The Mandate of the People and the Equality of Greed

In the liberal democracies the ideology of economic determinism has transformed the egalitarianism inherited from Christianity based on the egotistic desire for personal immortality into a new form of equality based on personal greed and envy. Christian reciprocal love was secularised and made into a legal right in the welfare states and only survives in voluntary associations and family networks. The Welfare State ideology is based on bills of Human Rights designed by lawyers and made compulsory and is nothing like Portia’s “Quality of Mercy” speech in “The Merchant of Venice”. For fifty years now the policies of all these governments has brought the Earth closer and closer to the brink of ecological and economic catastrophe.

 

The Political Machine

Undemocratic political party machines whose only skill is in winning elections need the support of undemocratic business organisations who also own or control the mass media, and loans from undemocratic international financiers to pay for their election bribes. In these consumer societies mass, compulsory, secular education, controlled by the state and financed by mass compulsory taxation, is aimed almost exclusively at producing indebted employee-consumers depending on the state for their welfare. Sophisticated advertising in the intrusive mass media is creating a frenzy of consumerist indebtedness. The General Will or Mandate of the People is driving mankind into the Pit of Hell.

 

Looking back at the origins of individualism, the legacy of St Paul’s radical interpretation of the message of Jesus, we can see how much it has changed during the past thousand years together with the political, economic and technological institutions in Europe. The original incentive for breaking out of the old world of inherited status and family gods was the need for a radical new explanation of the meaning of life needed to cope with the chaotic mix of cultures and beliefs that characterised the later stages of the widespread Roman Empire linked only by a distant god/emperor. The promise of immortal life after death was made for all people, man and woman, freeman and slave. This was conditional only on the vital importance of reciprocal love for all and the acceptance that a man/god had set the example of such love by deliberately sacrificing himself through an ignoble and excruciating death.