Future Faith

About Future Faith

A podcast, newsletter, and publication for followers of The Way (and friendly haters) about how to live faithfully in the age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance. jaredbrock.substack.com (https://jaredbrock.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Jared Brock

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

25 Aug 2021

Latest episode

22 Nov 2021

Latest episodes

14 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   22 Nov 2021

   Interview: Mark Sayers on China, Crypto, Politics, the Future, and the Church

   Hi family, We’re shaking things up on Future Faith today— I’m hosting an interview with Melbourne’s Mark Sayers, author of a half-dozen books and partner-in-crime with John Mark Comer on the This Cultural Moment (https://thisculturalmoment.com/) podcast. Grab a coffee or tea and find an hour to listen to where culture and the church are likely headed. (You can also watch the video version below.) If you’d like to win a free copy of Mark’s newest book, click enter here (https://kingsumo.com/g/1unoii/mark-sayers-book-giveaway). Since this is such an important conversation, please consider forwarding this email to the leaders in your life. And if you’re new to Future Faith, welcome! Subscriptions are free: Watch on Youtube: Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   8 Nov 2021

   How Corporations Kill Communities

   Every Sunday morning before church for several years, my friends and I used to gather at Locke Street Bakery on Locke Street in Hamilton. The bagels were amazing. Literally handmade. Boiled and fire-baked right before our eyes. Slathered with homemade cream cheese, smoked salmon, the works. Served by women in their forties and fifties who we knew by name. LSB was a blue-collar institution in a run-down neighborhood, and for decades it faithfully served its equally faithful clientele. LSB was so good, in fact, that it started attracting other local businesses. A funky hair salon opened across the street. A butcher shop did the same. A bookshop. A florist. And then, one day — once all the signs suggested this neighborhood was about to pop — Starbucks moved into the neighborhood. It was all downhill from there. Corporations can’t create culture. Corporations aren’t real. They’re just legal fictions; anti-human institutions that live forever, have more rights than people, and exist solely to extract wealth from employees, suppliers, consumers, and taxpayers. Corporations can’t and don’t create culture because culture is natural, organic, biological, creative. It’s why people use Airbnb/steal real family homes (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/open-letter-to-airbnb) instead of staying at hotels. Marriott can’t fake home. It’s why all the top restaurants in the world aren’t chains. Real human chefs surprise and delight patrons with new and living flavors. McDonald’s and Starbucks, on the other hand, are continually “innovating,” but it all tastes roughly the same because the bottom line goal isn’t creative expression, it’s profit. If you’ve ever been to a corporate “community event” or witnessed a corporate-created “grassroots campaign,” you know exactly what I mean. Everything’s a bit sanitized and clean and proper and nice and… off. That’s because corporations aren’t relational — they’re transactional. They can’t give freely and creatively. Their legal fiduciary reason for existence is to take. And human beings can smell it from a mile away. The Corporate Colonization Cycle Because corporations can’t create culture, they have to play succubus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succubus) to a living host, hoovering resources out of fledgling local ecosystems. To put it another way, corporations have to find real culture creators who are building meaningful neighborhoods, and then slip in their stores to get in on the action before the culture-creators get pushed out and move elsewhere. Unlike one-of-a-kind local businesses that keep 100% of their profits spinning in their neighborhood and attract outside money, multinationals do the opposite: They siphon money from local communities to faraway elite shareholders, and make everywhere so similar and boring that it drives people away from once-thriving pockets of real culture. In the case of Starbucks and hundreds of other multinational monster brands, they literally have teams of people who research up-and-coming areas to determine the best place to install their wealth-extracting hoses. The corporate colonization cycle happens all over the world: * Ernest Hemingway shops at a bookstore, and suddenly Shakespeare and Co (https://www.instagram.com/shakespeareandcoparis/). is a lifeless global brand. * Mennonites create St. Jacob’s Farmer’s Market, then Walmart builds just feet across the county line to benefit from all the visitors. * A trunkmaker named Louis Vuitton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Vuitton_%28designer%29) crafted high-quality bags, now a hyper-capitalist billionaire (http://Louis%20Vuitton) leverages the name to buy out seventy competitor brands. * Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre chatted philosophy at a run-down restaurant, now Café de Flores (https://cafedeflore.fr/?lang=en) is overrun by celebrities and narcissistic Instagramers. * Two centuries ago, Vincent Van Gogh used a certain sketchbook made of moleskin, and in 1997 an Italian papermaker created an overpriced knock-off version (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moleskine) that’s now owned by a Belgian glass repair company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Ieteren). The corporate colonization cycle is simple and heartbreaking: People create culture → Corporations kill culture. As Andy Crouch so eloquently points out in his book Culture Making (https://andy-crouch.com/#section-Culture-Making): “It is not enough to condemn culture. Nor is it sufficient merely to critique culture or to copy culture. Most of the time, we just consume culture. But the only way to change culture is to create culture. For too long, Christians have had an insufficient view of culture and have waged misguided “culture wars.” But we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators that God designed us to be. Culture is what we make of the world, both in creating cultural artifacts as well as in making sense of the world around us. By making chairs and omelets, languages and laws, we participate in the good work of culture making.” Clearly, we are living in an anti-culture. By definition, an individualist culture or a corporatist culture is an anti-culture. But who on earth is better at building de-commodified cultures than followers of Jesus? We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Sadly, most modern “churches” have actually adopted the corporate model, and are now little more than nationally-registered charities seen more for who they hate than who they help. In Jeremiah 29:7, Yahweh tells the Israelite captives in Babylon to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.” We Christians are, of course, all living in exile in a foreign land, and like the ancient Israelites, are awaiting our deliverance and our true home. But in the meantime, let’s culture-make. This means contributing, not consuming or colonizing or extracting. Let’s build communities and companies and villages and cities and countries that look nothing like their secularist-individualist counterparts. Let’s give the world a glimpse of what heaven might be like. Here’s Andy Crouch again: “So do you want to make culture? Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in one another’s lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless. Find some partners in the wild and wonderful world beyond church doors. And then, together, make something of the world.” After Starbucks moved to Locke Street, everything changed. House prices tripled, driving out the working poor. Antique shops bloomed like mold on week-old bread. Airbnbs popped up like brain tumors. The streets got cleaner, safer, more sanitized. Surveillance cameras showed up in shop windows. Pretty soon, crowds of aging female shoppers arrived, all looking to be part of this exciting new “neighborhood.” Little did the tourists know as they ordered their flat whites at Starbucks, but Locke Street had already died. All the real culture-creators had moved to James Street and Ottawa Street and Cannon Street. And, after serving as the neighborhood’s beating heart and soul for decades, Locke Street Bakery closed. It got bought out by a capitalist couple who moved the bakery to a lifeless warehouse in the suburbs and tried to make LSB a brand to sell in stores. All those sweet bagel-serving women were fired. (I miss you, Sue.) When the capitalists eventually realized that no one was interested in frozen bagels, they turned the former storefront into a lifeless vegan cafe staffed with why-are-you-even-talking-to-me Millennials. Ironically, they called the restaurant Democracy. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   2 Nov 2021

   "You Will Own Nothing And Be Happy" Is Just Feudalism 2.0

   The elites hate you. It’s not personal. They just do. Some think the elites are just indifferent to us, but they aren’t. The words “love” and “hate” are not merely theoretical notions — they are verbs. Elites hated your ancestors, too. Whether your ancestors were African slaves in the New World (especially in Brazil (http://blog.yalebooks.com/2016/11/21/slave-trade-u-s-brazil-comparisons-connections/)), or serfs under the British aristocracy, or peasants under the Russian Tsars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia), or slaves under the Chinese dynasties (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_China#Ancient), elites have extracted time and wealth from your family since before recorded history. Until essentially the end of World War I, elites owned everything. Take, for instance, the East India Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company). A staff of 35 people controlled the fate of more than 100 million Indians from a five-window office in London. Lack of ownership for the masses — that was the problem. (Well, you know, aside from the fact that the heart is desperately wicked, as Jeremiah points out.) Whenever elites own everything, everyone else is shackled to horrible jobs just to survive, while the elites live in obscene luxury (https://survivingtomorrow.org/jeff-bezoss-500-million-superyacht-proves-we-need-an-obscenity-tax-daad4a4dbe25) with no thought to the misery and suffering of the masses. Sound familiar? In the wake of the global pandemic, today’s elites are taking back the planet they believe rightfully belongs to them, and putting the rest of us back where they believe we belong: In economic chains. The Great Reset In January 2021, the hyper-elitist World Economic Forum — hosted by Prince Charles and sponsored by glowing anti-democratic monopolists including Blackrock and JPMorgan (https://www.weforum.org/partners#search) — held its 50th annual meeting from the Alpine slopes of Davos, Switzerland. The theme was The Great Reset (https://www.weforum.org/great-reset), a proposal to rebuild the economy “sustainably” in the wake of COVID-19. Right. Even billionaire-obsessed Forbes Magazine (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/2020/11/30/a-great-reset-is-coming-but-not-for-capitalism/) had to admit their agenda was “another example of wealthy, powerful elites salving their consciences with faux efforts to help the masses, and in the process make themselves even wealthier and more powerful.” In the WEF video 8 Predictions For The World In 2030 (https://archive.org/details/8-predictions-for-the-world-in-2030), the very first prediction is: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” As the WEF explained on its website (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/8-predictions-for-the-world-in-2030/): [By 2030] all products will have become services. “I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.” Shopping is a distant memory in the city of 2030, whose inhabitants have cracked clean energy and borrow what they need on demand. It sounds utopian, until she mentions that her every move is tracked and outside the city live swathes of discontents, the ultimate depiction of a society split in two. Notice the implicit threat towards the end? Play ball or suffer. And if the elites have their way, you won’t own your own underwear in nine years or less. Slavery by another name This, of course, begs the question: If we won’t own anything… who will? The answer is obvious: The elites will. And they’ll rent it back to us for top dollar. Whatever “the market (https://survivingtomorrow.org/let-the-market-decide-is-the-stupidest-phrase-in-human-history-b1fd7c7d0ae8)” can bear. But obviously, what the market can bear and what the people can bear are two different things entirely. Interestingly, a societal structure in which the vast majority own nothing and have to work for elites just to stay alive already has a name: It’s called feudalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism). Feudalism 2.0 Have you noticed that the economy is rapidly shape-shifting? During the pandemic, billionaires added more than $5.5 trillion (https://survivingtomorrow.org/the-global-economy-is-working-perfectly-cfc19da82f8) to their net worth. If you chart the trajectory and do the math, you’ll discover elites will control the entire global economy within our lifetime (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/infinite-wealth). Sadly, the goal of today’s elites is the same as their ancestors: To enslave the world in order to extract the maximum amount of time and wealth from every living being. Ownership matters Without ownership, America’s 115,656,681 renters (https://www.rentalprotectionagency.com/rental-statistics.php) are at the whims of cruel land-lorders and Airbnb takeovers (https://survivingtomorrow.org/people-dont-rent-because-they-re-broke-they-re-broke-because-they-rent-292c16b83fa4). Without ownership, all of Tesla’s 70,000 employees miss out on their $14 million stake in the company they created, while Elon Musk makes $36 billion in a single day (https://survivingtomorrow.org/tesla-is-the-worst-investment-in-the-world-629a521e1314). Without ownership, millions of Walmart employees struggle to feed their families, while the billionaire Walton family enjoys corporate socialism on an unprecedented scale (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/walmart). Without ownership, people pay ever-increasing gas prices to get to work, the bottom billion go to bed hungry because of the slightest increase in grain prices, women and children prostitute their bodies to make ends me, and a million people globally move into slums every single day. Without ownership, we don’t get to own stuff. Not our houses, cars, clothes, music, movies, furniture, appliances, or books. Everything becomes pay-per-use. And if you can’t pay, you don’t get to use it. No matter what it is. Without ownership, every single one of us lives and dies by the market: * When the price of energy spikes 180X (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis) during a Texas blizzard, you can either freeze to death or take on a lifetime of debt. * When the price of housing rises to $10 million in our lifetime (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/real-estate-bubble), you can live on the streets or work three underpaid jobs just to keep a rotting roof over your head. * When your child develops a life-threatening condition and private health insurance denies part or all of your claim, you can let your kid die or declare bankruptcy along with hundreds of thousands of other American families every single year (https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/more-than-half-of-us-adults-worry-about-medical-bankruptcy-debt/ar-BB1atS0x). * When the market price of water moves beyond what you can afford (due to systemic inequalities beyond your control) the CEO of Nestlé thinks you don’t deserve to drink water (https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/qb4fs0/here_is_the_ceo_of_nestle_complaining_about/). Without ownership, people don’t have stakes in the game. They aren’t invested. They become rogue actors, prone to dissent and violence and chaos. And why not? They didn’t sign up to play real-life monopoly (https://survivingtomorrow.org/monopoly-isnt-a-game-it-s-a-prophecy-a3644ad09a92). Why not smash the board and shatter the pieces? The end game You’re probably wondering… What’s the point of Feudalism 2.0? Is it really worth the hassle of re-taking total ownership of the global economy and forcing the masses back into serfdom? It’s not like it’ll win you friends, make you happy, or let you live forever. So why bother? Because elites are sad, broken, and delusional. They think that adding extra zeroes on their net worth will somehow give them peace of mind, contentment, true friendship, love, respect, and life purpose. And because owning the world can’t and won’t satisfy, once the masses are crushed, elites will continue their bloody game of thrones until the day they die. In a winner-take-all world, only one person can win. The irony of ownership Christians, of course, don’t believe in human ownership at all. It’s absurd to us that something as temporary as a homo sapien thinks they can own something so “permanent” as a piece of a planet. We know that God owns everything. And that we’re just stewards. Our mission is to take care of everything and everyone; to give Him all the glory; to live out His will and calling; to proclaim the good news; to make life on earth as it is in heaven and let His kingdom come in our lives and families and cities and nations. When hundreds of millions of Christians do this, everything changes. The presence of God floods the earth. Justice rolls down like a mighty tide. Grace unites enemies. Truth gets a seat at the table. People become wildly generous. Instead of competing, people start cooperating and sharing life and resources as though they share a common father and a common inheritance. It’s exactly the opposite of what the elites want. It’s time to go to war with the elites There are three earthly things we can do to resist the great reset. And remember, if they have their way, it’s less than nine years until you won’t own your underwear. 1. Vote with your time and money The polls can’t and won’t save you from the corporations that control Congress. We have to bankrupt them (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/walmart). The only way to do that is to stop giving them your money. No more shopping, no more banking, no more enriching predator corporations. Go local and independent. Support Christian businesses. Start Christian businesses. Invest in Christian businesses. (You can also join the national strike that’s currently underway, refusing to contribute your time and talent to enrich multinational extractors.) 2. Amass owned assets, help others do the same, and never sell I’m talking productive businesses, houses, land, building supplies, water sources, power generation, renewable lumber, animals, seeds. Real wealth. Just be sure to check your stock portfolio and cleanse it of all unrighteousness (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/p/christian-economic-sin). And while you’re at it, download every movie and song that you ever hope to watch/listen to more than twice. Otherwise, you’ll be forced to rent these things for top dollar, and in doing so, further enrich the most corrupt institutions and people on earth. And isn’t one of our jobs as Christians to participate in as little evil as possible? 3. Get offline and build real relationships with real people We need to build resilient micro-societies. And modern monasteries (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/p/monastery). And cities. And countries — entirely new anti-corporate, pro-commons sovereignties. We need more community. We need more friends. We need more family. When Feudalism 2.0 takes over the economy, we serfs are going to need each other. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

4. 

   1 Nov 2021

   The World Needs Far Less Facebook, Not More by a Different Name

   Last week, someone offered to pay me $500 to write a short Medium article about their new NFT startup. That’s a lot of money for someone with a brand new baby at home (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/reflections-on-fatherhood). The company “sends” its “community” on a different digital “travel experience” each month. One month everyone will digitally attend Coachella or Burning Man, another time they’ll go to the Superbowl or the NBA Finals. It’s a really cool idea, until you think about it for like four seconds. I wrote back: “Dear [so and so]. Sorry to say I can’t support your project. It’s anti-human. If you’ve read much of my blog, you know that I’m deeply pro-human. Biological. Offline. Together. [Your company] separates people. It keeps them from going on real adventures to real places to spend real offline time with real people. My post-college volunteering trip through Central America changed my life and made me friends for life. [Your company] is the opposite of what human beings need. I hope you’ll seriously re-think this business.” It was the easiest $500 I’ve never made. New name, same game Facebook is changing its name to Meta Platforms Inc. It’s stupid, I know. But then again, so is wasting 2.39 years (https://www.oberlo.com/blog/facebook-statistics) of waking life on Facebook, so can the average user really judge them? As most of my long-time readers know (https://survivingtomorrow.org/facebook-is-dead-it-just-doesnt-know-it-yet-614e723e9f72), I’m not a fan of the highly-addictive, extremist-breeding, time-devouring, money-gobbling, democracy-smashing, depression-inducing, hatred-boosting sludgefest that is Facebook. Now, in an attempt to distance Facebook from its endless crimes and scandals, kid billionaire/Sith lord Mark Zuckerberg has decided that burning 76,450,684 years of human life (https://www.oberlo.com/blog/facebook-statistics) each year in two dimensions is no longer enough. No, in his profit-focused mind, it’s time for Facebook’s 1.908 billion daily active users (https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-dau/) to enter the Metaverse  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse)— in other words, he wants to further separate us from each other, but this time, in virtual reality. In order to create “connection.” In order words, the lie that built Facebook is about to go exponential. The trillion-dollar vision Facebook is built on an extremely simple and profound promise: That if we will all spend more time alone staring at a screen, freely hand over our identities, and let an algorithm change our beliefs and behaviors, Facebook will deliver connection. And guess what? Facebook delivered. Extremely well: * Old classmates who’d lost touch (for a reason) suddenly knew what each other were up to. * Grandparents got to see their faraway grandbabies. * Former colleagues got to argue about who stole the election from whom. * During lockdown, everyone got to see how bored everyone else was. * Oh, and millions of couples had affairs (https://brandongaille.com/17-amazing-facebook-affairs-statistics/), with 20% of divorce cases now involving Facebook (https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/facebook-infidelity-cheating-spouses-online/story?id=12272421). So yes, we connected. But there’s a fundamental problem with Facebook’s unique selling proposition: There’s a massive difference between connection and communion. Facebook promises connection and hopes we won’t realize that connection isn’t actually what we want, need, or crave. In the same way that Americans conflate autonomy with freedom, Mark Zuckerberg conflates connection with communion. Humans don’t “connect.” We aren’t USB keys.We aren’t wifi signals.We aren’t prongs that plug into outlets. Machines connect. Humans commune. Communion I don’t know anyone who’s logged off of Facebook feeling euphoric, content, or fulfilled. Statistically speaking, most users log off either more depressed or more enraged. Facebook is like McDonald’s — it’s temporarily satisfying because of the saccharine sugar hit, but it ultimately leaves you hungry within hours, craving another hit. Communion, on the other hand, is different. When people meet face to face, magic happens. We smell each other. Hear each other without compression. We breathe in each other’s pheromones. Our breathing syncs. Our heart rates rise.Our faces flush.We really communicate.We can sense nuance, subtlety, jest.We subconsciously see each other’s pupils dilate.We touch each other, hold each other, feel each other.We know and are known. And not one advertiser, including Russian trolls and conspiracy theorists, can pay to plant 36 thoughts (https://www.gradschools.com/degree-guide/how-many-ads-do-you-see-each-day) in our heads. More of the same “The metaverse is the next frontier… From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.” — Mark Zuckerberg The metaverse is wildly overrated. It’s basically highly-addictive social media in virtual or augmented reality. That’s right — either we’ll spend our hours inside Facebook’s digital world, or Facebook will invade our physical world. Either way, its algorithms will continue to get to know us better than our family, bombarding us with ads whether we’re aware of them or not, manipulating our behavior for the betterment not of ourselves and our communities, but for the bottom-line profits of elite shareholders on the hunt for more and more Zuckerbucks. You thought Facebook wars on comment walls were bad? Now people will be able to see and scream at each other in digital town halls. The metaverse is simply yet another attempt at trying to create heaven on earth without God. It’s the kingdom without the king, the cathedral without the cornerstone. It just won’t work. Because even a shiny new metaverse will be filled with sinful human beings. In the end, it will be just more of the same. Sorry, MarkyZ. We are homo sapiens, not homo digitalis. We are proudly biological, offline, and physical. God created us this way. We were made to be together, in the flesh. Sure, God made us incredibly resilient, but we weren’t made to sit sedentarily and stare at a small square of light all day. And we definitely weren’t designed to strap a screen to our face and “live” inside an ad-filled world created by a sociopath. Christians don’t need to resist the metaverse so much as they just need to focus on our work as culture-makers in the real world. Undoubtedly, a few tech-obsessed pastors will attempt to create VR churches, but these will almost certainly fail in time. People in VR are looking to be entertained, not discipled. It would be like trying to sell haircuts in a carwash. I’m not saying we can’t and shouldn’t use technology as a way to bridge into culture and evangelize, but there comes a point when these connections need to be pulled offline into the real world in order to truly become healthy relationships. Christian parents especially need to wake up and learn to parent and disciple their children. It’s an unbelievable mistake to give anyone under eighteen a smartphone, and soon children will be pushing for a VR headset so they can “live” where all their friends do. Parents, guardians, and church leaders need to do a far better job at giving kids and teens places that help them feel they are home — with their faith family and in the presence of God. To be clear, we don’t need to try and compete with the metaverse; Christianity isn’t a “pitch,” and literally nothing competes with digital superstimuli except perhaps narcotics. We’re not offering the world a buzz — we’re living out the life that is truly life (https://biblehub.com/1_timothy/6-19.htm). And true life isn’t the metaverse. Let’s never forget that Facebook (and VR, and AR and the metaverse) were created not to improve human life and achieve widest-spread wellbeing. It was and will always be about shareholder profits. Leaked documents (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Files) have proved conclusively that Mark Zuckerberg does not care about the wellbeing of our global family. Like all of us, Mark cares above all for himself. So please lift him up in your prayers. People say that power corrupts, but I disagree. Power magnifies what’s already there. Mark Zuckerberg is just as broken and sinful as the rest of us, he’s just in a bigger spotlight, and he’s operating with more tools and weapons that impact billions of lives. As trust in Facebook Inc. continues to sink lower and lower, the Chief Exploitation Officer thinks he can rebrand as Meta Platforms Inc. and double down on a thesis that never worked in the first place. Facebook is built on the false promise that spending more time alone on screens will somehow deliver the communion we want, need, and crave. It hasn’t, won’t, can’t, and never will. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

5. 

   25 Oct 2021

   10 Signs America Is Headed for Certain Collapse

   Hello brothers and sisters, welcome to Future Faith, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about living faithfully in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for free on Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. I’m your host, Jared Brock, and today we’re going to discuss ten signs that America is headed for certain collapse. Superpowers aren’t impressive. Italy, Greece, Ethiopia, Egypt, Britain, Spain, Portugal; they’ve all ruled the world for a time before sliding back to just regular-ol’-nation status. Now it’s America’s turn. The United States is going to collapse. This isn’t a fear-mongering statement. Just a fact. Everyone knows it. Whether in five years or fifty, the days of America-as-global-superpower are numbered. In the same way that Rome pulled back its troops from Alexandria in Egypt and the Scottish borders in Britain, the American military-industrial complex will continue the work started in Afghanistan and eventually withdraw its 800 global military bases in order to make a last-ditch effort to enslave its own people in a soft-totalitarian panopticon surveillance state (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/panopticoin). And then it will collapse. Diehard nationalists insist it could never happen, but the signs of American collapse are obvious: 1. Wealth inequality American income inequality (https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/august/wealth-inequality-in-america-facts-figures) is growing, too. Higher than the Roman Empire’s (https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/us-income-inequality-ancient-rome-levels_n_1158926), in fact. The stats on wealth inequality are crazy. Please read them all (https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/). Nevermind the Gilded Age of corporate tyrants like Vanderbilt and Carnegie and Rockefeller — today’s billionaires control more wealth and political power than the monopolists of the past could ever have dreamed. Christians, of course, live by a different economic policy: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. And while extreme right-wingers are quick to shout “Communism! Socialism!” they fail to realize we’re not advocating central ownership or central control of the economy. That’s what billionaires are working on (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/infinite-wealth). 2. Debt The numbers are staggering: * America has nearly $29 trillion (https://www.investopedia.com/updates/usa-national-debt/) in federal debt. * Total consumer debt sits at $14.9 trillion (https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/). * Half a million American families are systemically forced into bankruptcy (https://medium.com/personal-finance/what-is-money-and-how-is-it-created-b82821ea3949) every year. Don’t listen to those nutty Modern Monetary Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory) boosters who think we can pile up debt forever and it will never destroy our society. The bell will toll, and it will toll for us. Don’t get me wrong, the MMTers are technically right — we can print money forever. But every unbacked printed dollar erodes trust and purchasing power. When society is built on a literal lie, it’s only a matter of time before it falls. Because only the truth can set us free. 3. Economic Instability Because of how hyper-elites have structured the economy, we’re stuck with permanent economic instability — insane asset bubbles, followed by massive crashes that hurt those who a.) didn’t benefit in the good times, and b.) suffer most in the bad times. While it’s never occurred to the corporations who control our countries, people want to live in economically stable places. Because America refuses to deliver on true, long-term economic stability for the majority, it’s no wonder we’re currently seeing a national strike (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/13/american-workers-general-strike-robert-reich), and why many of us with the power to do so have already moved overseas. 4. Homeownership in Crisis Rentership, too. I’ve been sounding the alarm on this one for a while — people have no idea the tidal wave that’s about to shatter the American middle class once and for all. House prices are going to $10 million in our lifetime (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/real-estate-bubble), and if we don’t ban for-profit residential real estate investment and overthrow the corrupt zoning boards that keep young families from building homes they can afford, we will see a houselessness crisis never witnessed before in human history (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/real-estate-bubble). There is a massive opportunity for the real-estate-rich Western church to become a global leader on affordable homeownership, but sadly, the church is asleep at the wheel. 5. Crony Corporate Politics Democracy, of course, has never existed in America (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/direct-democracy), but the corporate oligarchy now owns Congress lock, stock, and barrel, including the Federal Reserve (https://medium.com/personal-finance/what-is-money-and-how-is-it-created-b82821ea3949) which is in charge of the economy. There’s honestly no point in voting unless it’s with your money (https://survivingtomorrow.org/today-is-my-10th-anniversary-of-not-shopping-at-walmart-5aed2ac8442e). 6. Environmental Instability When I was younger, my wife and I visited Tikal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikal) in Guatemala, the New York City of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. They destroyed their environment, and then it destroyed them. It’s really simple: Nations that don’t protect people, wildlife, soil, water, and air eventually go extinct. It’s not personal, it’s science. As commenter Nikos Papakonstantinou (https://medium.com/u/fdd4b42875c) put it: You can’t eat, drink, or breathe money. It takes 1,000 years for nature to grow 3cm of topsoil, and America has managed to burn through several feet in the past century. Now, America only has sixty harvests left (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/). (An excellent book on the topic is Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7277210-empires-of-food).) Some Christians are starting to realize the importance of creation care and the huge opportunities it could afford us to connect with people on their way to God, but sadly, strong leadership has yet to emerge on this front. 7. The Vampire Economy Let’s face it, the American productive economy is dead. Most of the major brands are zombie companies that burn cash and have never been profitable (https://survivingtomorrow.org/why-do-so-many-famous-companies-lose-billions-every-year-3aa648ddc9d6) a day in their short-lived corporate lives. Rather than producing products and services of real value, corporate America is just a giant game of extractivism, a dung pile of rent-seeking skimmers who blood-suck time and wealth from the productive poor while contributing nothing of real value: * Landlords (https://survivingtomorrow.org/people-dont-rent-because-they-re-broke-they-re-broke-because-they-rent-292c16b83fa4) * Bankers (https://survivingtomorrow.org/landlords-and-bankers-are-killing-the-real-economy-61a5342c1112) * Stock investors (https://survivingtomorrow.org/the-magic-of-compound-interest-is-actually-just-wage-slavery-for-someone-else-7c98edcd0c33) * Crypto speculators (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/bitcoin) who would rather treat Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme instead of freedom money to stave off abhorrent central bank surveillance currencies. When a nation stops creating real value and starts eating itself like a snake, its days are mathematically numbered. There have been several seasons in history where Christian businesspeople have practiced nobless oblige — the obligation to help those in need, and we certainly need a renaissance of that holy task. 8. Mass Hysteria Looking at you, anti-vaxxers (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/vaccines). And Q-Anoners (https://bettermarketing.pub/qanon-is-a-brilliant-pyramid-scheme-c9e1f085c7ea). And cancel culturists. And people who vote for Republicans and Democrats. America is now filled with conspiracy theorists and people who draw the line and refuse to dialogue with people outside of their own box. This signals a total breakdown in personal understanding, civic goodwill, institutional trust, and national unity. 9. Screen Addiction The invention of the smartphone will surely go down in history as one of the most destructive pieces of technology ever invented. Homo sapiens are in no way adapted for the super-stimulus of digital outputs. Between social media, streaming, porn (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/pornography-addiction), gaming, and shopping addictions, we’re breaking our necks, frying our eyes (https://medium.com/improving-together/eye-strain-is-the-new-carpal-tunnel-ff8164f702f0), and shattering any sense of offline meaning or belonging. Just wait until Gen Z and Gen Alpha are in charge. 10. Individualism America is a culture (from the Latin cultus, where we derive the word “cult”) built on the myth of rugged individualism, of “one for me, and all for me.” It’s a dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest, winner-take-all, loser-dies-in-poverty cult where the rich prey on the poor and the masses suffer so the elites can live a little better a little longer. America is a piece of glass that has been shattered into 331 million shards, each stabbing the next in a frantic fight for survival. Only a hard fire can forge the pieces back together. It’s quite telling that the period of largest church attendance in history — and the greatest period of peace and wealth and democracy — came out of the ashes of World War II. Naturally, there are those who believe a Canadian living in Europe shouldn’t have the right to comment on America at all, but of course, those people are usually nationalists who fail to see we live in a hyper-connected world where everyone’s choices affect everyone else. The failure to understand this is yet another symptom of hyper-individualism. America is a fractured, atomized nation, with each member so hell-bent on self-actualization, obsessed with concocting a singularly unique identity, and blinded by the idea that autonomy and freedom are the same thing. Because the nation cannot fathom it shares one common freedom, it simply cannot surrender any amount of selfhood to the collective, despite the fact that human togetherness is the #1 thing correlated to human happiness. God made us for each other. The end isn’t the end All empires fall. It’s a non-negotiable. It’s just a matter of when, how, and how hard. Collapse doesn’t mean disappearance. And it doesn’t necessarily mean a total dystopian hellscape like the movie The Book of Eli. But it does mean a loss of global superpower status and all the unfair advantages that came along with it, like currency supremacy and cheap goods. It means a country seriously diminished, greatly impoverished, wracked with crime and disease and exploitation, and subject to the whims of foreign corporatists hell-bent on extraction. You know, like much of the rest of the world. Normally, my articles outline a challenge facing society and offer some proposals for how to fix it. This is one of those rare posts that just points out the macro factors that will lead to the inevitable fall of America, and how Christians simply aren’t rising to the task at hand. Collapse shouldn’t sit well with Christians, because human beings who are made in the image of God will suffer. Everyone needs to be working on solutions for challenges big and small. (And yes, peacefully turning the American landmass into a dozen or so new nations is highly preferable to a bloody second civil war.) The goal, of course, isn’t to maintain a hyper-violent military empire and coercive global economic grasp on others. It’s time for new ideas, and extremely ancient ideas, and real servant-hearted leadership, and working together. We shouldn’t mourn the loss of corporate-controlled America as the global superpower. It’s a monstrous menace to global freedom and widest-spread wellbeing. I remember attending the Catalyst Conference many years ago. Dave Ramsey was speaking, and in a moment of passion he declared, “our allegiance is to the cross, not the flag!” Our small group of Canadians cheered — and we were the only ones in an audience of ten thousand Christian leaders. To Christ-centered people, nation-states are irrelevant. Jesus couldn’t have cared less about a legal fiction called Rome. All he cared about was people, and we should do the same. Now, does that mean this is China’s century? Maybe. They already own America’s largest pork producer, and Canada’s largest dairy farm, but a third of their domestic economy is a giant real estate bubble that could seriously slow their growth. China’s rise to global super-power will all depend on their continued colonization of Africa and their ability to debt-trap the world via their Belt and Road Initiative — practicing capitalism abroad to enforce fake communism at home. Clearly, the world doesn’t need or want a conformist culture to dictate global policy. People often say that America is still the world’s “best hope for freedom.” But as billions of people who’ve endured the heavy hammer of the American military-industrial complex can attest, it’s simply not true. Modern corporate America doesn’t equal hope. No self-centered human institution can ever deliver the freedom that people truly need. That’s why the church of Jesus Christ still is and always will be the hope of the world. 1 Peter 1:25 says that “The word of the Lord will endure forever.” Do you believe it? I certainly do. As Peter said to Jesus, “To whom else shall we go? Only you have the keys to eternal life.” This world belongs to God. America is just a temporary guest in His house. But don’t worry, America itself isn’t going anywhere After all, Rome’s as gorgeous as ever. And Athens is amazing, albeit under-maintained. America the superpower is waning, but that doesn’t mean Concord Massachusetts won’t always be a gorgeous place to visit. And Texas will probably always be the BBQ capital of the world (or at least until the radical left bans meat or the radical right makes beef-raising an environmental impossibility.) And maybe Canada or Mexico will annex America and finally provide free healthcare to the poor? And if the fifty states decide to split up, which they almost certainly will in time, you never know if a united Maine and New Hampshire might rule a world in desperate need of lumber and freshwater. Or maybe we just don’t need superpowers anymore. Maybe it’s time for Tinyism (https://hankpellissier.medium.com/geo-tinyism-fusing-two-ideologies-to-advance-progressive-values-82f40f9c1e8e) and a million little democracies. It’s certainly time for Christians to start building alternative societies by the thousands, like we did for 1,700 years (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/p/monastery), places that can give the world a glimpse of the life that is truly life, and the kingdom that is and is to come. Either way, the United States of America won’t be around to see it happen. Thanks for listening to Future Faith. If you think this episode is important, please email the link to your friends or share it on social media. We are 100% follower-supported, so if you’d like to help us grow this community, please visit jaredbrock.com. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

6. 

   20 Oct 2021

   Are You Ready To Become a Monk?

   Welcome to Future Faith, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about living faithfully in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for free on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/2RBlQ0fdXjFM8YXOtjkoFs), Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/future-faith/id1583070927), and Substack: Every morning I go on a walk past a river, beside a centuries-old working millpond, into a graveyard and apple-laden church ground, and through the ruins of a twelfth-century abbey. If you walk around my village, you’ll see dozens of houses that are made of the exact same stones as the former abbey. There’s a reason for this: When Henry VIII dissolved all the monasteries and started his own church in order to self-bless his murder of innocent women, locals in my village stole the monastery’s rocks. The faded tourist sign says that the locals treated the monastery as a “convenient quarry.” A convenient quarry. That’s Christianity vs. Secularism in a nutshell, isn’t it? Because it’s inherently consumerist, post-modernity loves to harvest what Christians first cultivated: * Hospitals * Universities * Human rights * Universal basic income Secularism wants the kingdom without the king, the light without the power, the cathedral without the cornerstone. Monasteries What do you picture when you hear the word “monk?” Old men in black robes?Old women in white robes? Why not a young bearded brewer who brews beer for the glory of God?Why not a stay-at-home dad who adores children and wants to adopt a dozen orphans?Why not a working mom who erects houses for the benefit of people who would never qualify for a mortgage? What do you picture when you hear the word “monastery?” A rotting stone building, utterly detached from the world? Why not a vibrant house, street, neighborhood, village, or city? When I hear the word “monastery,” I envision an estate. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, he sold their buildings and land to whichever local elite offered the most cash. This allowed the British aristocracy to amass vast estates, with thousands of those plundered monasteries still owned by those same families to this day. (There are 144 estates (https://www.thegentlemansjournal.com/article/heres-why-everyone-wants-a-piece-of-the-scottish-highlands/) over 10,000 acres in Scotland alone.) Michelle and I have visited dozens of estates on various outings around the UK: * Chatsworth (1,822 acres, down from 200,000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatsworth_House)) invented the banana we all know and love. * Buccleuch (217,000 acres) raises 19,670 sheep, 700 cattle, 32,000 hens, and 117 red deer hinds. * Atholl (124,000 acres) hosts weddings and functions, has a trailer park, and does castle tours. * Highclere (5,000 acres) shot to fame as the shooting location for Downton Abbey. When I picture a modern monastery, I picture a not-for-profit sustainable estate — studded with dozens of villages and hundreds of people — being run by kingdom principles for kingdom purposes. The kingdom economy The poor will always be among us because the rich will always be above us. But not in the Acts 4 church, where there were “no needy people among them.” And not in today’s monasteries, either. For nearly 1,700 years, Christian monks and nuns have practiced Universal Basic Income. In my travels, I’ve visited monasteries in Greece, Italy, Spain, England, Scotland, and elsewhere. I’ve been to many of the great foundations, including Monte Cassino, Assisi, Subiaco, etc. Monasteries are the last place in Christendom that still practice koinonia, the ancient and subversive Acts 2 practice that radically set apart the early church from the rest of society. Koinonia is often translated as “community” or “fellowship,” but both are really terrible translations. “Brotherhood” and “communion” come closer, but the best description of koinonia might be “non-political spiritual communism.” From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. This isn’t forced or coerced secularist state-implemented communism. We know that doesn’t work. This is a Holy Spirit-led sharing of life. It is a communal life the world can never know or re-create. In monasteries, koinonia looks like this: Everyone works a reasonable amount of time (typically 4–6 hours each day, 5–6 days each week) and contributes 100% of the proceeds to the monastery. The abbot and his team then ensure that everyone’s needs are provided for: food, clothing, shelter, medical, soul care. No one is wealthy, but everyone is rich. The impossibility of individuality Just like biblical churches, monasteries aren’t democracies. The abbot or abbess (from “abba,” meaning father) is in charge. All the brothers or sisters put their faith in Christ and their trust in their abbot, and he is to lead them well — not as coercive politicians do, but as a true servant-hearted leader (https://christdesert.org/rule-of-st-benedict/chapter-2-qualities-of-the-abbot/). That’s why most rich Westerners — single or otherwise — will never enter a monastery. It requires submission and surrender to a communal cause. How will they know us? I wish Christians were more like Jews and Muslims. You can always spot a Jew in the crowd. She’s the one with gorgeous hair and the husband with the yarmulke. You can always spot a Muslim in the crowd. They’re the ones not eating until sundown. I’m not saying we should cover our women or face east at sunset. You know what I mean. Christians are barely discernible. There’s only ever been one marker that really separates Christians from our neighbors — unconditional love, even for those who hate us. But are we loving radically enough to make the world take notice in this attention culture? Where are all the disturbing Christians? Why don’t people leave our presence feeling deeply unsettled? Being around Christians should feel conspiratorial, revolutionary, even dangerous. After all, we serve a God who wants to change everything. There is some biblical precedence for the concept of monasticism: * Elijah fled to the desert during a time of great persecution, and communed with God until the day he was called the restore the kingdom to their heavenly king. * Yahweh sent Moses and the Israelites into forty years of desert wanderings in order to shake off the mental shackles of slavery and prepare them for life as a free people. * John the Baptist counterintuitively moved to the desert to become an evangelist and prepare the way for his cousin Jesus. * If you study the life of Jesus, note how many times Christ removed himself “to a desolate place.” Notice how all of these “monks” were incredibly connected to God and deeply invested in the renewal of the world? Notice how setting themselves apart actually allowed them to dive into culture and make a greater impact? It’s almost as though Christians are supposed to retreat in order to advance. Let’s face it: Churches haven’t been churches in a long time. Worship bands and motivational preachers and fancy buildings take precedence over sharing our wealth, living a rule of life in community, and housing the poor. It’s almost as if the monastery is a place of reformation and preparation for the next move of God in our lives and our culture. First Egypt When most people think about monasteries, they assume it’s just a retreat from “reality.” And it definitely can be that. But that wasn’t the original intention, not by a mile. Inspired by Elijah and John the Baptist, monastics like Anthony the Great (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_the_Great) renounced the brutality, injustice, and oppression of the Egyptian mega-cities and moved to the desert to practice a Christ-centered life. Pachomius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachomius_the_Great) developed the idea of monks living together, and in doing so, creating an alternate social structure to stand in sharp contrast to the rest of the world. In an age before the Internet, social media, and viral videos, more than 50,000 people joined the Egyptian desert fathers and created what became known as Cities of God. From there, the movement went viral, spreading all over the planet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monastery#Christianity). Monasteries aren’t retreats— they’re just new garden cities where the presence of God is actually welcomed. Because monastics renounce individualism and work together as humans were meant to do, it means they inevitably become places of great art and culture, both attracting outsiders and sending people back out. A nowhere always becomes a somewhere when Someone shows up. Then Italy A college student named Benedict of Nursia grew so horrified by city life in Rome that he moved to the ruins of Nero’s villa at Subiaco. Living by the simple rule of “ora et labora” (pray and work), Benedict founded twelve communities in all, laid the groundwork for Western monasticism, and single-handedly saved Western civilization from extinction. Benedict shapes every single day of our lives, and you can trace a direct line from Benedict’s communities to the faith transformation of hundreds of millions of people over the past 1,500 years. A nowhere became a somewhere when Someone showed up. Then Germany In 1722, Nicolaus Ludwig Count von Zinzendorf (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Zinzendorf) bought a huge estate from his grandmother and invited several hundred Christian refugees to build a village on a corner of his estate. The Herrnhut story (http://hiddenonesmi.com/2012/07/30/herrnhut-the-lords-watch-1727/) is now world-famous, especially the 24/7 prayer meeting that lasted for more than a century and sparked America’s Great Awakening. The community sent out hundreds of missionaries to all parts of the world, ministering to slaves in the West Indies and the Inuit in Greenland. They founded a denomination (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrnhuter_Br%C3%BCdergemeine) that still has over 1,000 congregations. They played a vital role in the salvation of John Wesley, whose ministry has impacted tens of millions of hearts. One estate — one monastery — continues to impact lives nearly three centuries later. A nowhere became a somewhere when Someone showed up. Monasticism has problems As usual, religion crept in, always ready and willing to replace real leaps of faith. The monks in many monasteries I’ve visited get up far too early, hours before the sun, as though it’s somehow “godly” to ignore the natural rhythms by which God saw fit to govern our biological bodies. Many monasteries fundamentally misunderstand prayer, spending four to six hours per day in the recitation of written chants instead of practicing a constant communion with Christ that leads to real action. Many monasteries are self-protective and entirely self-focused, completely ignoring the Scriptural call to go out to the ends of the earth — that we are the hands and feet of Christ who must go to seek and save the lost. Entrepreneurs for Jesus We are living in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance. As the hyper-elites execute their Great Reset (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset), the world is headed toward an unprecedented economic crisis. Within our lifetime, billionaires will control the global economy (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/infinite-wealth), the average house will cost $10 million (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/real-estate-bubble), and surveillance currencies (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/panopticoin) will dominate society. This new economy is creating millions of families in need of affordable shelter, climate refugees in need of resettlement, and workers in need of sustenance when they are excluded from the corporate economy. The church has a once-in-ten-generations opportunity to serve an unprecedented number of people in dire economic straights. Throughout history, monasteries have fulfilled the biblical mandate to provide food, clothing, and shelter to people in need. To fund these works of generosity and hospitality, monks and nuns have practiced sanctified stewardship for millennia: * Vatopedi Monastery (https://www.vatopedi.gr/) grows olive oil. * Himmerod Abbey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himmerod_Abbey) had a museum, art shop, cafe, guesthouse, and fishery. * Saint-Sixtus Abbey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Sixtus_Abbey) brews the best beer in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westvleteren_Brewery). * Caldey Abbey (https://caldeyislandwales.com/) makes perfume. * Ampleforth Abbey (https://www.ampleforth.org.uk/) presses cider. * Prinknash Abbey (https://www.prinknashabbey.org/) blends incense. * Little Portion Hermitage (https://littleportionbakery.org/) runs a bakery. * Cîteaux Abbey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%AEteaux_Abbey) ages cheese and makes caramels. * Buckfast Abbey (https://www.buckfast.org.uk/) hosts conferences and raises honeybees. * Lindores Abbey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindores_Abbey) invented scotch. Depending on the skills and passions of the monks and nuns at each monastery, the community soon becomes self-sufficient —  and because they live so simply, don’t have a profit motive, and share everything in common, they soon have a surplus to share with a world in need. Questions to prayerfully consider Where will God show up to meet real needs next? Will we be the ones to welcome Him in? My friend Andrew says that his job in life is to transfer as much earthly money into eternal value as possible. It begs some questions: * If all your needs were met and you didn’t have to work a job to pay bills, what would you do for the kingdom? * How would you contribute to the kingdom if you didn’t have to waste a moment working to pay rent or a mortgage? * How would you invest your time in eternity if you didn’t have to enrich a land-lorder or a banker? Most people miss their calling because they get mired down trying to pay bills. God can and often does use us when we’re working those dead-end jobs, but let’s not pretend we weren’t all made for more. You are unique in all of human history, with gifts and talents and strengths to contribute to the world that no money-hungry business could ever extract. “Vocation” comes from the Latin for “voice.” Does your work speak of who you are and whose you are? You are worth more than your paycheck We can survive without bankers and landlords, but we can’t live without farmers and mothers. So why do the former get paid so much more than the latter? Because we live in an upside-down society: * Insurance salesmen are incentivized to deny claims and let people die, while nurses suffer to keep people alive. * Fart app creators (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Fart+apps&atb=v240-1&ia=web) make millions while teachers have to buy their own chalk. * Bankers sit at a desk all day and type fake credit numbers into a screen (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/p/christians-and-money), while active workers must pay them back by creating and handing over real wealth. Sadly, most of the vocations that really matter, the ones that are incredibly humanizing, are almost entirely devalued by the monetary system: * Caring for widows/single moms * Feeding the hungry * Clothing the naked * Visiting prisoners * Being a mother or father, especially to orphans, foster kids, and at-risk teens * Sustainable organic farming, forestry, and soil production * True education (not propagandizing or teach-to-test) * Mentorship But these callings matter — really matter — in the monastery system. A vision for a modern monastery Imagine an estate. Hundreds or thousands of organic and sustainable acres under stewardship. Dozens of villages. Maybe even a garden city or two. Hundreds of families, couples, and singles by choice and by circumstance. With everyone answering a calling, practicing a real vocation, working as unto the Lord. Not one land-lorder or banker to lay waste to anyone’s time. With all profits to advancing the kingdom of heaven instead of the empire of man. A group of people setting themselves apart in order to advance the Kingdom. Like the monastic movements of the past, this one monastery could serve as a template for hundreds or thousands of others to follow — a platform for launching new and better works around the world. It’s time for Christians to make monasteries great again. A call to action The church of Christ has been a convenient quarry for secularism for the past century, and as our society now grounds itself to dust, there is an opportunity to rebuild cities of God on firm foundations with the only cornerstone that cannot be shaken. Please pray that God would send radically generous gospel patrons to fund the rebuilding efforts. Some of these city-monasteries will be family condos in high-rise towers. Some of these monasteries will be slums in hyper-cities. Some of these monasteries will dorms in universities. Some of these monasteries will be renovated abbeys and nunneries that have gone belly-up due to religion and a lack of vision. In our case, we sense ours will be some sort of village-packed eco-estate. Each of us needs to seek God’s face on the kind of set-apart monk or nun He is calling us to become. We are the hands and feet of Jesus in this world. The harvest has and always will be plentiful, but the workers are few. So let’s get to work. Thanks for listening to Future Faith. We are 100% follower-supported, so please head over to jaredbrock.com (https://www.jaredbrock.com/) to partner with us as a gospel patron. If you think this episode is important and adds value to our global church family, please email the link to your friends or share it on social media. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

7. 

   16 Oct 2021

   Why Do We Allow Infinite Wealth Accumulation?

   Jeff Bezos controls Amazon. And Whole Foods. And The Washington Post. And IMDB, Zappos, Souq, Blue Origin, Kiva Systems, Alexa, DPReview, Fabric.com, Woot, Goodreads, Twitch, Audible, Elemental, Quidsi, Annapurna Labels, Accept, Living Social, Twilio, HomeGrocer, Bill Me Later, eZiba, BankBazaar, Kozmo, Ionic, Songza, and Wine.com. Plus he has VC stakes in Lookout, Juno, Grail, Workday, Vessel, Domo, Fundbox, Stack Overflow, Everfi, Remitly, Rethink Robotics, General Fusion, MakerBot, Unity Biotech, General Assembly, Business Insider, Google, Uber, Airbnb, and Twitter. And he’s working on acquiring MGM. Plus he owns at least eight mansions and 100,000+ acres (https://nypost.com/article/jeff-bezos-houses-real-estate-portfolio/), a bunch of penis-shaped rockets (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/dear-space-obsessed-billionaires-please-stop-9928dadf5094), and a $500,000,000 hyper-yacht (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/jeff-bezoss-500-million-superyacht-proves-we-need-an-obscenity-tax-daad4a4dbe25). Bernard Arnault (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/meet-the-new-richest-man-in-the-world-5ac0468846c9) controls LVMH, which has swallowed more than seventy of its competitors, including Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, Dom Pérignon, Loius Vuitton, Moët & Chandon, Marc Jacobs, Stella McCartney, Loro Piana, Princess Yachts, Bulgari, Sephora, and Tiffany & Co. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns massive chunks of nearly fifty companies (https://www.cnbc.com/berkshire-hathaway-portfolio/) including Apple, Amazon, Amex, Bank of America, Chevron, Kraft, Mastercard, Sirius, Visa, Wells Fargo, P&G, Johnson & Johnson, Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom, GM, Merck, T-Mobile, GEICO, and Coca-Cola, which itself has eaten more than 400 competing drink companies. Blackrock, which owns a piece of 5,480 companies (https://fintel.io/i/blackrock) including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Tesla, JP Morgan, Paypal, Home Depot, Disney, Exxon, Pfizer, Pepsi, AT&T, Nike, Walmart, McDonald’s, Costco, and Netflix, just bought Reese Witherspoon’s media company for $900 million (https://twitter.com/i/events/1422561708019785735), adding to its $9 trillion Smaug-like horde. It makes you wonder when monopolists will stop growing larger and larger. And then one day it occurs to you… They will not stop until they are stopped. The facts There are now 2,755 billionaires on the planet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires), not including “royalty” and dictators. In the year 2000, they controlled less than $1 trillion. Today, they control more than $13.1 trillion. 13.5X in a generation. And they’ve grown their wealth by $5.5 trillion during the pandemic so far (https://inequality.org/great-divide/global-billionaire-pandemic-wealth-surges/). The world’s richest eight men now own more than the bottom 4 billion (https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/meet-the-8-men-who-control-half-the-worlds-wealth.html). On the flip side, there’s never been so many people experiencing suffering and deprivation in human history: * Systemic inequality pushed 200+ million people into poverty and cost women around the world at least $800 billion in lost income in 2020 (https://inequality.org/great-divide/global-billionaire-pandemic-wealth-surges/). * 690 million people go to bed hungry every night (and the number is rising by 16 million per year (https://www.actionagainsthunger.org.uk/why-hunger/world-hunger-facts).) * 5.5 million people are moving into slums per month (https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/living-on-the-edge-succeeding-in-the-slums). * 2.3 million children die (https://www.actionagainsthunger.org.uk/why-hunger/world-hunger-facts) from malnutrition every year. Clearly, there is no limit to the depth of poverty and deprivation to which our global society will allow humans to fall — never forget that millions of children are still trafficked for rape annually (https://zenodo.org/record/1259781) and that nine million people die from starvation each year (https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/losing-25000-hunger-every-day) — yet somehow elite individuals are allowed to amass unlimited plenty in a world of deprivation? It begs the question: Is it moral and right for us to allow individuals to hoard extreme wealth in the face of overwhelming widespread poverty, documented democratic subversion (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/jeff-bezos-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-politician-61991bc4f516), and environmental catastrophe? If humanity saw itself as the global family that it truly is, it would be morally impossible to not limit the amount that one family member could control while another suffered and died. “Earned” wealth It is impossible for an individual to legitimately earn a billion dollars. If someone earned $100 per hour — more than enough for anyone to live in luxurious comfort — in order to truly earn a billion dollars, they’d have to work 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for five thousand years. So how is a billion dollars actually amassed? By skimming a profit off the backs of untold others: * off the workers they employ * off the suppliers they squeeze * off the carcasses of the competitors they destroy with monopoly * off the planet they unsustainably extract from * off the governments from which they gain subsidies and advantages * off the stable societies they sell to while evading taxation * off the democracies whose rules they change at will * off the shareholders they dupe How is the ability to skim achieved? Through unfair advantage and privilege. It is impossible to “work hard, save, and invest” your way to a billion dollars. Let’s be crystal clear: billionaires don’t “create jobs.” They extract value — time, talent, creativity, effort — from others at an industrial scale. Decentralize everything Here’s a short thought experiment. Which is better: 2,755 billionaires and their $13.1 trillion, each monopolizing roughly one industry apiece and subverting democracy, or 131,000 centa-millionaires in competition? How about 1,310,000 deca-millionaires? Or 13,100,000 millionaires? 13.1 million millionaires would do far more for the economy in terms of spending, hiring, diffusing power, avoiding democratic destruction, increasing competition, and sparking innovation. Are there truly enough benefits to the global population to merit supporting the costs of maintaining billionaires? Surely not. No rational person can make the argument that 2,755 billionaires are globally preferable to having 13.1 million more millionaires, or 131 million more workers each controlling a $100K stake in the businesses wherein they constitute all of the wealth-creation. “But those poor billionaires are just rich on paper!” Sychophants for the ultra-elite are quick to cry out that most billionaires don’t actually have $1,000,000,000+ sitting in a Scrooge McDuck-style vault. Their wealth is usually tied up in shares of the companies they almost always undemocratically control. But these people don’t understand how billionaires work. Billionaires borrow colossal amounts of cheap debt against those paper shares, and let inflation devalue that debt over time. So you and I — the real taxpayers in society — end up footing the bill as the money-printing machine devalues our actual-earned money. We need a more equitable pre- (https://jaredabrock.medium.com/everyone-deserves-a-finnish-baby-box-48d7751dcc5a)distribution (https://jaredabrock.medium.com/everyone-deserves-a-finnish-baby-box-48d7751dcc5a) of ownership, wealth, and opportunity. Mathematical doom I believe — as do most of the working masses and the desperate poor — that it is morally wrong and utterly inhumane to be a billionaire whilst millions starve and billions suffer. Full stop. To paraphrase the Bible: “The poor will always be among us because the rich will always be above us.” The world and planet can’t afford to support billionaires anymore. Corporatism is a gross inefficiency and major source of economic inequality; it is anti-democracy; it is ecological unsustainability. We should replace it with an economy of sole proprietors, partnerships, cooperatives, not-for-profits, and for-benefits — all the wealth to all the workers — massively diverse, all competing and cooperating and innovating within a body of economic law that enforces ecological sustainability (as defined by biology) and economic fairness (as defined by real democracy.) If we don’t, we’re mathematically doomed. Charting our trajectory to zero When will billionaires stop amassing more wealth? The answer is clear: They won’t. Our total global wealth is currently $431 trillion (https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverwilliams1/2021/06/10/worlds-wealth-hits-half-a-quadrillion-dollars/?sh=760f77af309d). In the past twenty years, billionaires have grown their wealth by 13.5X, to $13.1 trillion, far outpacing the poor and total growth in global wealth. At their current pace, billionaires will control $176 trillion in twenty years and $2.3 quadrillion in forty. You read that right: If we do not stop them, billionaires will control the entire globe’s resources within our lifetime. From there, it’s simply a game of thrones to determine which few families will survive (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/the-hyper-elites-arent-thinking-straight-about-the-end-game-b240a9672e73). In the winner-take-all economy, elites will not stop until they are stopped. Why can’t voter-shoppers fathom this fact? The solution is frightfully simple It’s a radical idea that will be common sense to future generations: Individual private wealth must be limited. That’s right: No more billionaires. Every dollar over $1 billion in net worth will be taxed at 100% or placed in a commons trust. As one Redditor put it: Once you reach $999,999,999 we give you a plaque that says, “congratulations, you won capitalism,” and we name a dog park after you. A global Billionaire Ban will have wonderful implications for protecting democracy and making the economy more robust and fair. Obviously, democracy can argue over the exact number for our new global limit — 10 million, 100 million, even 1 billion — so long as we agree on the underlying fundamental that private wealth must have an upper limit. Older right-leaning white men will now scream “Communism! Socialism!” while failing to realize this piece is not advocating central ownership or central control of the economy. That’s what billionaires are working on. We need to reform our economic system. We need a more equitable pre- (https://jaredabrock.medium.com/everyone-deserves-a-finnish-baby-box-48d7751dcc5a)distribution (https://jaredabrock.medium.com/everyone-deserves-a-finnish-baby-box-48d7751dcc5a) of ownership, wealth, and opportunity, and we desperately need democratic limits to protect against monopoly and wealth hoarding. This isn’t optional for the survival of our species: it’s now required for the survival of all species. The Christian response to wealth inequality What’s incredibly disturbing about the wealth inequality discussion is how callous many Christians have become to the plight of the poor. As if the riches of the wealthy matter more to our God than the survival of the poor! Luke 3:11 is perhaps the most economically-convicting verse in Scripture: “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.” Clearly, God is not in favor of infinite wealth accumulation. Regardless of what reasonable limitations secularist governments place on private wealth, surely God always calls His family to a higher standard of generosity and stewardship. Mark 14:7 says that “the poor will always be among us”… but that’s only because the rich will always be above us. Do you where there weren’t any poor people? In the Acts 2 church, when those of means rejected the temptation to accumulate infinite wealth and instead sold assets to help others. And according to Acts 4:34, “There were no needy people among them.” That’s the power of Christians who actually obey Scripture… what a testament such a church would be to their community! Christians live by a principle that transcends all secular economic schemes. When it comes to finances, we express our faith with one principle: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. When we align our financial thinking with the Bible’s, we end up using all of our abilities for His glory, and He meets all of our needs, not just as individuals, but as a community. After all, unlike the individualist anti-culture in which we find ourselves, we profoundly understand that we’re all in this thing together. We need to move quickly. In the time it took you to listen to this episode, the world’s billionaires gained $62 million in wealth, while sixty people moved into slums and thirty children died of hunger (https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/people-and-poverty/hunger-and-obesity/how-many-people-die-from-hunger-each-year/story). How many more people must suffer and die before we re-structure the global economy — or at least our local church community — for widest-spread wellbeing? Thanks for listening to Future Faith. We are 100% follower-supported, so please head over to jaredbrock.com to become a gospel patron. If you think this episode is important, informative, or provocative, all I ask is that you email the link to your friends or share it on social media. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

8. 

   6 Oct 2021

   This Real Estate Bubble Won't Pop

   Hello friends, welcome to Future Faith, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about living faithfully in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for free on Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. I’m your host, Jared A. Brock, and today we’re going to discuss why the average house will cost $10 million within 50 years. But first, a personal update: I have a son! His name is Concord Thoreau Brock. Concord means “peace,” and Thoreau means “strength.” Concord is our favorite revolutionary town in America — home to the Alcotts (of Little Women fame), Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Hawthornes, and Henry David Thoreau, the father of environmentalism and philosopher whose pacifist writings inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. If you’d like to contribute to his education fund, head over to JaredBrock.com (https://jaredbrock.com/). Michelle was in labor for a brutal 38 hours, 11 of which were spent at a pub. (It’s a long and extremely British story.) She saw 28 medical personnel over 5 wards and 3 shift changes, and I recorded over four hundred 60+ second contractions. In the end, we had one 8.0 pound baby boy, the first male of eleven grandbabies in the family, and the first boy born to our church in twelve years! We are now accepting offers for a pre-arranged marriage. I’m feeling extremely grateful to God for this gorgeous little gift, and absolutely astounded by the physical strength and spiritual fortitude of Michelle to endure the whole glorious ordeal. But I’m greatly troubled by the world Concord will grow up in. If we keep in our insane trajectory… * He’ll have to compete with robots for work. * He’ll have to navigate totalitarian social credit systems and surveillance panopticoins. * He’ll face resource shortages, extreme weather events, species collapses, and massive societal strains caused by climate change refugees. * He’ll witness the complete privatization of public services in the hands of the corporatocracy, and the cessation of the charade of democracy as the world descends into corporate oligarchy. All of this will have serious implications for his faith and freedom. Of course, his Daddy and many others are doing their best to fight against all of these corruptions and injustices, but there simply aren’t enough Christians who are awake and understand the challenges that predator elites pose to human life and widespread flourishing. There simply aren’t enough Christian leaders who are willing to stand for the truth unto death and make radical contributions to the common good. In that sense, having a child amidst this corrupt corporatocracy is part of our act of resistance. It’s our declaration of hope against chance. One of Concord’s biggest challenges will be affordable shelter. House prices are currently at an all-time high, but we are not in a real estate bubble — we’re in a pricing paradigm shift (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/were-not-in-a-real-estate-bubble-38c09ddc74f9). The old paradigm: A house’s price is the maximum amount that an area’s average local buyer can afford to mortgage over 25–40 years. But because wages have flatlined and purchasing parity is the same as in 1978 (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/universal-basic-income-will-be-a-colossal-failure-deffef14ea60), the only rational explanation for this current price explosion is a giant debt bubble… right? Wrong. The new paradigm: A house’s value is now the maximum amount of annual rental income that can be extracted from it by a global investor, multiplied by maximal institutional leverage. It’s the biggest paradigm shift in the history of human shelter, and it’s the reason why the vast majority will never own a house in the future. Because our family homes are just future hedge fund investments. In 50 years, the average house will cost $10+ million. Most people think that’s impossible, but I’ll show you the exact math on how it’s going to play out. Sure, there might be more real estate price crashes, but they’ll just be bigger versions of 2008 — buying opportunities for the hyper-elites (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/the-hyper-elites-arent-thinking-straight-about-the-end-game-b240a9672e73). Even with temporary price drops, expect overall prices to continue hard up-and-to-the-right for nine major reasons. 1. Population is growing Our global family currently contains almost 7.9 billion (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/), headed to 10.5 billion within fifty years. That’s a 33% increase in the number of people who need to be housed. While this doesn’t mean house prices will automatically increase by 33%, population growth does create more demand, which will certainly increase prices significantly. 2. People are moving to cities The overall population will “only” rise by 33%, but look at the stats on where everyone is moving: Cities. 4 billion people currently live in urban areas, but that number is set to jump to 7 billion within 30 years (https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization) and will hit 8 billion in fifty. So essentially housing demand where most people live will double. What will the average house cost when twice as many people are bidding on it? 3. More people are living alone My grandma was raised in a farmhouse with a mom, dad, and a half-dozen siblings. My father-in-law was one of nine kids. Today, both of those homes probably contain less than four people. In major urban centers like New York, it’s less than 2.4 people per unit (https://wherewelive.cityofnewyork.us/explore-data/housing-conditions/) and falling. As more people live alone, we’ll need far more housing units. When there’s more demand without adequate supply, prices increase. 4. Multiple house ownership Looking at you, small-time landlords and non-resident Airbnb hosts. More than 23 million American landlords own more than one house (https://www.rentalprotectionagency.com/rental-statistics.php). That might seem like a lot, but what it actually means is that 115 million Americans (https://www.rentalprotectionagency.com/rental-statistics.php) don’t get to own a home because a wealth-extractor owns two. “Airbnb-type models altered the market irreversibly by proving on a large scale that short term rentals were more lucrative than stable long-term residents.” — Valerie Kittell 5. Housing construction isn’t keeping up Not even close. The US housing supply has been underbuilt for over a decade (https://blog.firstam.com/economics/why-the-big-short-in-housing-supply-will-remain-in-2021), and we’re building just six houses for every ten new households (https://www.redfin.com/news/were-building-6-homes-for-every-10-new-households-where-will-people-live/). Now add the fact that… 6. Building costs are soaring amidst material shortages Lumber, paint, concrete, glass, labor, land (https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-us-housing-construction-costs/)… all rising faster than average wages. We live on a finite planet with limited resources, and those resources are becoming more expensive to extract. Accordingly, constructing new houses will continue to cost more and more. 7. Real inflation is soaring It’s almost certainly 10+% per year (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/its-time-to-calculate-your-personal-inflation-rate-1b8b4537623d). And real estate always tracks with inflation. These days, in fact, shelter prices are outpacing inflation; in Canada, real estate prices are up 40% since last year (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/were-not-in-a-real-estate-bubble-38c09ddc74f9). Asset inflation in America is over 30% this year across the stock market and real estate market. Even without any of the other price-rise factors on this list, if rampant real estate inflation averages 7.5% for the next fifty years, inflation alone will send the average house price over $10 million. 8. The monopolists are here When you allow speculation and investment in residential real estate, you end up where every other capitalist sector ends up — with a handful of monopolists owning all the assets in the industry. If you study history, you see this happen with steel (Carnegie), railroads (Vanderbilt), oil (Rockefeller (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/jeff-bezos-just-pulled-a-rockefeller-13920fe403ca)), banking (JP Morgan), online retail (Jeff Bezos (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/jeff-bezoss-500-million-superyacht-proves-we-need-an-obscenity-tax-daad4a4dbe25)), luxury goods (Bernard Arnault (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/meet-the-new-richest-man-in-the-world-5ac0468846c9)), web search (Google+Youtube’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin), and so on. Monopolists will not stop until they are stopped. Obviously, up until this point in history, real estate has been a far harder market to corner because of the high upfront investment costs, but that’s changed since the invention of… 9. Outrageous leverage “A privileged class of investors are allowed to utilize the Fed and private banking system to print nearly infinite quantities of money via leverage, and use that money to out-bid first-time homebuyers who had to work for years to earn their money.” — Throop Von This is where things get truly ugly. Once monopolies form, they utilize the power of financialization to drop an economic atomic bomb on their competition. Let’s say a condo is for sale right now. * A first-time buyer can afford maybe $1,200/month, so they’re able to bid up to $250,000. * A landlord can squeeze $1,250/month in rent from a long-term tenant. If they’re expecting half their revenue to go to costs and want a 2.5% ROI plus appreciation, they’re willing to pay up to $300,000. * A non-resident Airbnb host can fetch $2,500/month in nightly rent, double the long-term landlord. So they’re willing to pay up to $600,000. * A predacious hedge fund, like all monopolies, will shave those profit margins to near-nil to destroy competition. (Amazon’s profit margin was negative (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-profit-margin) for seven years while they killed off competitors.) So the hedge fund is willing to pay up to $1,200,000 to turn your house into a vacation property, nearly five times what the average person can afford. * But here’s the really insidious move: The monopoly will partner with banks that — thanks to a corporate-controlled government that constantly prints ultra-cheap money and lets them create credit out of thin air  (https://medium.com/personal-finance/most-people-have-absolutely-no-idea-how-money-actually-works-5aa505188d29)— allow them to leverage their positions to an absurd degree. The monopoly won’t be paying $1.2 million for that house — they’ll be betting exponential house price increases unparalleled in human history. Average house prices could easily rise to $3.7+ million, likely $5+ million, perhaps even $10+ million, as every desirable location is turned into a vacation property to profit massive monopolies. It’s already happening in major cities like London and Paris, and the financialization curse spreads globally. At least it won’t affect me, right? I know what some of you are thinking. “Well that’s cool if prices rise, I already own a house so I’ll just hold onto it for a few decades and retire with ten mil!” But you’re forgetting about land tax. Land tax is currently 1–2% per year and rising. Where are you going to come up with $100,000–$200,000 in after-tax income per year to pay for it, especially when your pay is guaranteed not to keep up and a robot will replace half of all jobs within half a century? The answer is: You won’t. The only people who’ll be able to afford it are highly-leveraged institutional investors extracting top tourist dollar, likely with a corporate land tax rebate like crooked landlords already enjoy in the UK. Everyone else — the real societal contributors — will be living in highly undesirable tenements. The new economic paradigm is designed to make you a renter. If we keep on our current course, 99% of the global population will be housing insecure within a generation. According to the elitist World Economic Forum, we’ll own nothing and supposedly be happier (https://off-guardian.org/2020/11/12/own-nothing-and-be-happy-the-great-resets-vision-of-the-future/), but I don’t believe them for a second. I don’t want to live in a world where people are forced to be homeless because they can’t afford to live in a society that’s economically engineered to impoverish them. In a civil society, human necessities like shelter wouldn’t be commodified. The solution is simple We need to make it illegal to turn a passive profit off basic human necessities like shelter. There, I said it. We need to ban for-profit residential real estate investment. * Commercial real estate is another topic of conversation (but it’s a big part of the reason why bookshops and cinemas are closing and restaurants are getting more expensive — gotta support those hungry landlords.) * Not-for-profits like Indwell (https://indwell.ca/) are great. After all, even in a society with full employment at living wages (which isn’t going to happen) or a society with sustainable universal basic income (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/universal-basic-income-will-be-a-colossal-failure-deffef14ea60) (which isn’t going to happen), the bottom 10% will likely never own their own home for myriad reasons — mental illness, physical impairments, or just chronic rootlessness. But for-profit residential real estate investment? It has to be made illegal. Illegal to be a for-profit landlord.Illegal to Airbnb a non-owner-occupied house.Illegal for hedge funds to buy up neighborhoods.Illegal to financialize houses as tradeable bulk commodities. While it’s tempting to give little landlords a pass, even they must be eliminated — because financialized investors have an advantage over families, and the latter should always be prioritized in a civil society. The working class can no longer afford to support the non-contributing hyper-extractive land-lording and banking class. But don’t expect such bans to stick, of course. Hedge funds and Airbnb will continue to sue cities, states, and nations  (https://bettermarketing.pub/airbnb-is-the-next-groupon-it-just-doesnt-know-it-yet-63e429ed41a4)— and lobby-bribing and selecting puppet politicians to do their corporate will. There’s only one thing we can do: Make real estate investment wildly unprofitable There are many ways to do this: * Charge an eye-watered premium on second house purchases. Start at 250% and keep raising it until investors give up and invest in anything but residential real estate. Why should anyone be allowed to own a second house until everyone has the opportunity to buy their first? Why should a fund be able to passively extract wealth from active societal contributors? * Issue outrageously-priced landlord licenses and zoning permits for those bent on running a commercial business in a residential neighborhood. * Drastically increase tenant rights, safety standards, maintenance standards, and cleanliness standards so landlords have to continually invest more than they extract. * Zone all residential neighborhoods as owner-occupied only, so real estate investors have no choice but to allocate their capital to commercial holiday properties in commercial zones. * Start not-for-profit city, state, and federal banks that loan directly to housebuyers without the need for middle-man credit-printing banks. * Tax passive extraction income at 90+% and use the revenue to build owner-occupied houses. * Encourage young entrepreneurs to start blitz-building affordable, eco-friendly owner-occupied houses by the millions. We need to build 1 billion new houses in the next decade to keep up with population growth, so we should invest heavily in innovative startups who can help crush the house-as-investment market. * Bring a class-action lawsuit against Airbnb in every jurisdiction where they’ve stolen even one unit of family housing. We can debate the exact methods by which we eliminate for-profit residential real estate investment, so long as we understand the fundamental need to do so. We need to scrub culture clean of the notion that a house is an investment or a savings account. Houses can’t be commodities. They need to be homes. I subscribe to the radical belief that safe, healthy, adequate, and affordable shelter is a universal human right. Yes, a human right. I am aware it’s not a constitutional right. This proves America still has room to improve. The United Nations, and every nation, need to make affordable homeownership an unconditional universal human right, and make investment in residential housing illegal. If hyper-elites retaining obscene wealth (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/jeff-bezoss-500-million-superyacht-proves-we-need-an-obscenity-tax-daad4a4dbe25) matters more than the majority being able to afford shelter, it’s time for a revolution. So what should followers of Jesus do? Clearly, homelessness and shelter insecurity matter to a loving God, and should therefore matter to His church. Proverbs 19:17 says that “Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the Lord.” Conversely, Proverbs 14:31 says that “Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker.” This mathematically includes landlording and banking, but that’s a conversation for a future episode. What are we to do as shelter affordability continues to deteriorate? The answer is obvious: We are to open our homes and our lives to each other. Matthew 25:35 says that He is the least of these: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Isaiah 58:7 asks what sacrifice God accepts: “Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house?” If you have two houses, you must give away one. As Rosaria Butterfield says, “the gospel comes with a house key.” Christians need to wake up We’re sitting on trillions of dollars in real estate that sits empty six days a week. I think it’s absurd that we haven’t already moved to an Acts 2 scattered-gathered model, where most of “church” is done over meals in family homes, with weekly gathered meetings in spaces like cinemas, schools, or rental spaces. I think every church needs a housing ministry. * It could mean selling the church building and using the proceeds to build houses. * It could mean converting the church building into housing units. * It could mean fundraising to build an apartment cooperative. * It could mean helping others with down payments, or holding interest-free mortgages for them. * It could mean men’s weekends where we build new housing units in basements, attics, old barns, or backyards. * It could mean buying the closed-down cinema or big box store in your community and turning it into housing units. * It could mean investing kingdom resources in building a citadel, a village of owner-occupiers-only, with a restrictive covenant to keep it out of corporate hands forever. Every church could build a village. Every denomination could build a city. At present, a new hyper-commodification paradigm is emerging that stands in direct opposition to the human right and need to shelter. Housing-as-investment is a deeply anti-social belief that needs to be quelled if we are to thrive as a global family. I believe the Christian church needs to rise up and lead on this issue. Family homes or hedge fund investments. The paradigm that prevails is ours to decide. If you think this episode is important and adds value to our global church family, please email the link to your friends. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

9. 

   27 Sept 2021

   Should Christians Invest in Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency?

   Hello brothers and sisters, welcome to Future Faith, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about living faithfully in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance. If you’re a visual learner, head over to jaredbrock.substack.com to follow along in print. I’m your host, Jared Brock, and today we’re going to discuss whether or not Christians should invest in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. I’m in a good mood today. My freshly pressed apples are happily fermenting themselves into cider, my very pregnant wife is four days past her due-date, and my mother has just landed on the continent after nearly two years without seeing her. So it’s a good day, and I appreciate your prayers in the weeks and eighteen-or-so years ahead. I’m going to try to get a few episodes out this week, but with baby due at any moment, it’s not so much a promise as a hope. Let’s dive in, shall we? Non-wealth-backed, debt-based, government-printed paper money is the greatest scam of all time. America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, is owned by private banks (https://medium.com/personal-finance/what-is-money-and-how-is-it-created-b82821ea3949) including Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs; predatory corporations who actually pay some of their bankers to go work for the Fed. Additionally, the major banks sponsor political candidates and lobby them hard once they’re in Congress, leading to a dangerous political situation called regulatory capture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture). It’s the same in most countries — essentially, rabid foxes now rule our global henhouse. Because America is bank-captured, the richest people in history get to monopolize legal tender and pillage your wealth whenever they please. And they do. If you haven’t noticed, they’re absolutely out of control right now, having printing 80% of all American M1 money stock in existence in the past 18 months (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL) alone: All this debt-based money printing has created a tidal wave of negative consequences in our lives, and we haven’t even felt the effects of the past two years of crazy printing yet: * They’ve dangerously inflated house prices (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/this-real-estate-bubble-wont-pop-2f52f23709f8). * They’ve wildly inflated stock prices (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/tesla-is-dead-and-elon-musk-probably-knows-it-2858c86589d0). * They’ve put the world $300 trillion in debt (https://medium.com/personal-finance/the-magic-money-multiplier-effect-7802fc4e97e5). * They’ve devalued our purchasing power by debasing our legal tender. Not only does this straight-up steal money from everyone holding cash, but it discourages savings — making people less antifragile and more dependent on the state while creating an instant-gratification culture instead of one that plans for tomorrow. * They’ve locked us in an unsustainable debt+interest death spiral that requires all of us to compete against each other, and by pure mathematical necessity, heartbreakingly bankrupts more than 3,000 families (https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/personal-bankruptcy-statistics/) per day for thirty years straight. * They use their money power to set the agenda for the whole nation, spending on unending wars, toppling foreign governments, extracting wealth from poorer nations and sacrifice from their own citizens, stealing trillions of hours of human life. In total, this crime against humanity has pillaged several quadrillion dollars in real wealth from active societal contributors. Let’s not mince words: The corporate-controlled central banking money-printing scam is the biggest sin and crime in human history. Enter challenger money Given the utterly corrupt state of modern money, you can see why smart people who actually care about the sustainable long-term wellbeing of humanity started looking for a solution. One such person was Satoshi Nakamoto. We don’t know if Satoshi is a man, woman, group, or an AI, and we don’t know if he/she/they/it is even still alive. Satoshi invented a new form of digital currency that could be sent peer-to-peer, even anonymously. The system can be trusted because all transactions are automatically verified by its decentralized network and recorded in a blockchain, which is essentially a giant decentralized cryptographic spreadsheet. On January 9th, 2009, Bitcoin was born. And then greed set in Our total global wealth is currently valued at around USD$400 trillion. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins. In early 2017 (https://www.kraken.com/prices/btc-bitcoin-price-chart/usd-us-dollar?interval=All), savvy speculators did the math. If Bitcoin eventually became the global currency, each Bitcoin would be worth twenty million bucks. That’s when things went crazy. People started buying and hoarding coins. As supply constricted, the coin price rose. More people saw what was happening and jumped on board, bidding coin prices higher and higher and higher. Other people wanted to get in on the goldrush, and started making their own inferior versions of Bitcoin. Today, there are over 12,000 cryptocurrencies (https://coinmarketcap.com/) on the market. Then the pandemic hit and corrupt elites sent the money-printer into overdrive. As house and stock prices ballooned outrageously high, people like Michael Saylor (https://twitter.com/michael_saylor) realized they needed to get rid of their rapidly-devaluing $USD, but couldn’t rationally buy wildly overpriced assets either. So they turned to Bitcoin as a speculative asset, further jacking the price, attracting more speculators in search of a quick buck in hard times. As greed and FOMO set in — and all those government stimulus checks arrived — prices soared even higher. Today, Bitcoins that cost a few cents worth of electricity are now “worth” around $50,000. The total Bitcoin market cap now hovers around $1 trillion. So… should Christian invest? As my newsletter disclaimer (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/about) makes crystal clear, nothing I write is financial, legal, or tax advice. Blah blah blah, you’re an adult, do what you want to do. But I don’t think anyone should invest in Bitcoin for four major reasons: First: * It has no intrinsic value. You can’t eat it, wear it, or heat your house with it. * It is not a productive asset. It isn’t a factory that produces an item. It’s not a field that produces a crop. It’s not a firm that offers a service. * It has zero underlying value. It’s not backed by land or commodities or any other form of real useable wealth. Bitcoin is just a bunch of computer files. It’s just a distributed ledger, a fancy Excel spreadsheet. Its value is derived solely from the trust that people place in it — namely, that the price will continue to rise indefinitely and that there will always be new investors to buy out the old ones. On that standard of belief, the evidence is crystal clear (and don’t trust any online bitboy who tells you otherwise): Bitcoin is currently being treated like a Ponzi scheme (https://medium.com/personal-finance/bitcoin-is-a-giant-ponzi-scheme-ae4263008220). So if your motivation for buying Bitcoin is to buy and hoard it until the price goes up, this is deeply unethical, because someone will eventually get hurt. Currency is meant to be spent, given, or invested in producing real wealth for the world. Not hoarded. Second: God calls Christians to be good stewards of our money, and speculating in Bitcoin is a massive risk right now. Just remember what you’re actually doing when you decide to “invest” in crypto: You’re betting against the established powers. A bet on crypto is a bet against centralized violence-backed money. It’s a noble act, but an extremely risky investment strategy. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that many governments will make crypto illegal once they introduce their own totalitarian surveillance coins (https://survivingtomorrow.org/the-panopticoin-is-coming-9554bd69f62c). (See last week’s Panopticoin (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/p/panopticoin) episode for more.) Third: Christians are called to work with their hands and enjoy the fruits of their labor, not passively skim profits off the backs of others without contributing anything of real value to the world. For the same reason that gambling on the stock market isn’t moral, Christians hold themselves to a higher standard when it comes to stewarding God’s money. I have a friend who owns 36 full Bitcoins. He fully expects them to be worth $10 million apiece within a decade or two. But has he contributed $360 million in value to the world? Not at all. All he did was buy a few thousand dollars worth of digital files and waited for other people’s greed and fear to pad his bank account. Is this a God-honoring way for a Christian to amass wealth? Four: When (not if) the next recession comes — when house prices plummet, the stock market crashes, and millions lose their jobs — people will need to pull money out of assets in order to fund fiat liabilities like mortgage payments and daily expenses. What’s the most liquid asset most people have? Crypto. When millions of crypto holders desperately need fiat cash to stay afloat, expect them to reluctantly pull tens of billions from the exchanges and sink prices, if not crash questionable coins like Tether and house-of-cards operations like the DeFi and NFT markets. Wouldn’t it just be better to be generous to the poor instead of gambling in an online casino? All told, it seems to me that investing in Bitcoin is an extremely unwise and likely unethical thing to do. That said, it doesn’t mean we still shouldn’t buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. After much research and deep introspection, I have come to the conclusion that if the only two realistic options are an unfortunately hyper-individualist libertarian currency called Bitcoin versus the dystopian nightmare that is totalitarian surveillance currency, the inevitable decision for rational people is to side with the former. Humanity stands a better chance of achieving widest-spread well-being when we the people create our own money. So… what should we do with crypto? Satoshi Nakamoto made a huge mistake when launching Bitcoin. He mined about one million coins — which would sell for about $50 billion today — but he never used them. Just like the bitboy Ponzi speculators in the current market who dream of the day when Bitcoin is the world currency and they all get rich for doing nothing, Satoshi hoarded his coins instead. He just sat on them back in 2009, and all these years later, they’re still just sitting there to this very day. So what should we do with cryptocurrency? I think we should do the same thing we do with every other currency: 1. We should spend it. We need to spend crypto like crazy. Every day we treat it like a Ponzi scheme brings the whole thing nearer to the end, as corrupt governments rapidly build their own Orwellian competitor coins. We need widespread global crypto adoption as fast as possible; where every man, woman, and child on earth is spending crypto daily, and businesses are transacting in hundreds of trust-based coins, ridding the economy of trillions in toxic debt-based money. Crypto needs to be so widespread that governments should be absolutely terrified to take it away from us. That’s why we need to make crypto cheap and plentiful, spreading those satoshis as far and wide as digitally possible. 2. We should create our own cryptocurrencies I cannot believe that there aren’t any Christian cryptocurrencies out there yet! We are the largest and most networked family on the planet, and we don’t have our own micro-economies up and running? It’s insane. We have the opportunity to create sound money that can be a blessing to the planet and the poor, but when was the last time your church or denomination talked about investing in world-changing projects like this? We could create coins that are stable, free from thieving inflation, backed by real value, that are fair and trust-based instead of violence-backed, that can serve as a secure means of payment even when governments try to exclude Christians from the global economy. On a personal note, if you know any Christian technologists or investors, please send them this episode and get them to contact me via jaredbrock.com, as there’s a group of us who would love to get a God-honoring coin off the ground. 3. We should give it away. Imagine, if instead of hoarding his coins, Satoshi had sent the following text to millions of people: Hey, Here’s a free Bitcoin. Spend it. Smooches, Satoshi. You would’ve heard about crypto ten years ago if millions of people had immediately started using it in 2009. We would’ve had a ten-year jump on corrupt governments to reach global crypto adoption. Just look at El Salvador. When they made Bitcoin legal tender, they gave everyone $30 in free Bitcoin (https://news.bitcoin.com/free-bitcoin-el-salvador-giving-away-30-in-btc-to-everyone-using-government-wallet/) to get started, and 25% of the population (https://finbold.com/25-of-el-salvadors-population-1-6m-citizens-now-uses-bitcoin-wallet/) jumped on board in the first two weeks. (On the sinister flipside, China is doing the exact same thing (https://www.ledgerinsights.com/200000-free-digital-yuan-currency-china-cbdc-pilot/) to induce people into using its horrific social credit system (https://survivingtomorrow.org/are-you-ready-for-americas-social-credit-system-8f31a96a1fd0)-linked surveillance currency.) Imagine if we, as Christians, were radically generous with our coins. If the poor widow can give the very last of her wealth, just two copper pennies, then surely we can give a little more of our wealth today. We need to be generous with our money, be it dollars, pounds, euros, pesos, or Bitcoin. And our time, our possession, and our homes. As for Bitcoin, the Bible tells us to honor God with our wealth. That’s why I encourage all my listeners not to invest in any currency. Currency is supposed to be a means of payment. Currency isn’t supposed to be an investment. It’s meant to be spent, invested, and given. When it comes to cryptocurrency, we need to do that now, before money is out of our control forever (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/p/panopticoin). Luckily, our ultimate treasure is one that can never be vanquished. Governments can’t inflate it, thieves can’t steal, moths can’t eat it. My friend Andrew likes to say that his life’s work is to convert temporary money into eternal worth. That’s our ultimate call as Christians, no matter what currency we choose. If you think the Future Faith conversation is important, the best thing you can do is email this podcast to your friends right now. I publish more than 150,000 words of free content each year, and it’s radically generous supporters like you who keep it free. If you’d like to become a gospel patron, please visit jaredbrock.com. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

10. 

    21 Sept 2021

    The Panopticoin Is Coming

    Jared Brock’s Future Faith podcast is also available for free on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/2RBlQ0fdXjFM8YXOtjkoFs) and Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/future-faith/id1583070927). Hello brothers and sisters, Welcome to Future Faith, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about living faithfully in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance. Future Faith is now available for free on Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. I’m your host, Jared Brock, and today we’re going to discuss what many people think is the scariest thing in the Bible, the Revelation 13 passage that predicts a day will come when Christians will be excluded from the global economy. This episode is sponsored by Swanbitcoin. Visit www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock (http://www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock) to get $10 in free Bitcoin to spend. That’s $10 in free Bitcoin at www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock (http://www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock) Today’s episode is entitled The Panopticoin Is Coming. Let’s dive in. “The more strictly we are watched, the better we behave.” — Jeremy Bentham At some point between 1785 and 1786, while visiting his dictator-serving brother in Russia, the now-stuffed-in-a-glass box (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham#Death_and_the_auto-icon) utilitarian social engineer Jeremy Bentham started asking himself a series of questions that two centuries later are about to yield disastrous consequences for your freedom, privacy, and personal autonomy: * What if there was a way to design a prison that would allow one person to oversee the activities of thousands of inmates? * What if the watcher couldn’t be seen by the inmates, and therefore not even need be on duty at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched? * What if the surveilled inmates were coerced into working in their cells in order to stay alive? * What if the prison was named after Panoptes, a mythical Greek giant who possessed a hundred eyes? The result was the Panopticon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon). The Panopticon prison design was devilishly brilliant. The inmate cells lined the outer circular wall, with a surveillance tower in the center. The watcher could see all cells at all times and even speak to the inmates through a network of “conversation tubes,” but the inmates could never see the watcher. Bentham declared his invention was a “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.” Only a dozen or so (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/who-was-jeremy-bentham/panopticon) Panopticons were ever constructed — Fidel Castro was once imprisoned in one (http://www.hangdrumsandhandpans.com/2017/12/handpan-and-panopticon-connection.html) — but unfortunately, it created an insidious panopticon paradigm that lasts to this very day. Because a panopticon is no longer just a physical building; ultimately, it’s a system of totalitarian control. Panopticon Power Patrick Henry said, “give me liberty or give me death,” and he wasn’t being hyperbolic. He understood that humans without freedom are just inmates in a panopticon prison —without free will, we’re just dead people walking. Free will, of course, is an incredibly dangerous thing. It’s what allows us to choose God, but it’s also what allowed a small group of moneyed elites to murder Jesus in the first century A.D. Panopticons derive their ultimate power by creating a state of conscious visibility, assuring automatic obedience through coercive and anonymous power. Under the panopticon eye, people wither and die. Panopticon Today We already live in a panopticon. Anyone who owns a smartphone is being surveilled at all times. Every word spoken… Every sentence typed…Every photo and video taken…Every item purchased…Every relational connection forged…Every movement made… All tracked. The only difference between today and Bentham’s poor prisoners is that: a.) most people aren’t punished for wrongthink, wrongspeak, and wrongaction, and b.) most people aren’t conscious they’re being watched. Yet. Panopticon Tomorrow “All data is credit data, we just don’t know how to use it yet.” — Douglas Merrill, Google (https://www.newsweek.com/secretive-world-selling-data-about-you-464789) Nearly all the other pieces necessary for a modern panopticon society are already in place: * CCTV * Facial recognition * Voice recognition * Digital fingerprinting * IoT surveillance (via your fridge, car, etc.) * DNA banking * GPS tracking * Credit scoring * Non-anonymized consumer data harvesting * Biometric under-the-skin tracking * Heart rate and body heat monitoring We’ve literally never been more surveilled at any point in human history. Social cooling Panopticon culture is already changing our behavior and policing our free speech. We’re becoming more risk-averse. We’re self-censoring constantly. There’s even a term for it: Social cooling (https://www.socialcooling.com/). Have you ever not said something because you thought it would hurt your reputation Have you ever avoided posting something online for fear of reprisal at work? Have you ever hesitated to click on a link, watch a video on Youtube, or buy a book on Amazon for fear it might be tracked and come back to bite you in the future? That’s social cooling. When we let elite-controlled algorithms change our behavior in any way, we become less human. And now there’s a piece of technology coming on the market that will make everything monumentally worse: Digital surveillance currencies. Panopticoin Panopticoin: A digital currency that allows totalitarians to surveil and completely control the economic activity of their subjects. Imagine a world in which all money is digitally controlled and monitored by corporate-corrupted national governments. Yes, we already have digital $USD, but this is something else. Imagine a government-issued cryptocurrency — a digital file created from nothing by the most dangerous power-seeking sociopaths on the planet — that can be completely controlled. * They can create it at will — inflating prices, crushing purchasing power, draining wealth from productive workers to those closest to the money printer. * They can surveil every transaction — knowing exactly how you spend, where you spend, and who you know. * They can destroy it at will — if you fall out-of-bounds of the powers that be, they can delete your money, impoverishing or bankrupting you instantly. * They can exclude you from the global economy — in fact, economic exclusion is an eventuality predicted in the Bible (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+13%3A16-17&version=NIV) nearly 2,000 years ago. It’s a shocking prediction, especially when you consider that John lived in a time where most of the world was still agrarian and barely monetized. It simply wouldn’t have been possible in his day. But in a hyper-monetized global economy, there is nothing more dangerous than a surveillance currency that can be tracked, traced, devalued, or deleted at will. Sure, countries are letting bitboys have their Ponzi-like casino fun with cryptocurrencies for now, but the whole cryptoverse experiment allows them to silently watch and learn. When governments launch their own Central Bank Digital Currencies (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/central-bank-digital-currency-cbdc.asp) (CBDCs) — as conformist countries like China have already done — expect them to fully ban cryptocurrency and pair their CBDCs with Orwellian social credit systems (https://survivingtomorrow.org/are-you-ready-for-americas-social-credit-system-8f31a96a1fd0) and under-the-skin surveillance. Believe in a better tomorrow At the end of the day, it all comes down to what we believe. I believe the United Nations should enshrine into international law the illegality of social credit systems and surveillance currencies as an egregious invasion of the human right to privacy. I believe in the old-fashioned notion that everyone is legally innocent until proven guilty in a court of law by a jury of their homo sapien peers. I believe that conformity culture is anti-cultural. I believe in a future without mass surveillance. I believe in the right to make mistakes. I believe in the right to be unperfect. I believe in the right to be human. And those are just my earthly under-the-sun beliefs. I believe we are made in the image of God. I believe that God is on a mission to restore all things to Himself. I believe that God is working everything together for the good of those who are called according to His purpose. I believe that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. I believe that our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities in the spiritual realm. I believe we are to be conformed to the image of Christ, not to an algorithm or a ruling party’s opinion of what is right and good. I believe that God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power. I believe that we can resist evil, and that when we do so, it will flee. In conclusion We don’t need to live in a panopticoin world. In fact, we can go in the exact opposite direction, toward a coinified future where there are thousands of non-coercive trust-based currencies, all non-surveilled and even completely private. We can live in a world where the richest people on earth are no longer able to exploit the poorest of the poor, where the powerful have far less power over the weak, and where secularist governments no longer get to dictate whether or not you get to participate in the global economy because you refuse to believe their lies. To get there, we need to do a few major things: 1. On an earthly level, we need to vote out of office every single sociopathic corporate-captured politician who’s ever taken a single dollar in dark money. We must absolutely resist digital surveillance currencies. Maybe that means you need to run for office, or support someone in your church to do so. Perhaps you won’t get elected the first time around, but at least you’ll get to speak truth to power and help planet seeds in the communal conversation. If you’re a gospel patron or Christian of means, maybe it means you need to help fund candidates or entirely new political parties at a local, state, and national level. 2. Pray. Pray about your role in resisting evil. How are you helping to spread peace in a world of war? How are you being light in a darkening world? How are you giving hope in a society filled with hopelessness? How are you bringing peace amidst the growing threat of exploitation and control? These are questions that only you can answer, and only I can answer, when we take time to walk with God, read His word, and commune with His people. 3. Christian technologists need to go all-in on creating new God-honoring currencies. We are the largest and most networked family on the planet; we share the same Father and hold dear the same values and beliefs. If the secular world is going to go down a doomed totalitarian path, there is no reason why Spirit-filled innovators can’t use blockchain technology to protect a remnant from economic enslavement. As I said last week, it is my strong belief that Christians need to start building new currencies, new economies, and entirely new sovereignties. Churches and denominations need to wake up and re-invest their resources—not in maintaining crumbling buildings, but in building resilient communities that can survive and thrive even in the midst of global economic exclusion. If we can revolutionize our $10 trillion piece of the global economy before the surveillance coins take over the market, we’ll have a far better chance of securing our future economic freedom for the precious little time we have left on earth. Otherwise, the panopticoin is coming. If you want to help grow the Future Faith community, the best thing you can do is email this podcast to some friends and leave a 5-star review. This episode is sponsored by Swanbitcoin. Visit www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock (http://www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock) to get $10 in free Bitcoin to spend. That’s $10 in free Bitcoin at www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock (http://www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock) Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

11. 

    13 Sept 2021

    Christians and Money

    Jared Brock’s Future Faith podcast is also available for free on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/2RBlQ0fdXjFM8YXOtjkoFs) and Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/future-faith/id1583070927). Hello brothers and sisters, Welcome to Future Faith, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about living faithfully in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance. Future Faith is now available for free on Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. I’m your host, Jared Brock, and today we’re going to discuss the wildly corrupt world of modern money. Grab a coffee and a pen and paper, because it’s vitally important that Christians understand how money works so we can make it serve our vision and values instead of becoming enslaved by it. This episode is sponsored by Swanbitcoin. As you’ll discover in this episode, government fiat money is wildly corrupt… but “investing” in Bitcoin is highly risky and just turns it into a pyramid scheme. Instead, we need to SPEND and GIVE crypto to achieve rapid global adoption before centralized surveillance currencies monopolize money forever. So head over to swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock (http://www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock) to get $10 in free Bitcoin to spend. That’s $10 in free Bitcoin at swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock (http://www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock) Today’s episode is entitled Christians and Money. Are you ready? Here we go. Sixteen of Jesus’s 38 parables (https://www.envoyfinancial.com/participantresources/bible-verses-about-money-and-stewardship) involved money and wealth. Nearly 15% of everything Jesus spoke about related to money and possessions, and the only thing he talked about more was the Kingdom of God. There are over 2,300 Bible verses (https://compass1.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2350-Verses-Handout.pdf) about money. By comparison, faith and prayer are mentioned about 500 times. Clearly, the writers of the Bible knew it was important that we have a right view and understanding of money. As one pastor put it, “Our attitude toward money is an indication of where our heart is with God.” And on an everyday level, knowing what money is and where it comes from is incredibly important, as it plays a huge role in our future wealth or poverty, as well as our time and earthly freedom. Understanding money is so important that it will never be taught in schools. So let’s talk about it. What is money? It’s a simple question, but if you ask the average person, they’ll have a hard time actually explaining what modern money is, where it comes from, and how badly it’s destroying our society and advancing the plans of the enemy. Just as fish are rarely conscious that they’re swimming in water, we humans are rarely conscious that we live in a powerful financial stream that’s taking us places we don’t want to go. So let’s dive in. Or rather… dive out? What is money? Money is simply an agreement between two or more strangers to use something as a means of payment. * If 325 million Americans agree to use a tiny green rectangle of paper backed by the full might of the US military as a means of payment, that’s money. * If 100 million (https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoin-users/) mostly young adults agree to use digital bits of cryptographic code as a means of payment, that’s money. * If all my friend agree to accept IOU homebrews as a means of payment for cooking, carpentry, and car repairs, that’s money. Money is an agreement between two or more strangers to use something as a means of payment, and it requires trust between the parties involved — ideally, by making sure the money represents some sort of enforceable underlying wealth. The difference between wealth and money Money and wealth aren’t the same thing. True wealth is purely biological. You can eat it. Drink it. Wear it. Drive it. Live in it. Heat your house with it. Power your car or machine or business with it. Money, when it’s working well, is an accurate representation of real wealth. True wealth isn’t imaginary; it’s biological. Bankers, hedge fund managers, and NFT creators aren’t “wealth-creators” — they’re sophisticated video game players who successfully convince people to ascribe value to digital numbers, which in turn allows the creators to then acquire items of real wealth like mega-mansions, Ossetra caviar, doomsday bunkers, and hyperyachts. So how can you figure out the difference between wealth and money? Quite easily. Remember, money is an agreement between two or more strangers. So to determine if something is money or real wealth, just pretend that you’re the last person on earth or alone on a deserted island for the rest of your life. Money in that context immediately becomes worthless. American dollars, Euros, pounds, gold, silver, Bitcoins, beaver pelts… it’s all money, and it’s all utterly useless without another person to accept it as a means of payment. Real wealth proves itself real in isolation. If you’re the last person on earth, you’ll value water, food, and shelter far more than Mexican pesos and Chinese renminbi. Jack Sparrow didn’t scream for $USD — he hollered for rum. How is wealth created? True wealth is created by applying time, effort, creativity, and sacrifice to the raw materials that God freely gives. * When a carpenter sacrifices time/effort/creativity to turn a tree into a desk, table, or bed frame, she creates wealth. * When a chef sacrifices time/effort/creativity to turn some eggs and lobster into a $1,000 omelet (https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-expensive-omelette), he creates wealth. * When engineers sacrifice time/effort/creativity to build Elon Musk’s Tesla-building robots, they create wealth. On the flipside… * When a landlord extracts rent from a tenant, he isn’t creating real wealth. * When a Bitboy’s crypto holdings go up in price, he isn’t creating real wealth. * When a Robinhood addict’s shorts pay off, he’s isn’t creating real wealth. * When a billionaire’s stock goes up in price, he’s isn’t creating real wealth. But when a minimum-wage worker at one of those portfolio companies applies her time and effort to assemble two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and a sesame seed bun into a Big Mac, she’s creating a tiny bit of real wealth. People generally value real wealth. We instinctively understand that the more sacrifice is required, the more it should be worth. That’s why machine-assembled Casio watches are five bucks apiece, while hand-made Patek Philippes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEmS8gUfzA) can run you up to $24 million. Wealth versus value Wealth and value aren’t the same thing. To someone with a full bank account and access to a reliable grocery store, a lump of gold jewelry is often more valuable than a loaf of bread. But to a person on the brink of starvation, a lump of gold is often more only valuable if it can be readily exchanged for a loaf of bread. Value is a measure of desire. Value can fluctuate wildly, and it is easily manipulated. We can survive without bankers and insurance brokers, but we’re dead without doctors and farmers. Yet brokers and bankers earn far more money than the latter, which suggests the value hierarchy of the elites who control our economy needs a radical recalibration. Elites clearly desire private profits over public health, so they assign more value to extractive professions like financial services. Let’s pretend for a moment that value was democratically determined. Even in that fairy tale scenario, not all sacrifice is the same. Bitcoin’s proof-of-work is that a specific computational effort has been expended (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_work). A house builder’s proof-of-work is the 500-unit subdivision he just finished. Both of these sacrifice-created forms of value can be sold as money, though one is clearly more valuable (from a true wealth perspective) than the other. Price versus value Price and value aren’t the same thing. A house’s wealth is comprised of all the material and sacrifice that went into it. A house’s value is determined by how useful it is to a potential purchaser. A houses’ price is the amount of money charged for it, which is determined by value + manipulation. House prices are often boosted far beyond true value by a purposeful constriction of supply (thanks developers and land-lorders) and a purposeful glut of interest-bearing credit (thanks bankers). Prices can become even more unfair for products when corporations have a selling monopoly (or conversely, when a single buyer has a monopsony.) Prices can spike when powerful elites constrict supply, be it housing, Bitcoin, diamonds, gold, copper, oil — anything where people can at least temporarily corner the market. An easy way to understand the money vs. wealth vs. value vs. price schema is to consider which piece of financing changes most: * Money is the means by which you pay for a house. (This rarely changes — most Americans use $USD.) * Wealth is the materials and sacrifice that go into building a house. (This doesn’t change. Once a house is built, it’s built.) * Value is the personal usefulness to you. (This doesn’t change. You need 365 nights of shelter each year.) * Price is what you’re forced to pay by the market. (This changes on a daily basis, suggesting that prices rarely accurately reflect real value or wealth.) This is the problem with our current economy: Prices are rigged. And when prices are rigged, it allows the most powerful people in society to extract real wealth from the masses. By rigging the housing market through limiting supply, boosting demand by bankrolling investors to buy up multiple properties, and offering cheap credit to all with little money down, bankers can extract vast amounts of sacrifice from others without sacrificing anything themselves. There’s a word for this practice: injustice. To recap Money is negotiable. Wealth is objective. Value is subjective. Price is manipulated. How is money created? Brace yourself. Unlike creating real wealth, which is a measure of sacrifice, modern money is created in the exact opposite way — by extracting future sacrifice from others. Today’s fiat currencies are created as private debt in one of two ways: * Public debtGovernments and central banks print money out of thin air (via treasury notes or bond-buying) and call it “stimulus” or “quantitative easing.” * Private debtYou go to the bank and ask for a mortgage or a car loan. A banker types on a computer and creates credit in your account. Now you have to pay it back with real cash plus interest. That’s it. New money has been created. (If someone deposits $10 in a bank, the bank can loan out $9, then another bank can book that loan as an asset, which allows them to loan out eight more dollars, which allows another bank to book that loan as an asset, loan out $7, $6, $5, etc. It’s called the money-multiplier effect (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081415/understanding-how-federal-reserve-creates-money.asp), and it’s the reason you have to work harder year after year. The end result? Almost all new money is created as debt.) Welcome to the insane fractional-reserve banking system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking). That’s why it’s called fiat currency. In the Latin Bible, God’s first words were “Fiat lux” — Let there be light. Governments now say, “Let there be money.” That can’t be it, right? Surely bankers and governments shouldn’t be able to type numbers into a screen and print money out of thin air. Wouldn’t that inflate house prices and stock prices and put the squeeze on billions of people who have to work hard to pay back fake loans (plus interest) with the real wealth of their real labor? Wouldn’t printing money make currency worth less every year until $100 trillion doesn’t buy a loaf of bread? Yep. And yet, 80% of all American M1 money stock in existence was printed (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL)in the past 18 months (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL). Modern magical money creation is so simple and insidious that it’s downright repellent to most civilized minds. Back in the day, someone would have to show up in London with 500 sheep or 1,000 bottles of Madeira to receive a note of credit that was redeemable at a sister bank across the Atlantic in New York. The value came first. Now, because humans are such a wonderfully hopeful (and often delusional) species, we do it the other way around — we create new money out of thin air and hope the value chain will catch up. It never does. Most people can’t believe that most money is created via private debt. Thankfully, Western governments are at least honest about the scam: “Even though I work at the Fed, I really hadn’t thought a lot about money creation in awhile so I looked up your question and basically, yes, banks create money by what is called fractional banking. Banks take your deposit, hold a certain % in reserve, and lend out the rest, which then gets redeposited, spent, etc.” — My friend who’s worked at the U.S. Federal Reserve for 20+ years “The majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans.” — Bank of England (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf) “Private commercial banks create money when they purchase newly issued government securities by making digital accounting entries on their own balance sheets. Money is also created within the private banking system every time the banks extend a new loan, such as a home mortgage.” — Bank of Canada (https://web.archive.org/web/20210123023637/https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/201551E) How in the world did we let this happen? Well… we, the people never had a choice: America’s central bank, called the Federal Reserve (https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/structure-federal-reserve-system.htm), is actually owned by 12 regional reserve banks (https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/federal-reserve-system.htm). Each of these regional banks are owned by private commercial banks. Let’s look at the most important of those 12 reserve banks, the New York Fed (https://www.newyorkfed.org/). A Freedom of Information Act request (https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1kh4p10qysrhv/Conspiracy-Theorists-Ask-Who-Owns-the-New-York-Fed-Here-s-the-Answer) revealed that the biggest shareholders of the NY Fed are… wait for it… Citibank at 42.8% and JPMorgan Chase at 29.5%. Other shareholders include Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and even foreign banks like HSBC and Deutsche Bank. So who owns the central bank and the monopoly on money-printing? The richest people on earth. No wonder they’re so rich. They’re the closest to the money printer. If the GameStop crowd really wanted to have some fun, they should buy a majority stake in America’s biggest bank and expose this fraud from the inside. The problems with modern money-printing When corporate-captured governments print debt-based money that isn’t backed by real wealth and has to be paid back with interest, they create a tidal wave of negative consequences in our lives and the lives of the poor: * They wildly inflate house prices (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/this-real-estate-bubble-wont-pop-2f52f23709f8). * They wildly inflate stock prices (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/tesla-is-dead-and-elon-musk-probably-knows-it-2858c86589d0). * They put the squeeze on billions trying to make ends meet. * They make the masses work hard to pay back fake money loans (plus interest) with the real wealth of their real labor. * They devalue purchasing power by debasing currency. Not only does this straight-up steal money from everyone holding cash, but it discourages savings — making people less antifragile and more dependent on the state. * They detach money from real wealth and value. * They lock us into an unsustainable debt+interest death spiral that bankrupts millions of families on a regular basis and requires all of us to compete against each other. * They use their money power to set the agenda for the whole nation, spending on wars, toppling foreign governments, extracting wealth from poorer nations, sacrifice from their own citizens, stealing trillions of hours of human life. Let’s not mince words: The secular, corporate-controlled, central banking money-printing scam is the biggest sin and crime in human history. What about cryptocurrency? Unfortunately, crypto does the same thing as fiat currency — it prints (AKA “mines”) magic zero-wealth-backed money out of thin air. Unlike government currencies, which are backed solely by violence, at least cryptocurrencies are backed by real trust. But trust is easily undermined. Bitcoin relies entirely on the human imagination to give it value. Because when you look at it objectively, what is cryptocurrency? Nothing but bytes in a file, to which people have temporarily assigned extravagant prices due to hoarding and mass hysteria. As one of my commenters put it: “When someone gives ~$40,000 to get 1 Bitcoin, what actually happens is some bytes in a file change their values. People give a pile of cash to have some bytes in a file associated with them. Sounds like a good definition of insanity. Especially bearing in mind that anyone can create such files at will. There are currently thousands of cryptocurrencies, but there could actually be millions or billions, and all of them are backed by nothing. Just files.” Now, to be clear, cryptocurrency has a ton of benefits over government currencies: * Bitcoin is limited to 21 million coins, unlike the $USD, which has no limit. * Unlike the millions of Americans who’ve endured gold seizures (https://theconversation.com/how-the-us-government-seized-all-citizens-gold-in-1930s-138467), crypto can’t usually be seized by the state. * Unlike the thousands of poor Indians whose 500 rupee notes became worthless overnight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetisation), crypto can’t be officially canceled by the state (though it can be severely curtailed and outlawed.) Clearly, mined crypto is better than printed fiat. But it doesn’t mean the elite powers won’t shut it down. In fact, Bitcoiners themselves have given the government the perfect excuse to do so: instead of treating Bitcoin like a regular currency and spending it into the economy to achieve widespread global adoption, they treated it as a Ponzi scheme (https://medium.com/personal-finance/bitcoin-is-a-giant-ponzi-scheme-ae4263008220), hoarding it like a speculative investment, skyrocketing the price. In fact, it gave central banks an idea: What if we ban cash and created our own digital surveillance currencies so we can track and trace every penny in the economy, directly manipulate spending, and bankrupt people at will? So that’s exactly what they’re building (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/are-you-ready-for-americas-social-credit-system-8f31a96a1fd0). Thanks, bitboys. How should money be created? Money should be created as a representation of real wealth, and its price should match its unmanipulated value. Right now, the global financial system is essentially a precariously-stacked house-of-cards pyramid of glorified IOUs — we need stable money that is violence-free, value-backed, and vision-loaded. As one of my commenters recently posted: “Not only is the current process of money creation corrupt, but it produces very poor quality money. Money is ideally a neutral, globally fungible trade medium. We need money to be a fixed unit of cost for planning, stable store of value for saving, with global acceptance for maximum utility, and nothing else.” We need to strip money-making power away from private banks and entrust it to democratic, accountable, and transparent processes. We need to create new money free of debt, not by lending money into the economy but by spending (https://youtu.be/eHQ7wvWzUW0) it into real eco-assets via democratic, blockchain-built infrastructure banks (https://youtu.be/eHQ7wvWzUW0). But it’s extremely likely that this will ever happen, because scam money is far more profitable than sound money. So, where does that leave us now? First, a macro note: Psalm 62:10 is very clear: Don’t set your heart on riches. Don’t put your hope in wealth. Love others, but don’t trust human nature and the money it creates. On a related note, purge the love of money from your heart. The love of money really is the root of all kinds of evil, and Scripture is very clear that we can’t serve both God and money. It’s either the almighty dollar or the almighty God. Choose this day who you will serve. Second: Prepare for fiat hyperinflation, or your money is worthless (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/how-to-prepare-for-hyper-inflation-a75679538637). Third: Love your neighbor. Be good to each other. We’re going to need each other in tomorrow’s economy. Fourth: Get educated. Christians need to have a sound understanding of economics, debt, interest, investment, and power. Fifth: Prepare yourself for the forthcoming social credit system by amassing real, non-centralized, not-easily-seizable wealth with others. Sixth: Be extremely cautious of the crypto bubble (https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/bitcoin-is-a-giant-ponzi-scheme-ae4263008220). Hundreds of millions of people have made bets on various vision coins, but they’re betting against the violence-backed central powers. A bet on crypto is a bet against centralized power. It’s a noble act, but an extremely risky investment strategy. Seventh: Instead of hoarding crypto coins or playing the stock market, actually invest in the the kingdom economy. It is my strong belief that Christians need to start building new currencies, new economies, and new sovereignties, and we need to get started yesterday. Churches and denominations need to wake up and re-allocate, building Benedict Option citadels to resist the impending totalitarianism that’s coming. Matthew 6:21 says that where our treasure is, there are hearts will be also. We can lead our hearts by sanctifying our money — setting it apart for God’s service — dedicating it to things that honor God, be it advancing of the gospel, transitioning to renewable energy and sustainable food production, supporting circular economy businesses that work for everyone, or helping to house the estimated three billion people who will be forced into slums in our lifetime. It’s time for Christians to revive our hearts and reform our part of the $400 trillion global economy. Money is a resource, but it’s not the source. Instead of amassing temporary dollars here on earth, we have the opportunity to use our worldly wealth to create everlasting impact. As Jim Elliot said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” This is our invitation to turn mere money into eternal value. And that’s a vision worth investing in. If you want to help grow the Future Faith community, the best thing you can do is email this podcast to some friends and leave a 5-star review. In upcoming episodes, we’ll look at eight scenarios for the future of money. Next week, we’re going to look into what Christians should be doing with crypto and blockchain technology. As I mentioned at the top, this episode is sponsored by Swanbitcoin. Government fiat money, as you now know, is wildly corrupt, but “investing” in Bitcoin is highly risky and just turns it into a pyramid scheme. Instead, we need to SPEND and GIVE crypto to achieve rapid global adoption before centralized surveillance currencies monopolize money forever. So head over to swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock (http://www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock) to get $10 in free Bitcoin to spend. That’s $10 in free Bitcoin at swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock (http://www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock) Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

12. 

    8 Sept 2021

    Vaccine Passports

    Jared Brock’s Future Faith podcast is also available for free on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/2RBlQ0fdXjFM8YXOtjkoFs) and Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/future-faith/id1583070927). I’ve been avoiding publishing any articles on vaccines because it’s an absurdly contentious subject that wins you no friends and makes you quite a few enemies. It’s an issue plagued with political ideologies, conflicts of interests, bad faith arguments, issue conflation, terrible research, and appallingly stupid false dichotomies. But alas, my inbox has been flooded with good folks asking me my perspective, so hopefully, I can lay it all out in one article and never have to discuss it again. My guess is that this will be one of the most contentious pieces I ever publish, so even if you disagree but can manage to stick with me through this one, I think we can continue our relationship for years to come! In this piece, I’m going to try and lay out a biblical framework for approaching issues like this. I have no financial incentives in this fight, and I want to make it clear that my goal isn’t to make you get a vaccine or not get a vaccine, but to help tune up our reasoning and look at this highly-contentious subject through a Christ-centered lens. Let’s start at the beginning “A very good place to start.” — Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music There are a lot of people out there who think vaccines are “inherently dangerous because there is no long-term safety data.” These people have never read a history book. Let’s go back in time… The year is 1774. Smallpox is ravaging the world. Sore throats, headaches, and difficulty breathing are the nice symptoms. Instead, disfiguring rashes cover most infected people’s faces, feet, throat, and lungs with pus-filled pustules. A third of adults infected will die. Eight in ten infants will die. At least 400,000 people will die per year for decades, and survivors will be marred with blindness and lifelong scars, driving some to suicide. Here’s what that looks like in real life: People tried everything to halt smallpox outbreaks — hot rooms, cold rooms, avoiding melons, wearing the color red, drinking twelve beers per day. None of it worked, of course, but there was one genuine cure — an ancient practice from India and Africa called “variolation” an early form of inoculation. We even know the name of the African slave (https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/blog/onesimus-smallpox-boston-cotton-mather) who brought the life-saving practice to North America. His name was Onesimus, likely named after the slave mentioned in Colossians and Philemon. The American Onesimus’s master convinced 287 Bostonians to get variolated — among the inoculated, their rates of death fell sevenfold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Mather#Salem_witch_trials_of_1692,_the_Mather_influence). Variolation is pretty freaky by today’s standards: People just took pus from someone suffering from smallpox and scratched it into the skin of healthy folks. During the American Civil War, people would take the dried scabs of smallpox survivors, grind them into powder, then sniff it up the nose or drink it in tea. Variolation worked… ish. People would usually get a mild case of smallpox and survive, thanks to their well-prepped immune systems. Some people still got full-blown smallpox and died, but variolation increased your chances of survival. Over in rural England, one class of person seemed completely immune to smallpox: milkmaids. The women occasionally suffered from a cattle disease called cowpox, but they usually survived with little scarring. In 1774, as a smallpox epidemic once again swept his nation, farmer Benjamin Jesty (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200928-how-the-first-vaccine-was-born) decided to scratch some cow pus into his family’s skin. None of them got smallpox. The science was and is simple: The cowpox pus — vaccinia — could create antibodies and genetic memory that would trigger the human body to create immunity against life-threatening pathogens. Ben Jesty renovated his garden cottage into a “Temple of Vaccinia” and invited locals to visit after church for their life-saving doses. For his generosity, he was labeled inhuman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Jesty), “hooted at, reviled, and pelted whenever he attended markets in the neighborhood,” with some neighbors even worrying he’d turn them into horned beasts. Because of a lack of widespread and effective vaccination, 300 million people (https://ourworldindata.org/smallpox) died in the 20th century from smallpox alone. A resounding success We now have nearly 250 years of data and it all says the same thing: Vaccination decreases your chances of dying from deadly pathogens. * We no longer have regular rolling rounds of smallpox, whooping cough, scarlet fever, polio, hib, cholera, and other deadly diseases that have killed tens of millions of people across time. * Since 1962 (https://www.studyfinds.org/vaccinations-save-lives-vaccines-study-finds/) alone, 4.5 billion virus cases have been averted thanks to modern vaccinations. * Tetanus (https://emedicine.staging.medscape.com/article/229594-overview) mortality has been reduced by 96% since 1988. * 17.1 million lives (https://www.who.int/news/item/12-11-2015-measles-vaccination-has-saved-an-estimated-17-1-million-lives-since-2000) have been saved from measles since 2000. * Smallpox has been completely eradicated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox). To be anti-vaccination is the same as saying you’re anti-medicine. Thankfully, the vast majority of the world understands that vaccination is medicine. 9 out of 10 people (https://ourworldindata.org/vaccination) in the world think that vaccinating children is important. But there’s a small but vociferously vocal minority — typically white, right-leaning, Westerners who have never lost a child to a life-threatening pathogen — who would rather risk their family’s life and safety than give them this particular form of medicine. They have about five major reasons, but none of them are Socratically sound: 1. Therapeutics aren’t a good enough reason to reject vaccine therapy Some of our more earthy brothers and hippie sisters think we should stop playing God and just let nature do its thing, building our immune systems naturally. Which is exactly what vaccines do. Innoculation comes from the Middle English word “inoculaten,” which means “grafting a plant part to another plant.” When we get a vaccine, we’re essentially grafting some of the enemy pathogens into our immune system, but in a way that teaches our body to do the miraculous work of defending itself when the real pathogen shows up. Most football coaches don’t let their teams go onto the field until they’ve analyzed the competition for weaknesses. Most militaries don’t send their soldiers into battle until they know their enemy’s setup. I hate to use computer terms for something as gloriously biological as a homo sapiens, but human bodies are old hardware in need of constant software updates. Some people think our updates should only come from therapeutics and not inoculations. But don’t forget Brock’s Rule! Avoid false dichotomies. When given two bad options, choose neither.When given two good options, choose both. Don’t fall prey to the false dichotomy that it’s one or the other, therapeutics versus vaccinations. Clearly, governments should have instituted a two-year ban on fast food, high fructose corn syrup, added sugars, processed foods, and everything non-organic, then sent everyone to the woods and beaches for exercise and sunlight while scientists worked on a vaccine. And if you’re so inclined, go ahead and take therapeutics — sniff all the essential oils and eat all the vitamins to try to build a killer immune system, and also get the vaccine… which is just another natural immune booster. If our rationale for therapeutics is truly to boost our natural immunity, then vaccines are the #1 weapon in our arsenal for doing so. The Cambridge dictionary defines a therapeutic as anything “tending to make a person healthier.” Vaccinations are therapeutic. 2. Big Pharma profits aren’t a good enough reason to reject vaccine therapy Big Pharma is awful. Life-saving medicine shouldn’t be a money-making industry. There should be zero for-profit vaccines. Pfizer and the other drug cartels are making billions off Covid, and it’s not right. I wonder how many more anti-vaxxers would take vaccine therapy if it was owned and administered by democratic governments, not-for-profits, and charities. Imagine how many more people would get vaccinated if the Red Cross did the deed at their local church. But alas, here we are. We need to ask the same question as Cicero and the ancient Romans:Cui bono? Who profits? Clearly, Big Pharma is reaping a waterfall of cash from their vaccine. That’s a huge issue we must address. But it doesn’t mean vaccines are any less effective. What’s interesting is that many anti-vaxxers are happy to take all sorts of other for-profit products — literally anything under the sun, including anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine and a mostly Chinese-produced (https://pharmaoffer.com/api-excipient-supplier/ivermectin)lice medication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin) (and horse de-wormer (https://www.salon.com/2021/08/09/how-anti-vaxxers-weaponized-and-promoted-ivermectin-a-horse-de-wormer-drug-as-a-covid-19-treatment/)) called Ivermectin. Who do they think is paying for all the marketing and social media posts they’re reading about these products? Who do they think profits from every single therapeutic purchase they make? It’s just shadow Big Pharma. (Ironically, one of Ivermectin’s biggest manufacturers (https://www.merck.com/product/usa/pi_circulars/s/stromectol/stromectol_pi.pdf)… is also a vaccine maker (https://www.merckvaccines.com/).) There are profit motives on both sides — clearly, Big Pharma’s profits are far larger because they have so many unfair advantages — but it doesn’t mean vaccines are any less effective. Vaccines don’t care who makes money off them; they simply decrease our chances of dying from deadly pathogens. 3. Economic re-engineering isn’t a good enough reason to reject vaccine therapy Corporate elites have used this pandemic as an excuse to enrich themselves to the tune of $5.5 trillion and growing. We clearly have to deal with this. We need a wealth tax, a global minimum corporate tax, and a robot tax. Otherwise, the Great Reset will leave us all as full-time wage-slaves and rent-slaves. But wealth inequality and systemic impoverishment also have nothing to do with vaccination efficacy. Vaccines decrease our chances of death, regardless of who dominates the economy and tries to grind the middle class to dust. 4. The risk of a superbug isn’t a good enough reason to reject vaccine therapy There’s also the very bad argument that taking vaccines will eventually create some sort of vaccine-resistant superbug. While the odds of such a pathogen eventually existing is extremely high, the argument itself is extremely poor for two big reasons: First, this argument naturally forces the anti-vaxxer to admit that vaccines have, up until this point in time, indeed worked. Second, when that vaccine-resistant pathogen does arrive, millions of people will die and no vaccine will help — and neither will the immune systems of millions of anti-vaxxers. There’s no evidence that says people who’ve avoided vaccines their whole lives will magically be granted immunity from the superbug. I’ve met people who literally believe no one should take vaccines and we should risk the annual loss of millions of lives in an effort to boost our collective immune system. This, frankly, is unacceptable in a pro-human society. Sure, it would be great if our immune systems naturally adapted as fast as viruses do, but they don’t. Christ-followers can’t in good faith permit millions of deaths when we have a suboptimal but effective immune-training technology in our possession. That would be like withholding a life-preserver from a drowning person today because there might be a tsunami in the future. We cannot allow the delusional perfect to be the enemy of the concrete good. The Bible is very clear that the earth is currently in a fallen state. In heaven, we won’t need vaccines. On earth, we clearly do. 5. Covid passports aren’t a good enough reason to reject vaccine therapy This is the big one, isn’t it? It’s certainly the thing everyone keeps emailing and calling me about. “Aren’t Covid passports just the tip of the spear for government surveillance?” No, they’re not. We’re way past that. A vaccine passport is a joke compared to your smartphone, your digital bank, your social media, your Internet usage history, and especially the coming central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and social credit systems (https://survivingtomorrow.org/are-you-ready-for-americas-social-credit-system-8f31a96a1fd0). Don’t lose the plot, friends. Vaccines aren’t the “tip of the spear” whatsoever. That weapon belongs to the elite monopoly control of money-creation (https://medium.com/personal-finance/what-is-money-and-how-is-it-created-b82821ea3949). Everything else is secondary. And here’s a big thing a lot of non-travelers have forgotten: We’ve already had vaccine passports for years. My wife and I have traveled to plenty of risky places including North Korea, Transnistria, Honduras, Ethiopia, and West Texas. Tourists who only go to Florida and Hawaii and Caribbean all-inclusives may not realize it, but much of the world has required proof of vaccination for decades. As any missionary kid knows, you can’t get into many countries without showing your doctor-stamped visa that proves you’ve had your yellow fever shots. 124 nations (https://www.traveldocs.com/travel-services/by-country-vaccination-requirements) require you to show a yellow fever vaccine visa to get across their borders. We’ve shown ours many times. (We’ve also never had yellow fever, which still kills 30,000 people per year (https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/newsroom/topics/yellowfever/index.html), because our vaccination gave us 99% immunity 30 days after injection (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/yellow-fever).) Yes, future vaccine visas will likely be logged on the blockchain and movement will be automatically restricted by robots and algorithms. This is anti-human and should rightly be outlawed. But avoiding vaccination itself won’t change this. It’s the wrong hill to die on. Tyranny isn’t defeated by leaving your immune system under-educated. Why vaccines are so political If Covid had a 100% transmission rate and a 100% kill rate, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If any disease spread to everyone and killed everyone, everyone except suicidal sociopaths would be in favor of mandated vaccination and proven containment measures. Conversely, if a “disease” had a 0% kill rate and a 0% transmission rate, none of us would be in favor of any vaccination or any containment measure. Clearly, it’s just a sliding scale, based on personal risk tolerance. So the question is: Who gets to decide when we should mandate vaccines and when to implement containment measures? Ebola has a 50+% kill rate, but a low transmission rate. The vaccine is effective 97.5% of the time. If it had a 90% transmission rate by simply breathing in public, would you mandate a vaccine and/or try to implement containment measures? Even though we live in a troublingly individualist anti-culture, most people would say yes. (If it were solely up to me, for the sake of stopping variants, vaccines would be mandatory for any contagious disease with an R-nought of more than 1.27 (https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2334-14-480) and/or an Infection Fatality Rate of more than 0.038%. If someone doesn’t like it, they can move to Arkansas.) But it’s not up to me, of course. And it’s not up to you. Because we can all infect each other, it’s only fair that we all get to decide. Vaccine regulation is democracy’s job. And people are actually furious because they don’t live in a democracy (https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/direct-democracy). Let’s be honest about what this is really all about: Thisisallabouttrust. The vaccine debate has almost nothing to do with health: People don’t trust Big Pharma. Nor should they — if it were up to Big Pharma, we’d all die unless we could pay top “free”-market dollar for their wares. They already do this in unregulated nations in Africa (https://www.sfaf.org/collections/beta/why-are-hiv-meds-so-expensive-and-what-can-we-do-about-it/). People don’t trust Big Medicine. Nor should they — the American for-profit healthcare system is the biggest scam in global health (https://survivingtomorrow.org/millions-of-americans-refuse-to-get-vaccinated-blame-their-doctors-4f4f546fdd32). People don’t trust Big Government. Nor should they — we live in an undemocratic corporatocracy ruled by private interests with anti-commons agendas. The Bible is quite clear in Psalm 146:3 “Do not put your trust in princes; there is no hope for you there.” But our distrust of government has nothing to do with vaccine therapy. We need to think clearly about the big picture: We’re rapidly approaching the age of the panopticon surveillance state. So long as we continue to buy from giant corporations and vote for their corporate-captured political parties and candidates, social credit systems are coming, with or without a vaccine passport. Vaccines are an opportunity As far as I can see it, vaccination provides Christ-centered people with five intriguing opportunities: 1. The opportunity to serve others Just because some of us feel young, strong, and healthy doesn’t mean we aren’t surrounded by more vulnerable people, especially the elderly brothers and sisters in our churches. In Philippians 2:5–7, Paul encourages us that, “In your relationships with another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus by taking the very nature of a servant, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” Supercharging our immune systems is yet another way we can serve each other. One thing is for certain: Vaccinations aren’t worth losing unity over. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.” The reality is that vaccine passports are just the next technology that secularist governments may try to use to control their citizens. These new technologies are emerging at a faster and faster rate, which suggests Jesus-followers actually need to slow down, get in step with the Holy Spirit, and wrestle together as Christ-centered communities on how to honor God in this cultural moment. 2. The opportunity to obey our governments This one is very, very tough for those of us who’ve been raised in this hyper-selfish individualist anti-culture. But Scripture is brutally clear on this point: we are to obey every government law that doesn’t disobey God’s law. Titus 3:1 — “Remind the people to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready to do whatever is good, to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and always to be gentle toward everyone.” 1 Peter 2:13–15 — “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors… For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people.” Clearly, getting vaccinated doesn’t go against the word of God and the gospel of Christ. In fact, it creates obedience to 1 Corinthians 6:19, where Paul insists our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. But if you’re like me, you have a deeply rebellious spirit! This is our opportunity to submit to the government. Believe me, there will soon be plenty of reasons to glorify God by practicing civil disobedience, but avoiding vaccination isn’t one of them. 3. The opportunity to honest and truthful We don’t need to delude ourselves into thinking we’re “educated” on vaccines. The vast majority of us don’t have a doctorate in the subject, and no amount of online article-reading will ever get us there. We don’t argue about whether or not houses reliably stay standing — they generally do, and we don’t need to research the intricacies of house-engineering to trust the experts. In the same, we know that vaccines have proven to boost our immunes systems for the past few centuries, and while they aren’t perfect, that’s probably all a lay-person needs to know. This is an opportunity to lay aside the notion that we are experts on this subject. As Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” 4. The opportunity to practice wisdom Pastor Andy Stanley says that the best question ever is, “In light of our past experiences, current circumstances, and future hopes and dreams, what is the wisest thing to do?” This isn’t a question to answer alone. Followers of the Way will naturally do what we always do when faced with tough questions: Go to the Word, get on our knees, and meet with other believers. Only the Holy Spirit can guide us into all truth. 5. The opportunity to wear a cloak of humility This is our chance to not think better of ourselves than we should. Having the vaccine doesn’t make you a better person — it just means you’re less likely to die from Covid-19. In the same way, not having the vaccine doesn’t make you better than your vaccinated brothers and sisters — it just means you’re putting them and yourself at a greater risk of infection. Remember: Christ-followers don’t have human enemies. We are called to love those who hate us, and pray for those who persecute us. As John Mark Comer says, we are to make our bodies a graveyard for hate. For pastors and elders, there is a huge opportunity to disciple your believers toward a less individualistic outlook on life, re-orienting your people to a communal framework for living, and a proper understanding of the government’s role in the life of a Jesus-follower. In Conclusion Regardless of mandates or economics or passports, I would’ve gotten the Covid vaccine anyway. Why? Because vaccination helps train my God-given immune system to be awesome, and because this vaccine is proven to significantly decrease my chance of death by Covid (https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0607-mrna-reduce-risks.html). That’s it. Vaccines just aren’t political for me, at all. I can’t fathom why anyone makes them political — vaccines are therapeutic medicine that trains your body to fight pathogens, pure and simple. Sadly, ours is an age of outrageous conflation. Rather than thinking clearly and tackling the real problems of tyranny, we endanger our children because we think it’s magically “creating change.” My track record shows that I’m extremely anti-partisan, anti-politician, and anti-corporatocracy (https://survivingtomorrow.org/), and I’m not going to let any tyrannical earthly institution weaponize my own health against me. We need to stay strong so we can take down the powers and principalities who are actively at work in the spiritual realm. This often ugly debate should make us ask important questions: * Am I placing my trust in the government, myself, or my Savior? * Am I spending more time on social media than in God’s word? * Do I spend more time researching vaccines than I do in prayer? * Would I rather fight digital people on the Internet more than commune with local believers in the flesh? At the end of the day, everything always comes back to the gospel. The good news is that the kingdom of God is here in our midst; that Christ has taken our sin on his shoulders; that through Him we can be restored to God. This has massive implications for how we live and move and have our being. As you wrestle with the Word and the Holy Spirit and your church through this issue, I pray that you will find unity and peace in the bonds of His love. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

13. 

    31 Aug 2021

    Under-the-Skin Surveillance

    Future Faith is also available for free on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/2RBlQ0fdXjFM8YXOtjkoFs) and Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/future-faith/id1583070927). In late 2018, NPR broke a story about how thousands of Swedes are inserting microchips under their skin (https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin) to make payments without the need to carry a credit card. British companies (https://futurism.com/british-companies-implanting-microchips) have already started micro-chipping employees (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/microchipping-workers-takes-us-back-to-1984-09gxqdx6s). Bill Gates is funding a remote-controlled contraceptive microchip (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2014/jul/11/design-futures-remote-controlled-contraceptive-microchip-launch-by-2018). Indonesia has debated forced implantation for sex offenders (https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/indonesia-wants-all-child-sex-offenders-be-tracked-using-rfid-microchips-1563157). Elon Musk is already implanting computer chips in pig’s brains (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53956683). Earlier last month, the Pentagon revealed it has developed a disease-detecting implant for under-the-skin monitoring of the human population (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/last-pandemic-science-military-60-minutes-2021-04-11). Their stated intention is to protect the populace from future outbreaks and pandemics. In a twist not seen before in science-fiction dystopian fantasies, rather than appearing as a dreaded microchip, the Pentagon’s new technology is a “tissue-like gel engineered to continuously test your blood” with a transmitter to relay the data. It’s a conspiracy theorist’s dream scenario, and for many apocalyptically-minded Christians, it can send them into paroxysms of fear. But we’d like to take a more reasoned approach to the growing trend of under-the-skin surveillance. Like all technologies, this one has obvious and non-obvious costs, some clear benefits, and a laundry list of unforeseen risks. Don’t believe the techno-evangelists who can forecast no harms. Don’t believe the conspiracists who can see no good. Like the Amish and other faith communities, we must weigh as a society whether or not we should adopt new technologies on a global scale. (I, for one, don’t believe the convenience of ditching my credit card outweighs the risks of embedding Visa or Mastercard in my wrist. Nor do I believe we need to fall prey to the false dichotomy that there aren’t other non-under-the-skin ways to prevent pandemics, store passwords, prove digital identity, or unlock our cars.) Regardless, I’m just one vote among eight billion. In order to judge the sum total merits of any new invention or innovation, we must understand three fundamentals about all forms of technology: 1. Technology isn’t neutral Never believe the popular delusion that technology is neutral. Guns are designed to kill mammals, not wash your dishes.Push notifications weren’t created to leave you alone with your thoughts.Nukes weren’t created to fold your laundry. All technologies can be judged based on their long-term “tilt.” Sure, a stainless steel water bottle can be used to bludgeon someone to death, but the more likely scenario in the case of widespread adoption is less sea plastic and a better-hydrated populace. Over maximal human terms (think: 100+ years), technologies tilt in either a net-negative or net-positive direction. The question Christians must ask is: Which way does under-the-skin surveillance tilt over long-term scenarios? The answer is unclear. 2. Technologists have an agenda The makers of new technologies always have an agenda. Always. Social media was designed to addict you and advertise to you.Monsanto seeds are engineered to maximize farmer reliance.Netflix wants you to binge. Sometimes the technologist’s agenda is good. Sometimes it’s bad. Sometimes it’s misguided. Sometimes it’s downright malevolent. The question Christians must ask is: What is the agenda of those who control under-the-skin surveillance technology? The answer is unclear. 3. Technology is easily weaponizable Even when the technology is a net benefit over the long term and the makers have a fairly benign agenda, we can never rule out the predator parties that hijack the original intention and attempt to weaponize each new technology. Not all technologies are equally weaponizable. Gunpowder has the ability to kill more people than, say, paper origami. Ricin gas is more easily weaponizable than Dawn dish detergent. The easier it is to weaponize something, the higher the likelihood that sociopaths will find a way to do so. The question Christians must ask is: How easily weaponizable is under-the-skin surveillance technology? We have an answer for this one. Without a doubt, under-the-skin surveillance is one of the most easily weaponizable technologies ever invented. It has the potential to track and surveil every single person on earth for the rest of human existence. It is therefore a near-mathematical certainty that under-the-skin surveillance will be weaponized by powerful elites and the governments they control. Within ten years, totalitarian regimes like China and North Korea will likely microchip their subjects whether they like it or not. In corporatocracies like the U.K. and the U.S. — land of the autonomous and home of the distrusting — expect adoption to move slightly slower… and likely under the fear-fueled guise of safety. Which is exactly how the Pentagon is framing the conversation. So what is the Christian response to under-the-skin surveillance? First things first: Paul says in 2 Timothy that God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-control. Under-the-skin surveillance is an opportunity to practice these things: * To let perfect love cast out any fear * To live in the power of His Spirit regardless of circumstance * To love others by sharing the truth of reality * To practice self-control against our instincts to lash out at authority There are so many things outside of our control. Secularist corporate states will continue to enact their anti-human agenda, but that shouldn’t surprise us or scare us. Each of us must prayerfully discern how God is calling us to individually and communally respond to this growing threat. We also need to remember that we know how this story ends — with the presence of God flooding the earth. It’s an exceptional vision; an outcome so bright that it completely floods out this present and growing darkness. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

14. 

    25 Aug 2021

    Christianity's Dark Investment Secret

    This article is not investment advice. It is theological advice. Please take time to prayerfully meditate on the 37 Scripture passages included in the links. A few years ago, I was touring my documentary on pornography (https://over18doc.com/) across the continent and we did an event in British Columbia at an exciting up-and-coming church. The pastor and I connected after the screening and I heard his story. In addition to being a pastor, he was heavily involved in his community on an economic level, and because of an ethical giving fund that his grandfather set up, was finding himself more and more involved in conversations about ethical investments. He confided that his organization had been secretly approached by multiple high-level church leaders, all of whom wanted his team’s help in quietly cleansing their denominational portfolios of anti-Christ assets. A Day of Reckoning Is Coming Randy Alcorn once predicted that a day could come when a Christian author would get exposed on national TV for having gotten someone else to ghost-write their books (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/randyalcorn/2020/08/ethics-ghostwriting/). Dozens of famous Christian authors have also cheated their way to the (https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/januaryfebruary/buying-bestsellers-resultsource.html)New York Times (https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/januaryfebruary/buying-bestsellers-resultsource.html) bestseller list  (https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/januaryfebruary/buying-bestsellers-resultsource.html)— the scheme was pioneered by a Christian leadership guru you’ve all heard of (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_21_Irrefutable_Laws_of_Leadership) — and it’s only a matter of time before these authors rightly get blacklisted for it. Now just imagine what would happen if the portfolio investments of every Christian denomination, foundation, charity, church, pastor, and congregant were suddenly opened to public scrutiny. What would they find? What’s in Liberty University’s endowment?What’s in the Vatican Bank’s massive portfolio?What’s in the United Methodist Church’s pension plan?What’s in the Southern Baptist Convention’s missions fund? The reality is that the overwhelming majority of Christians who own pension plans, retirement funds, mutual funds, 401ks, RRSPs, education trusts, giving foundations, and other diversified investments are profiting from a huge range of anti-Christ activities. The Fortune 500 alone — America’s largest 500 companies in which nearly every mutual fund, pension plan, and index fund is invested— contain some truly troubling companies: * One of the companies is systematically dismantling democracy through the use of corporate donations to political candidates, controlling media assets, and lobbying on a scale never seen in history. * One of the companies is currently withholding hundreds of billions in much-needed taxation offshore. * One of the companies fights minimum wage increases and forbids its staff to unionize; its workers are so impoverished that many require food stamps. * One of the companies has a century-long track record of polluting rivers, oceans, and the atmosphere. * One of the companies sells more cigarettes, fatty foods, and sugary drinks than any other company on earth. * One of the companies sells a leading abortion medication. * Four of the companies have evicted millions of poor people from their homes while simultaneously adding trillions in debt to the world’s housing markets. * Three of the companies facilitate the delivery of pornography. * One of the companies profits from civil unrest, fake news, anti-science claims, and overseas electoral interference. * One of the companies sold nearly $60 billion in weapons last year. * Two of the companies are implicated in using Eighur slave laborers in China. And these few just scratch the surface. Can you fathom the implications of this? * Pro-lifers are profiting from aborting babies. * Health advocates are profiting from sickness and death. * Purity campaigners are profiting from pornography. * Creation-care activists are profiting from environmental destruction. * Peacemakers are profiting from war. * Denominations are profiting from sin. Many Christian investors have done far more evil with their capital than good with their charity. Many pastors have done more for Satan than Jesus because their everyday portfolios have far more power than their Sunday preaching. Selah. Of course, this reality will send every truly Christ-centered person immediately scrambling to right their myriad financial wrongdoings. (Sadly, an equal or larger number of church-goers will simply ignore or delay this reality until the guilt is blunted; such is money’s true power in modern man’s war between flesh and spirit.) For those who do wish to honor God with their wealth, the question is: How? There’s only “one” thing to do: grieve, confess, repent, and make amends. I’ll admit it: these are a few of my least-favorite words in Scripture. They feel judgemental and old-school and Puritan. But they’re central concepts in the Christ-centered life (https://biblehub.com/1_john/1-9.htm). 1. Grieve and Confess For Christians who desire to put their money where their mouth is (https://biblehub.com/james/1-22.htm) — or rather, to put their treasure where they want their heart to be (https://biblehub.com/matthew/6-21.htm) — the first step is to see what’s actually in your portfolio. Most people have no idea, and truly Christ-centered disciples will likely be terrified with what they discover. In this regard, your current financial manager will almost certainly be a major hindrance, not a servant-hearted helper. Expect them to delay their response by several months, and if you keep up the pressure, they’ll likely suggest you let them do a superficial “portfolio re-allocation” before finally revealing what all you own. Decline the offer. The financial services industry thrives on keeping people in the dark. Demand to see how dark your accounts truly are. When your list eventually arrives — and it may take you threatening to switch advisors for them to even produce it — take a weekend and do the research. See which conglomerates own which brands and which is invested in which other companies. Dig all the way down. Research their crimes, their scandals, their wicked corruptions and exploitations and human rights abuses. Email me if you need help (http://jaredabrock.com/). Then: weep (https://biblehub.com/james/4-9.htm). We have fallen far short of the glory of God and have sinned against Him (https://biblehub.com/romans/3-23.htm), His world, and our fellow man. There’s no point in shying away from it or trying to justify ourselves or rationalize it away. Let it hit you, hard, like a Noahic flood. Be deeply disturbed. Overwhelming grief is a very good gift (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Corinthians+7%3A8-11&version=NIV). 2. Repent Repentance (https://biblehub.com/acts/3-19.htm) isn’t a word you’ll hear preached from most seeker-sensitive pulpits. It suggests that God might have some sort of right to make us change. The hard reality is that we live in a world so mired with sin (https://biblehub.com/ephesians/2-1.htm) that we literally cannot even fathom all the ways we are currently sinning with our money. So should we play ignorant and continue to profit from the suffering of others? No. Obviously, the consumerist-individualist world can and will continue to bankroll and profit from these anti-kingdom companies, but why should Christians remain complicit in the crimes and sins of our secularist society? No. Repentance means “to turn around.” To go and sin no more (https://biblehub.com/john/8-11.htm). After discovering that which is not God-honoring in their portfolios, Christ-centered Christians take swift steps to work with God in cleansing themselves from all unrighteousness (https://www.biblehub.com/esv/1_john/1-9.htm). Yet again, your current financial manager will almost certainly be a major hindrance, not a servant-hearted helper. In fact, they will probably become antagonistic at this point. This will be an uphill battle and you likely have to fight it alone. (As the hymn says, “Though none go with me, still I will follow.” As Joshua (https://biblehub.com/joshua/24-15.htm) said, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”) Unless you have a fiduciary advisor, your wealth manager’s fat commissions are directly tied to your unethically profitable investments. They will again suggest a portfolio re-allocation to “ethical” investments. (This is the point where you should probably fire them.) Even if they do reluctantly offer to transition you to “ethical” investments, you have a duty before God to truly understand what it is they’re investing your money in. The reality is that most so-called Socially Responsible Investments (SRIs) are just greenwashing. I’ve lifted the hood and investigated the underlying portfolios of many of these funds, and have discovered that they almost always contain constituent companies that still fall far short of anything Jesus would ever buy. The reality is that Christians need Biblically-responsible investments or none at all. 3. Make Amends God commanded Moses that when his people “realize their guilt, they must return what they have stolen or taken (https://biblehub.com/leviticus/6-4.htm).” When Zacchaeus was confronted with his economic sin, he didn’t just confess and repent — he gave back four times what he’d sinfully acquired (https://www.biblehub.com/luke/19-8.htm). Pastors and their parishioners have reaped trillions of dollars (https://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/14/the-religion-of-millionaires-.html) through sinful means. Only each of us and God know what we need to do to make it right, but one thing is for certain: it will hurt our wallets, help our neighbors, and heal our hearts (https://www.biblehub.com/james/5-16.htm). At this point, many concerned readers are probably thinking: just tell me how I can invest ethically and still get rich. Even my beta readers (including several pastors) asked if I could point them to Christian financial advisors who specialize in biblical investing. Unfortunately, I haven’t (yet) found a single one who allocates in a way that truly honors God. Perhaps I’ll do a follow-up piece if enough people ask for it, but that’s really not the point of this article. My call-to-action is to take the first step: to open up Pandora’s Box and discover exactly what you’re investing in. The reality is that living rightly will cost us something. What if Jesus wasn’t joking when he said it is extremely difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (https://www.biblehub.com/matthew/19-23.htm)? No wonder they killed him — he was horrible for the Extraction Economy. Jesus bore the impact of our sins in His body (https://www.biblehub.com/1_peter/2-24.htm), and it is extremely likely that we will need to bear the impact of abandoning unrighteous investments in our diminished portfolios. In Conclusion The church has inoculated itself to the plight of the poor (https://biblehub.com/galatians/2-10.htm) and numbed itself to the global economic system of oppression that creates poverty (https://biblehub.com/mark/14-7.htm), forgetting that what applies to the world doesn’t have to apply (https://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/15-4.htm)to the church (https://biblehub.com/acts/4-34.htm). There are currently one billion people living in slums today, and that number is rising by one million people per day. In our lifetime, three billion of God’s children will be suffering in slums. We have mathematically abandoned the least of these (https://biblehub.com/matthew/25-40.htm). For most Christians, this is a sin of omission (https://www.biblehub.com/acts/17-30.htm). We’ve been zombie-walking (https://biblehub.com/ephesians/2-1.htm). Until this very moment, they simply don’t know. But now they do, and now they have a choice: * They can discover what they’re invested in, but never sacrifice to make it right. * They can actively choose not to discover what they’re invested in, ignoring their almost-certain secret sin. * They can face the full truth of what they’re invested in, then rapidly sacrifice anything to honor God with their wealth (https://biblehub.com/proverbs/3-9.htm). What’s interesting is that choosing either of the first two options instantly makes this a sin of commission (https://www.biblehub.com/1_john/2-4.htm). By reading this article, the Rubicon’s been crossed. We must now prove ourselves doers of the Word (https://biblehub.com/james/1-22.htm). As James 4:17 says, “To him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.” It’s not enough to throw up our hands and say “it’s just too complicated.” It’s actually quite simple: It is more God-honoring to make less money than exploit your neighbor. Jesus tells his disciples we must count the cost of following him (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+14%3A27-33&version=NIV). What are you willing to spend or lose to honor God with your wealth? This is a test of true faith (https://www.biblehub.com/1_john/2-4.htm). An Apology Paul’s letter to the Christians in Corinth is exactly how I’m feeling as I write this article, and I hope it produces the same result in its readers: “Even if I caused you sorrow by my letter, I do not regret it. Though I did regret it — I see that my letter hurt you, but only for a little while — yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret… See what this godly sorrow has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done. At every point you have proved yourselves to be innocent in this matter.” — 2 Cor 7:8–11 For the sake of the cross and all it represents, I implore you to choose option three. Every day of delay is sin from here on out. Thankfully, Christian investors — though they may lose a significant portion of their future wealth in the process — have the ability to honor God and radically transform the world with their investment funds. The Great Reallocation We, the global Christian church — as individuals, pastors, churches, and denominations — must immediately divest of sinful assets and make amends, but this is only the start. The Christian church needs to re-allocate. American church-goers possess more than $10 trillion in investment funds. Imagine if they pulled every single penny from the secular system and redeployed it to back businesses that honored God, stewarded the planet, and blessed people? It would cause a revolution and advance the gospel on a scale we haven’t seen in generations. We need Christian investors to back Christian entrepreneurs. We need Christian investors to start their own companies, and join together with others to start Christ-center partnerships of all types. We need broad-scale not-for-profit social enterprises, international food cooperatives, construction collectives, and national brands that are owned by charitable trusts. We need streaming services that don’t propagandize our children, social media apps that don’t addict our teenagers, and products and services that help our planet instead of hurting it. We need to start interest-free banks, at-cost self-insurance co-ops, truly ethical investment advisories, asset-backed cryptocurrencies, highly-creative for-benefit venture capital firms, and so much more. Above all— especially in the Age of Commodification — we need to re-discover koinonia (https://biblehub.com/acts/2-42.htm), the radical early-church practice that set it apart economically and eradicated need within the Christian community (https://biblehub.com/acts/4-34.htm). Time is running out The Western church will witness a mathematical decimation as Gen Xers and late-Millennials allow secular screen culture to raise and disciple their children. Yet Christian denominations still have the economies of scale to execute a plan to create a shadow economy — call it the Light Economy — reforming and redeeming every sector of the global economic system, creating for-the-people companies and citadel communities that are democratically fair, environmentally sustainable, and ultimately God-honoring (https://biblehub.com/proverbs/3-9.htm). Our investment dollars could make it a reality. “By their fruit, you will know them (https://www.biblehub.com/matthew/7-16.htm)… Bear fruit in keeping with repentance (https://www.biblehub.com/matthew/3-8.htm).” The first step is to see what we own and how we’re profiting from sin and suffering, trusting God that He will guide us through any of the steps to follow. As we bring our portfolios before God, we must ask Him to grant us wisdom (https://biblehub.com/james/1-5.htm), to search our hearts (https://biblehub.com/psalms/139-23.htm), to reveal to us the ways in which we are hurting the poor and the planet, and to give us the will to change. There is no question this will cost us. Like the rich young ruler (https://biblehub.com/matthew/19-21.htm) — which we in the West certainly are — it will cost us dearly. But is there any asset worth more than the life that is truly life (https://biblehub.com/1_timothy/6-19.htm)? It is the pearl of great price (https://www.biblehub.com/matthew/13-45.htm), the treasure hidden in the field (https://www.biblehub.com/matthew/13-44.htm), the only thing worth sacrificing any amount of money for. It’s the best investment we could ever make. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe (https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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