The Fellowship versus the Bilderberg Group
Relating a Real World Contest for Hearts and Minds
via an Allegorical Tale
by A. Allen Butcher, Denver, Colorado, January, 2005
Foreword
The intent of the material appearing on the culturemagic.org website,
where a version of this paper will be posted, is to provide
foundations of understanding, methods of articulating, and structural
models for building lifestyles of sharing and cooperation. This paper
serves that purpose through identifying the two organizations that
this writer believes best represent the dichotomy between the values
and lifestyles of sharing and cooperation, and of possessiveness and
competition.
By relating the contest for hearts and minds between the two values
structures identified in the previous paragraph to a well known
allegorical tale of good versus evil, it may be more likely that
readers will grasp both the scale and significance of the issues
involved.
The specific motive for this writing is to create a mental
relationship in the minds of readers between a fantasy of epic
conflict and a real-world contest. The contest is between two
economic systems in the real-world, which are monetary exchange
economies and non-monetary sharing economies. Toward that goal this
paper is an introduction. For more detail see: Time Based Economics
Once Upon a Paradigm…
In our time of increasing privatization of institutions of mutual aid
by governmental agencies and nonprofit organizations, such as in the
health care industry, the proposals for social security, and the
continuing assault on education, we are seeing the power of the ideals
of possessiveness and of competition displacing the ideals of sharing
and cooperation.
On the individual level, the trend in industrial, service and
information-based economies is toward people living alone, with
single-parenting becoming increasingly common. In the United States
the 2000 census shows that just over 26% of all households are now of
people living alone, without children present (14% women, 11% men).
The number of single-parent families in 2003 was 32% of all families
with children (26% single-women and 6% single-men family households).
The number of classic nuclear-family households (father, mother and
children) has been declining from 87% of all families in 1970 to 68%
in 2003, although the drop has been leveling off since 1995. (See:
source and source )
Even for the American Dream nuclear family, the African proverb of "it
takes a village to raise a child" can be an impossible dream, a
utopian ideal, far from the reality of the suburban commuter
lifestyle. The simple, human-scale village has been lost by enclosure
of the commons and the commoditization of everything that families
used to do for themselves or together as extended families,
neighborhoods and small towns.
It isn't just simple proximity that makes a "community," it is
interactions of residents, especially in the context of some kind of
commons, along with mutual aid and forms of local self-reliance, that
creates community.
The typical housing development since the Second
World War, whether tract development, apartment or condominium
complex, has tended to emphasize privacy over community, and the loss
has impacted our quality of life in many ways from the growing
prevalence of violence, domestic and otherwise, the increase in
stress, depression and a corresponding reliance upon medications, and
a range of other problems experienced by adults and children, not to
mention environmental problems.
It is interesting to see, perhaps partly in response to the desire for
some kind of community (not to discount the motive of economic
necessity), that the number of non-family, non-related households is
increasing. The Census Bureau defines a "nonfamily household" as
either a person living alone or a "householder who shares the home
with nonrelatives only; for example, boarders or roommates," this
latter household construct being called "other nonfamily."
And the
increase in the number of "other nonfamily" households is from 1.7% in
1970 to 5.7% in 2000 (see resource citations above). With the
prevalence of "other nonfamily" households increasing, the question is
when is such a group merely a circumstantial community, living
together by chance or out of necessity, and when is it an intentional
community, deliberately forming a society based upon common affinities
and mutual-aid?
The idea of community has been lost as we've tended to pursue other
values. Individual freedom and independence from the responsibility
for maintaining any community has a predictable outcome. Yet changing
times lead to cultural innovations in response to the needs and
opportunities of the day.
In the past the village community or the neighborhood was
circumstantial in nature. People happened to live in proximity by
chance, more than by choice. Today, with multiple immediate and
ongoing communication channels we have increasing methods and
opportunities for finding and choosing those with whom we most like to
associate, focus upon commonalities of values, interests and
lifestyle, and deliberately build community.
As we seek we may find others willing and able to make commitments to
collectively building intentionality into our lives, thereby
displacing the circumstantial nature of a cultural system which breaks
down community and results in the atomization of society, with
cultural designs expressing the values of sharing and of cooperation.
The Allegorical Coin
Mere circumstantial community is created and maintained by an economic
system based upon the profit motive, emphasizing possessiveness and
competition. To help in understanding this dynamic, take a quarter
out of your pocket and consider for a moment its mass in your hand,
notice how shiny it is, the imprint upon it and its inscriptions.
Think for a moment about what it represents in your life. What power
do you give the system, of which a quarter is one small
representation, over the choices you make in life? Where is the
balance between how you use that system to create and maintain the
lifestyle of your choice, versus how it causes you to arrange your
life in service to its imperatives?
How precious is this monetary system to us, as it promises freedom
while it binds us to a global economic reality that few of us, if any,
really understand.
In response to a challenge by spiritual authorities of the day about
paying taxes, Jesus Christ once had his audience consider the imprint
upon the coin of their day. Jesus made the distinction between
individuals serving as appropriate both the temporal authorities'
systems via its coin and taxation, and individuals serving the
spiritual ideals and beliefs that they all shared. He made clear that
we live in two different worlds, the material and the spiritual and
that each affirms different imperatives.
That remains an important
lesson for today, part of which may be interpreted for the purposes of
this paper as being, if we want community in addition to housing and
family, our status in two separate cultures must be carefully balanced
and maintained. Those two cultures are the
possessive/competitive-based monetary culture and the
sharing/cooperation-based non-monetary culture.
How we manage the balance between possessive isolation and sharing
community in our lives remains a personal choice, and for many of us
the choice is compartmentalization. Our material values are kept
separate from our spiritual values, and in practice if not intent the
balance between the two may increasingly, overwhelmingly, emphasize
material over spiritual.
How can we reverse that trend, in order to
accommodate community in our lives? By what spiritual awareness and
practice, what art or craft or lifestyle can we emphasize sharing and
cooperation over possessiveness and competition?
The spiritual institutions built upon the life and teachings of Christ
have only accommodated themselves to the monetary system, beginning
with Christianity becoming a state religion, much later with Catholic
complicity with fascism, and now with Protestant complicity with
global monetary economics. For many Christians the obvious answer
since the time of Christ has been Christian intentional community, yet
the question remains of how to build community, whether Christian or
any other.
The challenge of the coin of today is not so much taxes as it is the
service of debt. Through advertising and consumer culture we are
enticed into making purchases on credit, the long-term cost of which
can be much more than the original purchase. This is the binding
mechanism of the economic system represented by the coins we carry in
our pockets.
And the more we are controlled by debt, the more we seek
to rise within the system to be among those who control other's lives
in service of our own economic fortunes. It's an insidious system,
and it's not just consumer debt, it's also the problem of rent and the
landlord-tenant as well as the landowner-mortgage company economic
relationships.
The credit reporting bureaus and their formulas for assigning our
credit scores have an amazing degree of control over our lives. And
if we haven't been paying attention to that, such neglect can result
in problems for us. Our use of credit cards offers intimate details
of our lives to anyone with access to those financial records. It's
an all-seeing system that we serve, it's a matrix of surveillance and
reporting that seeks to determine our world view, and everything is
twisted or spun in service to the monetary economic matrix, from
scientific data to electoral voting systems to spiritual beliefs and
expression.
It may not be possible for any one religious faith or any ethical
system of belief to stand alone in advocating sharing and cooperation
in opposition to the possessive and competitive values of global
monetary economics. A multi-faith expression of the common values of
sharing and cooperation may be the best foundation upon which to build
a world view counter to the increasingly globalized economic system.
Yet it's not simply a question of beliefs and world views, it's the
application of ways of thinking to the actions we take in managing our
time and energy that determines whether our lives serve the values of
sharing and cooperation versus possessiveness and competition.
Light versus Darkness
We can divide these two different moral systems today between two
organizations representing the different world views or paradigms.
The older of the two is the Fellowship for Intentional Community,
originally formed in 1947 in response to the World Wars, and reformed
in the early 1980s (Fellowship for Intentional Community).
In advocating community
the Fellowship is supporting lifestyles of sharing and cooperation,
and the methods that different communities use in their organization
for affirming these values involves different forms of time economies.
( Time Based Economies).
The Bilderberg Group, also called the Bilderbergers, was formed in the
1950s (it evidently sponsors no website) originally to help protect
the West from communism. It supports lifestyles of possessiveness and
competition through the monetary system. Increasingly the Bilderberg
Group is supporting globalization of the monetary system.
As it is said that "money is the root of all evil" one can squarely
place any organization that advocates economic systems based upon
possessiveness and competition on the Dark side of contests between
good and evil, light and darkness. The terms used in describing the
monetary system including "rational self-interest" (Adam Smith) and
"comparative advantage" (David Ricardo) clearly specify selfishness
and taking advantage of others, even though there are many
rationalizations for how these may be seen as positive values. The
coins and credit cards we carry around with us tie us into the global
monetary system, and when one scans a credit card it can almost
instantly recognize and record who you are and what you are doing.
Much like the "lidless eye of Sauron" in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the
Rings," all cultures of the world are increasingly coming under the
domination of the monetary economic system, and by extension, the
Bilderberg Group.
Although it is not generally known, it may be observed that the
monetary system actually cannot function without forms of
common-ownership of property and of time economies. In fact, 43% of
all economic activity in the US is due to the combination of
government spending and the activities of nonprofit organizations,
both of which are forms of common ownership of property. 20% of the
gross national product (GDP) was federal spending and 12% of GDP was
state and local spending in 2000 (source).
In 1995
11% of GDP was by nonprofit organizations including hospitals,
schools, churches and research organizations (source) and that
percentage has been increasing according to the Internal Revenue
Service's Statistics of Income Division.
Volunteerism and donating everything from money to blood is
continually advocated, and housework and other unpaid family nurturing
processes are essential to the maintenance of the labor supply for the
monetary economic system. Add non-monetized labor and easily half of
the US economy involves common-property ownership or time-based
economics.
In short, time-based common-property economies can exist
without monetary economies yet the reverse is not true; monetary
private-property economies are dependent for their existence upon
common-property economies using taxation and donations of money along
with time-based labor-sharing systems. Yet our government is
continually working to privatize the economy and reorganize everything
under the profit motive.
Although there is a graphic of a "lidless eye" on the reverse of the
Great Seal of the United States, and printed on the dollar bill, it is
essential to not confuse this image with evil as its original intended
meaning is good. This graphic actually represents the concept of
Divine Providence and so is a positive image, as long as it refers to
individual election and respect for each person's "inner light."
Yet
just as competition and self-interest can be spun and twisted in
positive ways, so also does the monetary system justify its agenda by
using spiritual ideals. One may reject fascism just as vehemently as
one would communism (as opposed to "communalism" the form of
common-property ownership using participatory governance, as opposed
to communist authoritarianism) as neither can justify association with
anything Divine, and the potential for monetary economics to become
fascist has been realized in the past.
The problem of course is in specifying when monetary economics becomes
fascist. One determining factor is when an individual is not
permitted to remove their consent to participation in the monetary
economy and instead freely choose to give it to the sharing and
cooperative economic paradigm when ever they desire.
The problem with debt, of course is that it ties one to the monetary
system. By comparison, the problem with living and working entirely
within a time-economy is that one may accumulate little or no money
with which to leave the time-economy and become established in the
monetary economy. Fortunately, skills are transferable between the
two economies, and this facilitates individual's transition between
the two.
In most First World, market-based countries people are able
to choose to place their consent as they wish, either entirely or
partially, upon time-based economies rather than the debt-based
monetary economy. And in most such situations people are involved in
both economic systems, the global monetary system and the local
non-monetary time-based economy of their community. Here one may see
again the balance of values: sharing and possessiveness, cooperation
and competition, Light and Darkness.
If one accepts the analogy of the Fellowship for Intentional Community
as representing the fantasy role of the Fellowship of the Ring as
portrayed in the story "The Lord of the Rings," in opposition to the
Bilderberg Group in the fantasy roles of Sauron and Morgoth, each in
both cases being in conflict for the hearts, minds and lives of the
races of beings on Earth, then we can fill the rest of the fantasy
roles of the allegory. Consider:
 | Coins and credit cards in our pockets serve as the One Ring in a
Hobbit's pocket. |
| To destroy the One Ring by casting it into Mount Doom is an analogy
for removing from our minds the power that money and its values of
possessiveness and competition have upon us, enabling us to turn to
forms of time-economies supporting the values of sharing and
cooperation. Accomplishing this can be of varying degrees of
difficulty depending upon one's intellectual and emotional constitution. |
| The Fellowship of the Ring / The Fellowship for Intentional
Community. Both represent societies dedicated to building lifestyles
of freedom as opposed to domination. |
| Elves / Members of Spiritual Intentional Communities. These may be
Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, New Age, Pagan, Native American Spiritual
Communities or other. |
| Dwarves / Members of Survivalist Communities. May be isolationist
and even politically conservative (e.g., Libertarian), yet may also
resist the Dark Side. |
| Humans / Members of Secular and Multi-Faith Intentional Communities:
Ecovillages, Cohousing Communities, Community Land Trusts, Anarchist
and other Political Activist Communities, Collectives, Rainbow, Native
Tribal Cultures and others. |
| Numenorians / Members of Egalitarian Communal Societies. These are
few in number yet have much to teach and valuable aid for building
societies based upon the values of sharing and cooperation. |
| Hobbits / Those who ignore or who are oblivious to the contest of
values between the Light (sharing and cooperation) and Darkness
(possessiveness and competition), which may include average citizens,
members of the military, police or other civil servants.
This may be
due to being far removed from the actual contest, or to being
self-absorbed, or to being in denial of the contest, yet individuals
may find themselves suddenly in the thick of it of no intent of their
own, and may end up serving either the Light or the Darkness. |
| Wizards / Those who seek to understand, frame and teach the issues
involved in economic systems, whether debt-based or time-based. They
may serve either the Light or the Darkness. |
| Trolls, Goblins, Orcs, Urka-hai / Those who prey on others in any
way: thieves, predatory lenders, terrorists, etc. This includes
those serving the Darkness unwittingly. |
| Ring Wraiths / Upper and mid-level managers of the monetary economy,
such as the Federal Reserve and other central banks, the World Bank, etc. |
| Sauron and Morgoth / The Bilderberg Group, Tri-Lateral Commission
and other associations at the highest level of global monetary
economic coordination or consultation. |
| Dragons and Balrogs / Powerful natural forces hindering the work of
the Fellowship. |
| Ents and Eagles / Powerful natural forces aiding the work of the
Fellowship. |
Epilogue
Allegories have always been used to aid the explanation of ideas and
the teaching of moral principles. If one is to consider that
time-based economics offers the only complete alternative to the
possessiveness and competition of monetary economics, and that
understanding the difference is essential in devising communitarian
responses to the demographic changes at least partly resulting from
the negative aspects of the monetary economy, then devising
instructional aids based upon contemporary fantasy stories,
accompanied by census statistics about changing lifestyles, may be
helpful in the effort to increase our experience of mutual aid and of
local self-reliance.
Building intentional community out of the circumstantial culture is an
adventure. And the efforts through the ages to live by the values of
sharing and cooperation within a dominant culture of possessiveness
and competition is an epic story of classic proportions. For each
individual who accepts the journey, it can be said that one never
knows where the road to community will take us among the many side
paths and people sharing them.
Today the Fellowship offers aid, and the adventure beckons. It is our
choice, each of us mere hobbits, to close the door and continue to be
"stretched" as Bilbo described it, or to resolve to either cast away
the burden and explore the ideal of the non-monetary, time-based
lifestyle, or at least work to balance in our lives the debt-based
economy with the time-based economy.
| |
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
-- J R R Tolkien |
Notes From Windward - Index - Vol. 64
|
