In yesterday’s DM and the video that accompanied it, we laid out the latest attempts at democracide, that is the conscious killing of democracy by people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (on track to become the first trillionaire in the world).
And we must not leave out their patron, he who occupies the present White House–currently being dissembled to make room for a grotesque showcase for the richest Americans to gather. The same kind of folks who attended a Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, ostentatious to the hilt at the very time when 42 million Americans were about to be deprived of SNAP benefits, i.e. were going hungry. Now that is a truly scary Halloween event indeed.
Yes, the richest country in the world cannot feed its hungriest citizens. Nor provide health care to 40 million citizens. Cannot? Or chooses not to?
What, in their minds, is to replace democracy?
We saw how Thiel, the single most influential kingmaker in the current MAGA government, is so scared of the regulation of AI that he calls such a movement to regulate it “the antichrist.”
What is a government without regulation of its richest and most powerful citizens? It is surely not a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” that Abraham Lincoln spoke of. He dreamed, as the founders of this republic dreamed, of a government where the people reigned. “We the people,” as our Constitution puts it.
But a government sans regulation is not a government of “we the people” but of “we the billionaires (and soon-to-be trillionaire).” Without regulation, government becomes available to the highest bidder, and it is guaranteed to be a government of greed, avarice, and corruption. Of, by, and for the greedy? What could possibly go wrong?
When America was building its middle class in the 1950s, there was genuine regulation going on of the most entitled of its citizens. At that time, there was a closer likeness to the salaries of the owners of wealth and the working class that continued pretty much up to 1980. In 1980, among the Fortune 500, the ratio between CEO pay and the average worker’s pay was 42 to 1. In 2023, the ratio was 268 to 1.*
The awareness of this gap, whether conscious or unconscious, fueled the anger that got candidate Donald Trump elected both in 2016 and 2024. But now that, as president, he is in no way fulfilling his promises to the lower classes, fire is happening again in the American body politic.
Speaking of “regulation,” such a bete noire among the spoiled classes, let us consider what all spiritual traditions caution about: The capital sin of Greed or Avarice.
Thomas Aquinas teaches that “the greed for gain knows no limit and tends to infinity.” He points out that there are natural desires and manmade desires, but natural desires cannot be infinite because “nature tends to something finite and fixed. Hence, a person never desires infinite meat, or infinite drink.”
Manmade desire fans a quest for the infinite. “One that desires riches may desire to be rich not up to a certain limit but to be simply as rich as possible.” Or richer than the next guy—or every guy.
Aquinas calls greed “the opposite of justice” because it erects such an obstacle to love and compassion. This may help to explain why the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, killed over 600,000 of the poorest people in the world—mostly children—when he and Trump dismantled USAID for starving Africans this year. Millions of Africans are projected to die next year as a result.
David Korten warns that regulation is necessary for survival of the planet as we know it. “To accept the reality of physical limits is to accept the need to limit greed and acquisition in favor of economic justice and sufficiency.”
Global warming is at issue here—the Earth is finite and can only absorb so much of human greed that in turn bets on fossil fuels for short-term gain.
*Collins, Burned by Billionaires, p. 46.
Banner Image: Poverty vs. ostentation: the children in the truck are painfully real, while the model is staged as a luxurious objet d’art. (L) “Family of ex-sharecroppers from Arkansas, near Little Rock, on California highway.” Photo by Dorothea Lange, 1937, colorized by Ian Betley, 2023. (R) “Ziegfeld Model Risqué.” 1920s photo by Alfred Cheney Johnston, restored by Nick & Jane. Both on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you see regulation as “the antichrist” like Thiel does? And no regulation as the government to replace democracy? Or do you see greed as needing regulation both as a personal practice and a societal one?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society, pp. 301f., 304
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, Jen Listug
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
“Warriors for Ecological and Economic Justice,” in Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision For a New Generation by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox
2 thoughts on “No Regulation: A Government Replacing Democracy with Greed?”
No! No! Yes! Thanks Matthew and DM team for continuing to expose the rise of destructive greed and corruption of capitalism/greed, spiritually unbalanced patriarchy, the billionaire class and their multinational corporations, the sycophant Republicans, the Unsupreme Court, up to the present democracidal authoritarian regime of Donald Trump. We have to continue maintaining our Faith/Hope, prayers, and resistance as American citizens, community groups, and democratic institutions to maintain our humanistic, democratic, and spiritual values personally and collectively with-in the Spirit of Love, Truth, Wisdom, Peace, Justice, Healing, Strength, Transformation, Creativity, Joy, Compassion… daily with one another….
One of the tragedies of the destruction of all regulation is that no vulnerable class is now legally protected, so that, for instance, if a woman is being sexually harassed at work, her only recourse is to sue to get any relief, which is not guaranteed. This is the tactic that Roy Cohn taught the president’s father: do anything illegal you want and then make the victim or victims sue and then tie them up in court forever. If a disabled child loses educational services, the parents must sue to get relief, and so on and so on. The victims continue to be victimized by a totally corrupt system, while the perpetrators make themselves into victims somehow—as when a man tells his abused wife that she made him do it!! The America that I was brought up to respect is now the victim of rampant violence to all of its values. And those of us who care are the remnant in our exile and must stick together to find peaceful ways to resist and stand as examples of a better way. Thank God for leaders like Matthew Fox, Bishop William Barber, Fr. Richard Rohr, and others–they remind us of who we are, whose we are, and what we need to do.