Rest Assured

As obnoxious and volatile as he may be, Donald Trump is not the end of the world. Cooler heads will prevail--not in the United States, with its religion of Disneyanity and culture of self-delusion--but rather in China.

While the hollow American empire has been bombing the daylights out of everyone it finds threatening to "the New World Order," the Chinese have been quietly fanning out around the globe cutting deals and building economic relationships of dependency.

This is because they’ve read their Marx carefully and understand that, before it collapses, capitalism shifts the world’s wealth and resources to the capitalists. That’s why they have become arch-capitalists: not because they think Jesus would have wanted it that way (an American delusion) but because they see the endgame and are preparing for the next big meltdown. For they also know that capitalism has repeatedly demonstrated itself to be an unstable system: without rationalized bureaucratic intervention, it lurches along in bi-polar fashion from boom-time to bust. So, when the next big bust finally comes, the Chinese plan to be sitting pretty. In the meantime, they are enjoying the benefits of Marxian materialism—though in a way that Marx himself, prophetic moralist that he was, would never have approved.

I doubt the next great meltdown will happen in my own lifetime; I suspect that we are still a couple of generations away. If history is any guide (and, unfortunately, it's our only guide), things can get far more dystopic than they are at present. And they probably will. American fascism will eventually wake up to the success of Chinese pragmatic Marxism and, in the name of all that's holy (i.e., a bigger slice of the global economic pie), start spoiling for a fight. What will come of that confrontation I cannot say. Trump's muddle-headed tariff policy is an early indication of American discomfort with Chinese success.

In the interim, however, the human race will hunker down deeper in its accustomed forms of self-delusion.

It is important to stress that we--ordinary human beings, cogs in the wheel--are not without options in this matter. We can follow the crowd and cultivate our own self-delusions or we can embrace the Near Eastern prophetic inheritance and model a better way—not looking for “results” (that’s so American)—but on principle. We can cultivate a subterranean counter-culture dedicated to something along the lines of Jack R. Lundbom's "a better righteousness."



As I say, we should not enter upon such a course hoping to turn the historical tide (though, of course, despite its remoteness as a possibility, that could happen); rather, we should do it as representatives of a worthy--if losing--cause. We should do it, in other words, because we wish to assert our personal integrity by conducting ourselves as class acts.

And the god alone knows best.