Troubled Hearts Can Heal
by Marc Batko
[This article was posted on May 12, 2024. Hundreds of translated articles await you at freetranslations.foundation and freetranslations.site. Happy spring! Happy reading!]
If we come to God with hearts open for transformation, God will heal us of our prejudices and stereotypes and befriend us with the gift of salvation, wholeness and happiness in fellowship with the Messiah Jesus!
In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, people were mesmerized by the images and confused images with reality. Whoever criticized that deception was driven out of the city.
In “One-Dimensional Man,” the philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse denounced the false needs, false consciousness and alienation of his compatriots that blocked their experience of liberation and transformation. Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” and George Orwell in “1984” warned of authoritarian dystopias that create new languages and erase the memory of sociality and interdependence.
In the US, business schools expanded, the financial markets and financialization became panaceas. What was lost? What traditions were blocked and suffocated?
Peace education could have replaced military training. We could have learned from Vancouver Canada’s 26 community centers and 2014 three-structure Welcoming Center for Immigrants! Instead, Canada is never mentioned in the US corporate media as though we had nothing to learn about community centers, affordable health care, transportation, social ethics and empathy!
Leaving the coming generation with the choice of Amazon assembly lines or being Uber drivers is cynical and misanthropic! No, the market is not self-healing! Without regulation and guidance, income and wealth inequality will explode and resources will be denied the atomized and commodified people!
Vancouver Canada is like a new world or wonderland open to the new where many worlds fit. The Sky Train, a computer-operated light rail connecting Science World with New Westminster was built in 1986 (when Reagan was demagogically denouncing Sandinista Nicaragua as a threat to the world!). Now the computer-operated Canada line travels from downtown to the airport and the Evergreen line joins Port Moody and Coquitlam.
July 1 is Canada Day, the perfect time to visit Vancity on Amtrak with AirBrB helping with locating inexpensive lodging. See a city celebrating its cradle-to-grave subsidized health care! See a people proud of being Canadian and not ruled by Wall Street or the Pentagon’s permanent wars!
In 2024, the US seems like a helpless giant caught in the economic and political myths of its former unchallenged dominance and yearning for a new tap dancer, a new Fred Astaire, to entertain and distract. Billions are available for new stadiums while the burning need for teachers and nurses is left to the market. The invisible hand is invisible because it doesn’t exist, said 2001 Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. The market is not a self-healing cure-all but only a helpful and limited instrument after we decide what kind of society we want.
Neoliberalism changed the meaning of the state and human interdependence. The state serves capital and human capital must be optimized. In truth, late-stage financial capitalism is suffocating in its excesses.
Criticism, whistle-blowing, systemic/structural analyses and learning from other cultures are all proscribed. The tax avoidance industry, tax havens, stock buybacks, micro-second betting (the casino economy) and insider trading stand in the way of fair taxation. Denied corporate taxes, cities and states suffer revenue shortfalls and must choose between food assistance and housing assistance! The future of the first world is the third world, liberation theologians warned since JFK’s assassination.
Actually, neoliberalism is an indoctrination (cf. Rainer Mausfeld) based on pernicious myths of selfishness becoming selflessness. Neoliberalism confused freedom with market dependence and consigns the welfare state and social justice to the dustbin of history!
We clean the outside of the cup and leave the inside filthy! We call cheap grace an economic necessity, judge other countries elections and see the speck in our brother’s eye but not the log of militarism or tax avoidance in our own system!
How can troubled hearts be healed when we demonize rivals as enemies and make the poor and homeless invisible? Critical and independent journalism is absolutely necessary for an open, changing democracy. Celebrity news is only a distraction encouraging an apolitical and ahistorical people clueless about authoritarian neoliberalism and the advancing dystopia!
How can we know the signs of the weather but not the signs of the times?
In “Escape from Freedom,” Erich Fromm connected the desire for a strong leader with subservience and the need for social approval. In “Manufacturing Consent,” Noam Chomsky identified the filters and narrowing mechanisms that disguise the causal agents of failure, tragedy and collapse. The prophet Jeremiah walked the roads of Jerusalem with a broken jog or vase to warn disobedient Jews about the imminent destruction.
Does the US have two Know Nothing political parties? Will Trump and Biden engage in mud-throwing and name-calling and leave the speculative financial markets, the tax avoidance industry, the financialization of housing (into a speculative pot of gold), the enrichment of weapons manufacturers, the micro-second betting of the casino economy, permanent wars, and indifference to the poor, the elderly and students undiscussed? Is socialism for the rich and ruthless, spiritless capitalism for everyone else our fate?
You must be super-human to be hopeful in cynical, complacent, polarized and paralyzed America!
The fire of youth will never be put out! The state must invest massively to make up for decades of social neglect, build thousands of SROs (single resident occupancy hotels) and affordable apartments or accept the unacceptable, millions of homeless who refuse to be thrown into mega-camps!
The future must be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the present (cf. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 1960)! Courage, conversion or metanoia and enlightened consciousness are long-term challenges. Can we be non-conformists like Pope Francis who declared “This economy kills!” and warned before the Ukraine war “NATO is barking at Russia’s border”?
The US wasn’t an innocent bystander any more than Trump was a mere onlooker on January 6. Since 1999, the US has encircled Russia with military bases and ignored Russia’s legitimate security interests. On the quiet, the US has been led by blind haters of Russia and China like the neocons in The Project for an American Century “we are an empire and make our own reality to which the world must adjust.”
The US must accept its loss of hegemony and become an interdependent nation like England did. Hatred only leads to blindness. Scapegoating is not a substitute for self-criticism and accepting the new multi-polar world.
Civil society must rise up with religious and humanist communities to reverse our homemade collapse! Only a progressive taxation of corporations and the super-rich can turn skid-rows and deindustrialized wastelands into flourishing communities of transformed, interdependent people!
Resist the beginnings of soft fascism! Become post-materialists free from the endless advertisements and seductions!