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. <br/><br/><a href="https://jaredbrock.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">jaredbrock.substack.com</a>
Future Faith
Claim This Podcastby Jared Brock
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14 episodes
Updated Daily
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Podcast Overview
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. <br/><br/><a href="https://jaredbrock.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">jaredbrock.substack.com</a>
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8/25/2021
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Recent Episodes
November 22, 2021
Interview: Mark Sayers on China, Crypto, Politics, the Future, and the Church
<p>Hi family,</p><p>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 <a target="_blank" href="https://thisculturalmoment.com/">This Cultural Moment</a> podcast.</p><p>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.)</p><p>If you’d like to win a free copy of Mark’s newest book, <a target="_blank" href="https://kingsumo.com/g/1unoii/mark-sayers-book-giveaway">click enter here</a>.</p><p><strong>Since this is such an important conversation, please consider forwarding this email</strong> <strong>to the leaders in your life</strong>.</p><p>And if you’re new to Future Faith, welcome! Subscriptions are free:</p><p>Watch on Youtube:</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Future Faith at <a href="https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe</a>
November 8, 2021
How Corporations Kill Communities
<p>Every Sunday morning before church for several years, my friends and I used to gather at Locke Street Bakery on Locke Street in Hamilton.</p><p>The bagels were amazing.</p><p>Literally handmade.</p><p>Boiled and fire-baked right before our eyes.</p><p>Slathered with homemade cream cheese, smoked salmon, the works.</p><p>Served by women in their forties and fifties who we knew by name.</p><p>LSB was a blue-collar institution in a run-down neighborhood, and for decades it faithfully served its equally faithful clientele.</p><p>LSB was so good, in fact, that it started attracting other local businesses.</p><p>A funky hair salon opened across the street.</p><p>A butcher shop did the same.</p><p>A bookshop.</p><p>A florist.</p><p>And then, one day — once all the signs suggested this neighborhood was about to pop — Starbucks moved into the neighborhood.</p><p>It was all downhill from there.</p><p>Corporations can’t create culture.</p><p>Corporations aren’t real.</p><p>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.</p><p>Corporations can’t and don’t create culture because culture is natural, organic, biological, creative.</p><p>It’s why people use Airbnb/<a target="_blank" href="https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/open-letter-to-airbnb">steal real family homes</a> instead of staying at hotels. Marriott can’t fake home.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>That’s because corporations aren’t relational — they’re transactional.</p><p>They can’t give freely and creatively.</p><p>Their legal fiduciary reason for existence is to take.</p><p>And human beings can smell it from a mile away.</p><p>The Corporate Colonization Cycle</p><p>Because corporations can’t create culture, they have to play <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succubus">succubus</a> to a living host, hoovering resources out of fledgling local ecosystems.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>The corporate colonization cycle happens all over the world:</p><p>* Ernest Hemingway shops at a bookstore, and suddenly <a target="_blank" href="https://www.instagram.com/shakespeareandcoparis/">Shakespeare and Co</a>. is a lifeless global brand.</p><p>* Mennonites create St. Jacob’s Farmer’s Market, then Walmart builds just feet across the county line to benefit from all the visitors.</p><p>* A trunkmaker named <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Vuitton_%28designer%29">Louis Vuitton</a> crafted high-quality bags, now a <a target="_blank" href="http://Louis%20Vuitton">hyper-capitalist billionaire</a> leverages the name to buy out seventy competitor brands.</p><p>* Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre chatted philosophy at a run-down restaurant, now <a target="_blank" href="https://cafedeflore.fr/?lang=en">Café de Flores</a> is overrun by celebrities and narcissistic Instagramers.</p><p>* Two centuries ago, Vincent Van Gogh used a certain sketchbook made of moleskin, and in 1997 an Italian papermaker created an <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moleskine">overpriced knock-off version</a> that’s now owned by a <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Ieteren">Belgian glass repair company</a>.</p><p>The corporate colonization cycle is simple and heartbreaking:</p><p>People create culture → Corporations kill culture.</p><p>As Andy Crouch so eloquently points out in his book <a target="_blank" href="https://andy-crouch.com/#section-Culture-Making">Culture Making</a>:</p><p>“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.”</p><p>Clearly, we are living in an anti-culture. By definition, an individualist culture or a corporatist culture is an anti-culture.</p><p>But who on earth is better at building de-commodified cultures than followers of Jesus? We’ve been doing it for thousands of years.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.”</p><p>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. </p><p>But in the meantime, let’s culture-make.</p><p>This means contributing, not consuming or colonizing or extracting.</p><p>Let’s build communities and companies and villages and cities and countries that look nothing like their secularist-individualist counterparts.</p><p>Let’s give the world a glimpse of what heaven might be like.</p><p>Here’s Andy Crouch again:</p><p>“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.”</p><p>After Starbucks moved to Locke Street, everything changed.</p><p>House prices tripled, driving out the working poor.</p><p>Antique shops bloomed like mold on week-old bread.</p><p>Airbnbs popped up like brain tumors.</p><p>The streets got cleaner, safer, more sanitized.</p><p>Surveillance cameras showed up in shop windows.</p><p>Pretty soon, crowds of aging female shoppers arrived, all looking to be part of this exciting new “neighborhood.”</p><p>Little did the tourists know as they ordered their flat whites at Starbucks, but Locke Street had already died.</p><p>All the real culture-creators had moved to James Street and Ottawa Street and Cannon Street.</p><p>And, after serving as the neighborhood’s beating heart and soul for decades, Locke Street Bakery closed.</p><p>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.</p><p>All those sweet bagel-serving women were fired. (I miss you, Sue.)</p><p>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.</p><p>Ironically, they called the restaurant Democracy.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Future Faith at <a href="https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe</a>
November 2, 2021
"You Will Own Nothing And Be Happy" Is Just Feudalism 2.0
<p>The elites hate you.</p><p>It’s not personal.</p><p>They just do.</p><p>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.</p><p>Elites hated your ancestors, too.</p><p>Whether your ancestors were African slaves in the New World (<a target="_blank" href="http://blog.yalebooks.com/2016/11/21/slave-trade-u-s-brazil-comparisons-connections/">especially in Brazil</a>), or serfs under the British aristocracy, or peasants under the <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia">Russian Tsars</a>, or slaves under the <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_China#Ancient">Chinese dynasties</a>, elites have extracted time and wealth from your family since before recorded history.</p><p>Until essentially the end of World War I, elites owned everything.</p><p>Take, for instance, the <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company">East India Company</a>. A staff of 35 people controlled the fate of more than 100 million Indians from a five-window office in London.</p><p><strong>Lack of ownership for the masses — </strong>that was the problem. (Well, you know, aside from the fact that the heart is desperately wicked, as Jeremiah points out.)</p><p>Whenever elites own everything, everyone else is shackled to horrible jobs just to survive, while the elites live in <a target="_blank" href="https://survivingtomorrow.org/jeff-bezoss-500-million-superyacht-proves-we-need-an-obscenity-tax-daad4a4dbe25">obscene luxury</a> with no thought to the misery and suffering of the masses.</p><p>Sound familiar?</p><p>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:</p><p>In economic chains.</p><p>The Great Reset</p><p>In January 2021, the hyper-elitist World Economic Forum — hosted by Prince Charles and sponsored by glowing anti-democratic monopolists including <a target="_blank" href="https://www.weforum.org/partners#search">Blackrock and JPMorgan</a> — held its 50th annual meeting from the Alpine slopes of Davos, Switzerland.</p><p>The theme was <a target="_blank" href="https://www.weforum.org/great-reset">The Great Reset</a>, a proposal to rebuild the economy “sustainably” in the wake of COVID-19.</p><p>Right.</p><p>Even billionaire-obsessed <a target="_blank" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/2020/11/30/a-great-reset-is-coming-but-not-for-capitalism/">Forbes Magazine</a> 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.”</p><p>In the WEF video <a target="_blank" href="https://archive.org/details/8-predictions-for-the-world-in-2030">8 Predictions For The World In 2030</a>, the very first prediction is:</p><p>“You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”</p><p>As the WEF explained on its <a target="_blank" href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/8-predictions-for-the-world-in-2030/">website</a>:</p><p>[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.</p><p>Notice the implicit threat towards the end?</p><p>Play ball or suffer.</p><p>And if the elites have their way, you won’t own your own underwear in nine years or less.</p><p>Slavery by another name</p><p>This, of course, begs the question:</p><p>If we won’t own anything… who will?</p><p>The answer is obvious: The elites will.</p><p>And they’ll rent it back to us for top dollar.</p><p>Whatever “<a target="_blank" href="https://survivingtomorrow.org/let-the-market-decide-is-the-stupidest-phrase-in-human-history-b1fd7c7d0ae8">the market</a>” can bear.</p><p>But obviously, what the market can bear and what the people can bear are two different things entirely.</p><p>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:</p><p>It’s called <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism">feudalism</a>.</p><p>Feudalism 2.0</p><p>Have you noticed that the economy is rapidly shape-shifting?</p><p>During the pandemic, billionaires added more than <a target="_blank" href="https://survivingtomorrow.org/the-global-economy-is-working-perfectly-cfc19da82f8">$5.5 trillion</a> to their net worth.</p><p>If you chart the trajectory and do the math, you’ll discover elites will control the entire global economy <a target="_blank" href="https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/infinite-wealth">within our lifetime</a>.</p><p>Sadly, the goal of today’s elites is the same as their ancestors:</p><p><strong>To enslave the world in order to extract the maximum amount of time and wealth from every living being.</strong></p><p>Ownership matters</p><p>Without ownership, America’s <a target="_blank" href="https://www.rentalprotectionagency.com/rental-statistics.php">115,656,681 renters</a> are at the whims of <a target="_blank" href="https://survivingtomorrow.org/people-dont-rent-because-they-re-broke-they-re-broke-because-they-rent-292c16b83fa4">cruel land-lorders and Airbnb takeovers</a>.</p><p>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 <a target="_blank" href="https://survivingtomorrow.org/tesla-is-the-worst-investment-in-the-world-629a521e1314">in a single day</a>.</p><p>Without ownership, millions of Walmart employees struggle to feed their families, while the billionaire Walton family enjoys <a target="_blank" href="https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/walmart">corporate socialism on an unprecedented scale</a>.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Without ownership, every single one of us lives and dies by the market:</p><p>* When the price of energy <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis">spikes 180X</a> during a Texas blizzard, you can either freeze to death or take on a lifetime of debt.</p><p>* When the price of housing <a target="_blank" href="https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/real-estate-bubble">rises to $10 million in our lifetime</a>, you can live on the streets or work three underpaid jobs just to keep a rotting roof over your head.</p><p>* 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 <a target="_blank" href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/more-than-half-of-us-adults-worry-about-medical-bankruptcy-debt/ar-BB1atS0x">hundreds of thousands of other American families every single year</a>.</p><p>* 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 <a target="_blank" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/qb4fs0/here_is_the_ceo_of_nestle_complaining_about/">don’t deserve to drink water</a>.</p><p>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.</p><p>And why not?</p><p>They didn’t sign up to play <a target="_blank" href="https://survivingtomorrow.org/monopoly-isnt-a-game-it-s-a-prophecy-a3644ad09a92">real-life monopoly</a>.</p><p>Why not smash the board and shatter the pieces?</p><p>The end game</p><p>You’re probably wondering…</p><p>What’s the point of Feudalism 2.0?</p><p>Is it really worth the hassle of re-taking total ownership of the global economy and forcing the masses back into serfdom?</p><p>It’s not like it’ll win you friends, make you happy, or let you live forever.</p><p>So why bother?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>In a winner-take-all world, only one person can win.</p><p>The irony of ownership</p><p>Christians, of course, don’t believe in human ownership at all.</p><p>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.</p><p>We know that God owns everything.</p><p>And that we’re just stewards.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>It’s exactly the opposite of what the elites want.</p><p>It’s time to go to war with the elites</p><p>There are three earthly things we can do to resist the great reset.</p><p>And remember, if they have their way, it’s less than nine years until you won’t own your underwear.</p><p>1. Vote with your time and money</p><p>The polls can’t and won’t save you from the corporations that control Congress.</p><p>We have to <a target="_blank" href="https://jaredabrock.substack.com/p/walmart">bankrupt them</a>.</p><p>The only way to do that is to stop giving them your money. No more shopping, no more banking, no more enriching predator corporations.</p><p>Go local and independent. Support Christian businesses. Start Christian businesses. Invest in Christian businesses. </p><p>(You can also join the national strike that’s currently underway, refusing to contribute your time and talent to enrich multinational extractors.)</p><p>2. Amass owned assets, help others do the same, and never sell</p><p>I’m talking productive businesses, houses, land, building supplies, water sources, power generation, renewable lumber, animals, seeds. Real wealth.</p><p>Just be sure to <a target="_blank" href="https://jaredbrock.substack.com/p/christian-economic-sin">check your stock portfolio and cleanse it of all unrighteousness</a>.</p><p>And while you’re at it, download every movie and song that you ever hope to watch/listen to more than twice.</p><p>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?</p><p>3. Get offline and build real relationships with real people</p><p>We need to build resilient micro-societies.</p><p>And <a target="_blank" href="https://jaredbrock.substack.com/p/monastery">modern monasteries</a>.</p><p>And cities.</p><p>And countries — entirely new anti-corporate, pro-commons sovereignties.</p><p>We need more community.</p><p>We need more friends.</p><p>We need more family.</p><p>When Feudalism 2.0 takes over the economy, we serfs are going to need each other.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Future Faith at <a href="https://jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe</a>
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