit from it, the benefit rapidly dissipates and in a few hours is gone
altogether. The worker's labor is thereby spent for little effect. In
comparison, an industrial worker who assembles a machine tool or an automobile,
creates a product that remains beneficial to society for a long period, maybe
ten or twenty years, instead of just a few hours. Even if the production time is
pro-rated to the scale of the product, the industrial process for applying human
action is vastly more efficient than the service process.
Of course society can't totally eliminate
the service process, but there are certain types of products that are produced
in a service type fashion that would be fare more efficiently produced by
industrial processes. Take housing for an example.
Can housing be more efficiently produced?
Let's look at the current process:
Laborers go into the forests cutting down
trees. The trees are taken to mills, are stripped, cut, shaped, dried, and are
by a laborious processes turned into construction lumber or plywood, and so on.
The products, together with many other products are then shipped to the
construction site where teems of craftsmen measure and cut and nail the stuff
together and in the space of weeks and months produce a house. The price of the
house combines the cost of all the collective labor that went into the finished
product, which adds up to a substantial amount. Under ideal conditions the
amount is typically borrowed and becomes repaid over a space of twenty or thirty
years during which a family devotes a large portion of its income to the
repayment. The end product thereby becomes a large burden to society because of
the inefficiency in the process. The resulting price is great, but it is endured
because housing is necessary.
However, there efficient industrial
solutions possible that can change that scene. We can get away from "the
way it's always been done." Let's look at just one potential option:
The material for this option is basalt, a
finely grained stone that melts at 1400 degrees Celsius. One molten it can be
cast into any form or shape one can imagine to produce building modules in a
single step in automated production with virtually no labor involved. Basalt can
also be extruded into micro-fibers for purposes of insulation which makes it
three times more efficient than asbestos. In addition, basalt is stronger than
steel by weight, lighter and non-corrosive - it doesn't rot or rust - and is
non-abrasive being nearly as hard as diamonds. And best of all, it is readily
available in huge abundance, all ready for use without pre-processing. It sits
process-ready on the ground, right on the surface. We only need nuclear power to
process it, most likely via the hydrogen fuel-cycle. Hydrogen burns sufficiently
hot, about 2000 degrees C., enough to melt basalt. The process isn't anything
new. It is already used on a tiny scale for some specialty products. The process
is limited only by the currently high energy costs.
How much do we have of this top-quality
building material available for ready use? Well, the Columbia
River Basin contains 175,000 cubic-kilometers of it. That's enough to cover
the entire USA twelve meters deep, though it represents only 1/20th of the
global deposit. India has almost three times the amount of the Columbia
River Basin in the Deccan
Traps, some 512,000 cubic km of it. And the Siberian
Traps, the largest on the planet, are estimated to be in the range of
1,700,000 cubic km to upwards of 2,300,000 cubic km. That's an infinite
amount for all practical purposes. No shortage will ever be possible.
Yes, the $2000 house is within reach, even
universally free housing. It's a matter of getting away from the property
mythology to the divine Principle, the principle of love for God and man
reflected in the principle of "the advantage of the other."
Of course the question remains, will we
see houses manufactured out of basalt in fully automated industrial processes?
Of course it will happen. It will happen simply because that's the most
efficient way for producing high quality housing. Such housing will likely come
in with a price tag of less then $2000 in total cost per house, or apartment
unit. Will we see it? Perhaps not. Today's global society is still too deeply
polluted with the slime-mold sophistry that defines human living as too
expensive. If we get out of this mode we will see houses being given away for
free, just as highways are free of charge for all to use that need them (except
for the privatized slime-mod facilities that presently clog up the economic
system such as privatized roads 'earning' profits and so forth).
The fact is, free housing is possible
right now. It would be the wises step for any society to take. Money really
isn't the real factor, even in the present world. A single B-2 bomber of
America's Air Force costs society over two billion dollars to built. A million
houses could have been built for the equivalent amount of one single aircraft.
At the present time the USAF has 21 of these bombers in its inventory. Do you
think that 21 million new houses, given away for free (as the aircraft have
been), would eradicate the national housing shortage, slum living, and
homelessness? You bet it would, and more.
The maintenance cost and operation costs
of the B-2 program all by itself could easily cover the infrastructure costs for
the 21 million new houses. And it would create life in society instead of
killing people. It would create a new world and would revolutionize
manufacturing and upgrade the entire construction industry, and have a cultural
uplift beyond anything ever seen. It would start a renaissance beyond compare.
And that's just the beginning.
The USAF's B-1b bomber program was cheaper
than the B-2 program. It has only cost society $28 billion. The F-15 fighter
program, for which close to 900 units were built at $30 million each, has cost
another $26 billion. On that scale (equal to the financial outlay for killing
people) a new house could have been built for every needy family in North and
South America, for free. And those three aircraft projects still add up to only
minuscule amounts. The war costs incurred by the Bush administration so far tallies
up to $487 billion, running at $500 million a day. And all that society gets
for it, is a trail of corpses adding up into the millions, mostly of civilians
and children. In comparison with this utter waste that produces nothing but pain
and a liability in human damage that won't be repaired for decades, free
housing, free public transportation, and free quality education would still add
up to peanuts in comparable cost while it would secure the future of mankind as
nothing else ever has or could. (see: Financial
Value is in the Sublime)
Free high quality housing will likely
happen, and it will be free right from the beginning when society chooses to
implement the readily available technology for it. It will be done, because
quality housing is one of the most potent factors in enabling the creative and
productive potential of society. Slum living and homelessness are among the most
expensive waste of society's most precious resource -- its human potential --
with unemployment trailing as a close second. This kind of waste throws away the
divine potential.
Any meaningful economic recovery from the
current 'slime-mold' disaster misnamed an economy, would likely be built on the
most efficient processes available, such as nuclear power, sea-water
desalination, magnetic levitation transports, and basalt technologies for the
manufacturing of everything from free housing to low cost cars, furniture,
clothing, appliances, civil construction, road building, water diversion, indoor
farming. The sky is no longer the limit.
When money is deemed too expensive we are
on the wrong track.
The second most expensive waste that a
society can inflict on itself is not actually war, though war is an expensive
waste. The most expensive financial waste its found in society's reluctance to
invest in itself. Money isn't expensive at all when it is spent for productive
purposes to improve the efficiency in human living and the power of culture.
Then money becomes a wealth-creating-resource. Money is only expensive when it
is not spent for such purposes. In that case it inhibits the development of
human wealth, the divine potential, the only real wealth that is possible, that
thereby remains unrealized.
The third most expensive waste that a
society can inflict on itself is to devote a too large portion of itself to acts
of labor. All the mundane things need to be automated so that ever greater
amounts of time and energy can be devoted to cultural processes which are the
prime multipliers of the power of human labor. The Sublime in human nature is
exclusively mental, intellectual, and spiritual. The discoveries of principles,
the learning and developing of ideas, all come from there. That is where the
chief resource of society lies that drives all future development. Nuclear power
is necessary. Physical inputs are all necessary, including food, water,
clothing, transportation, and housing. But the biggest factor in the entire
equation is the cultural factor, the one factor that is most directly the
efficient expression of the Sublime nature of mankind. Nothing is more important
than that. The entire third column is related to our individual cultural and
spiritual awakening and the healing that comes with it. And that includes
emphasis on real education including self-education; to learn the art of making
discoveries; and science-education to learn the art of creating technologies,
including medical technologies; and spiritual education to develop the power of
the human genius; and education in literature, art, music, poetry, all adding
invaluably to the communicating of culture; even recreational pursuits,
recreational culture, and social cultural pursuits are necessary factors, such
as dancing. All of these are essential components of culture. Devoting financial
resources to all of these areas is not a dead-end drain, but is the chief
multiplier of the value of financial currencies. It is the principle of "the
advantage of the other" as an example of divine Principle that gives
value to human living. It is that which brings us together and puts us onto a
lateral platform with God. Herein we find the river of the third column
reflected as Mary Baker Eddy defined it: Divine Science, understood and
acknowledged, unfolding "southward, to the genial tropics, with the
Southern Cross in the skies, - the Cross of Calvary, which binds human society
into solemn union." Here the cross is not a cross of tragedy, put a
cross that was demonstrated to have no power over man.
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