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Mass delusions and their consequences : Comments
By John Perkins, published 4/11/2008The god delusion is pathological. Not only America, but the whole world, has been forced to pay the price.
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John Perkins blames the god delusion for all of our major global woes.
I think that he is badly overstating the case. In fact, I fear that as an economist, he is trying to divert the blame away from the human fallibility to the profit motive and onto a stool pigeon.
There is no doubt that misguided religious beliefs have a fair bit to do with it in much of the world. But in Australia, religion is not a huge force, nothing like it is in the US, and yet we are in pretty much the same sort of pickle as the US, in terms of our grossly unsustainable lifestyle and addiction to continuous growth.
I doubt that our somewhat better financial situation is particularly strongly due to us having a much less manically religious population.
The addiction to the profit motive, has led to the big end of town accumulating huge power and strongly compromising governments in their fundamental duty to mitigate the downside of the profit motive and make sure that wealth is reasonably equitably distributed. It has also led to people who are supposed to be experts being bought or duped into towing the line of the greed merchants. Many others actually believe that never-endingly increasing resource consumption, population growth and environmental impact is ok, because they live in a world where everyone around them promulgates it.
Unfortunately, many ‘scientists’, most ‘economists’ the vast majority of politicians, and a very large portion of the general populace fall into these categories.
An economist that believes in unending growth is at best a pseudoeconomist and probably outrightly a false-economist (Is Mr Perkins one of these?).
The absurdity of our addiction to continuous growth sits right at the extreme end of the spectrum of MASS DELUSION, deception, blind-eyedness and perhaps even psychosis.
THIS is what is rooting our future! And it has STUFF-ALL to do with religion, in Australia and in many other countries.