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Brian McLaren taught me an incredibly useful principle, and it has become one of the most useful tools in the pursuit of truth.
It doesn’t matter how good your answers are if you aren’t asking the right questions.
We all know that poll questions can be worded in such a way as to “skew” the answers to the questions. In any study or discipline, such as theology or philosophy, the questions we ask are important because they lead us to certain answers. Theological questions do the same thing: they narrow down our answers in the confines of the scope of the question itself.
McLaren’s incredible ability to explain why some questions are irrelevant, unimportant, or sometimes wrongheaded, and his aptitude for reconstructing better questions more relevant to today’s world, have helped me see through the mist and haze of various world views and their entrapping questions. As I’ve been burrowing through the rabbit hole we call “economics,” and a more all-encompassing notion of social justice, I’m learning that the conventional questions are perhaps misleading and insufficient to find ethical and sustainable answers.
Before starting my self-study of economics, I knew practically nothing about supply, demand, money, exchange, capital, investments, and all the other accompanying pieces of an economy. I was taught the basics my senior year of high school, but I didn’t understand most of it, and what I did understand I didn’t find all that relevant to my goals in life.
For over a year now, I’ve questioned everything with regards to economics, and I’m discovering that the questions we tend to ask about economics only deal with the symptoms rather than the problems. If one sits down on a thumb tack, and pursues a long regimen of physical therapy, medicine, and other forms of pain relief, but doesn’t even consider removing the tack itself, we would call this person ignorant or deluded. And when it comes to economics, if we don’t focus on the source, we won’t know how to relieve the symptoms.
So let’s get to the source of the pain. If you are at all interested in fighting against injustice, against the activities, policies, and agendas that result in the poor remaining poor, the rich gaining at the expense of the poor, and the shrinking of the “middle class,” then you must find the source of the pain.
I used to mock those who say that economic injustices are “institutional problems” that favor the wealthy, leaving the poor to fend for themselves. I now believe this to be true, but in a very different way, and in a more specific institution. The more I seek to understand this particular institution, the more I realize how horrible the “system” really is in the United States, and how much it needs to change. For those who want to fight for social justice, economic equality, and the abolition of institutionalized economic injustice, that fight must be taken directly to the source.
Care to know what the source is? Would it surprise you? Would it even fall under the McLaren principle of asking a very different question?
If you want to find the source, take a close look at the Federal Reserve Bank. In future posts, I’ll mostly link to articles concerning the evil that is the Federal Reserve System, and why it is so important to understand this as what I’ve just described it to be.
