The New Capitalists' The economic times they are a changing?
The Old Capitalism amassed things or wealth, and the New Capitalism amasses expenses. The Old Capitalism belonged to parents of the youth who today are rebelling against them as the New Capitalists -- and they are not as different as they may seem. They both are greedy: they both hoard. But one is like a squirrel gathering nuts, the other, like a philanderer, gathers joyless pleasures.
The Old Capitalism first: It controlled the methods of production like mines or oil wells, and then became masters, consumers in virtue of money it possessed. Ownership became an extension of the personality of Old Capitalist. He believes he was important because he owned important things. Having was equated with being: "I am what I am because of what I have". He was a "self-made man", thereby relieving God of a tremendous responsibility. Life to him consists in abundance of things a man possesses. His Yacht is a new piece of his ego. His having is so possessive that he speaks of "my lawyer", ""my doctor", "my psychiatrist" and even "my rheumatism".
Very often when he becomes jaded with his financial power, he searches for a new power and enters politics. The "having" in terms of money now is converted into "having" of influence and prestige. Millionaire politicians have become a new phenomenon in American life, spending almost three million dollars for a senatorial post that will pay only fifty thousand.
The New Capitalists are not the middle-aged or the old, but the young men. Many of them rebelled against their families who were financially rich. They claimed that their conscience protested against the accumulation of wealth. They rebelled against affluence, while often living on it, being supported either by their parents or by the welfare state. Their protests against an old generation were often right, but their reforms were wrong. Having no goal or purpose in life, sometimes their dissent against wealth had no other common expression than by changing the age of snobs into the age of slobs. This antisocialism became identified with dirt. Unlike Buddha who conquered desire when he became poor, and St Francis who put on Christ when he took off his silks, they were more like Tolstoy who lived with peasants but never gave up the title to his property.
The New Capitalists were just as passionately in love with wealth as the Old Capitalists but not with money-wealth, but experience-wealth. They would do any thing to have a new thrill, whether it would be love of destructiveness in which a human life is aborted every twenty-five seconds, to the wildest of erotic titillations. They looked down on the "new poor" who had never knocked their brains out with heroin or could count his "checks" only on the fingers of one hand, or who had not indulged in wholesale defloration of maidens. As rapacious as any of the old capitalists, they controlled a new form of wealth of flesh instead of oil, a new drug euphoria for bonds. While complaining against pollution of rivers, air and land, their new strip-mining flung aside one ruined life after another.
If the Old Capitalists went into politics when they grew tired of making money, what will happen to the New Capitalists when they become sensually and erotically exhausted. One or two tried politics without success. The chances are they may turn out to be better citizens than their older counterparts. The reason lies in the nature of their excesses. The Old Capitalists' sin was pride, the New Capitalists' sin is lust. Pride inflates, lust deflates. The former ends up with a bigger ego because he measures it by what he has, the latter ends up with disillusionment and a sense of shame for he cannot add experiences together as the rich man adds dollars.
The New Capitalist perverted the noble spirit of self sacrifice. He practiced a self sacrifice not like a martyr who loved life intensely, but could suffer death because he loved Christ more and, therefore, would die for Him. "The New Capitalists' self sacrifice was based on the ignoble theme that life is not worth living, he loved not life, but death because of the despair of not knowing where he was going. But that very emptiness becomes a yearning for God, as thirst is a yearning for water. He has hope.
"America needs religious conviction and a stanch adherence to sound principles if they are to meet the threat of communism on a long-term basis. Communism is a faith and it can be combated only by those who have a strong faith in Christianity."
-- Fulton J. Sheen, 1952, Silver Jubilee of Rev. Thomas J. Toolen.
This reminds me of Luke 15:1-32 where Jesus tells the the parable of the prodigal son to a crowd of followers and jealous scribes and Pharisees.
Posted 2012-03-10 6:25 AM (#60620 - in reply to #60614) By: Philomena
Sheen's extraordinarily insightful, if unique, interpretation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in this work, is historical rather than moral. The younger son in the parable is Western Civilization. After many long centuries in union with the Father's house, the Church, Western Civilization took its inheritance -- not inheritance in the form of gold and silver, but spiritual capital in the form of the eternal truths necessary for salvation. Carried away by its newfound independence from the Father's House, it began little by little to spend the patrimony that Christ committed to His Church: first its belief in the need for authority, then its belief in Scripture as the revealed word of God, followed by its belief in the Divinity of Christ, the necessity of grace and, finally, the existence of God as Lord and Supreme Judge. In our own day, it has spent its last penny living riotously. How it can come to its senses once again and find redemption is the subject of this book.
The time has come for honest men to take consistent ground in politics, or the Lord will curse them. . . . God cannot sustain this free and blessed country, which we love and pray for, unless the Church will take right ground. Politics are a part of religion in a country such as this, and Christians must do their duty to the country as a part of their duty to God. God will bless or curse this country according to the course Christians take in politics.
America's Party Golden Archives
Edited by gcsteven 2012-03-10 7:41 AM
Posted 2012-03-10 7:17 AM (#60621 - in reply to #60620) By: gcsteven
