Wide gaps between haves and have nots have never been good for the social order, and when these gaps become extreme, unbridgeable chasms of hopelessness and despair, they are fatal.
This occurs independently of religion and culture, even to a large extent, politics, though all of the above have historically been useful tools for both oppressed and oppressor.
Recent events in France are as predictable as indigestion after a McDonald’s meal, and the only relation to either culture or religion is that the French underclass happens to be mostly brown, black and Muslim.
If they were blond haired Presbyterians from Estonia, had they been treated the same by the French mainstream populace, there would today be reports of Estonian Presbyterian youngsters torching cars.
All the Abrahamic faith traditions (and the older ones, for that matter) contain generous dollops of fatalism presented as “God’s will,” which have been used to good advantage over the centuries to persuade the poor that they should accept their fate without protest in hopes of obtaining a benefit in the afterlife.
As a counterbalance, they also contain plenty of justice and righteousness memes, available for use by the oppressed. There is no sacred text worth its salt that does not enable the faithful to cite passages that support diametrically opposed views.
And all contain to one degree or another, support for the supra-religious social control strategy of the oppression of women. Ironically, the one doctrine that diverges most from that particualar norm, Islam, is today painted as the really oppressive one, usually by westerners who are very candid about not having read the Koran, and not having any interest in reading it.
All the tribal rivalry, the futile batting of moth wings against the twin gentle zephyrs of Mendel and Math, as demographics change, in nations, on the planet as a whole, however, only serves to smear itself like cheap makeup on the face of the real issue: poverty.
Not insolvable poverty, not poverty that can’t be helped, not I can’t afford a big screen TV poverty, but deliberate, conscious, poverty, hopeless and desperate, caused not by failures of crops or weather, disease and unpreventable famine, all those ancient demons have been virtually eliminated by science and technology, and Greed, the One True Devil, now reigns unchallenged by his erstwhile obliging helpers.
Not one human being goes to bed hungry in the world today save for the conscious decision of another human being that it should be so, wealthy nations have the capacity to produce and deliver medicine, food, seeds, to anyone anywhere who lacks them, but prefer not to do so.
The affluent routinely spend more money on adornments and recreational pursuits than the poor earn in a year, in many cases, in their whole lives.
An ever-increasing percentage of the world’s resources are held in an ever-decreasing number of hands, with the result that worldwide, about half of the children born on earth are slaves of one kind or another, and in the richest nation on this planet, a child born in poverty has about the same chance of “getting ahead” as he does of winning the lottery.
Obscene wealth and inexcusable poverty living cheek by jowl is not a new phenomenon. It has happened before, in many societies, and eventually, corrections occur.
These corrections seldom result in Utopian paradises, in fact they never do. If such a thing were possible, it would not happen within the context of a resource distribution correction.
Lords, whether of Imperial China or modern day France or the US, do not voluntarily cede their gold and their power to the serfs. On the contrary, in their desperate efforts to stave off the inevitable, they rip the bellies of geese and end up increasing the numbers of the serfs, at the expense of their own.
Their weakness is that their desperation is no match for that of the serf. Their weapons are no match for the weapons of the weak (with props to T.S. Eliot).
In their frenzy to consolidate and secure their gold against the desperate hordes, they give no thought to their lives, or those of their children, while the serf is motivated only by his only chance to secure this benefit.
He has now reached that critical point of certainty that the lords will kill him whether he does what they say or not. He has nothing to lose, everything to gain, and his enemy has voluntarily discarded any negotiating chips he might have had.
His enemy the lord has plenty to lose, but all he sees is the gold, and that is all he tries to save, thus forfeiting both battle and war.
None of that is new. What is new is that the same technology, the same science, that has enabled the lords to consolidate so many resources into so few hands on a global basis, has also enabled the serfs to have a greater awareness of the extent of their plight, and gradually, an awareness of the extent of their power.
As Arthur Gilroy mischievously asks, “What if every non-French menial worker in France went on strike?”
And what if every “undocumented” (and frequently unpaid) worker in the US did?
What inspiration might that be to the people struggling to survive in Saudi-Occupied Arabia? in the Philippines?
Wrap it in any flag, cense it with the smoke of any faith, label it as any ism that your personal beliefs and/or culture dictate.
Evildoers who hate Greed are on the march.