Kinda getting in a bad habit of naked linking, but I’ve been meaning to link to this article by Brian McLaren for a few days now and have not gotten around to it.

I read McLaren’s Everything Must Change last year. In it, the driving impression was that we live in a system turned “suicide machine” by a destructive framing story.

And this is just a prophet’s friendly “I told you so”.

McLaren:

In [Everything Must Change], I made it clear that to me, the Prosperity Crisis was the key symptom of an unsustainable (or suicidal) system. The economic system that we have created in the last few centuries has indeed produced wealth for the West that lifts the middle class to live at a level of comfort and wealth that a king could only have dreamed of a few centuries ago – medical care, hot water, bountiful food, heated and air conditioned homes, mobile phones, not to mention entertainment like MP3’s and The Office at our fingertips!

But this unprecedented prosperity has too often been purchased through various kinds of theft. First, we have stolen resources from the planet at an indefensible rate, stealing from our children and children’s children. Second, we have stolen land from native peoples, and we have stolen resources from nations whose people lack even basic needs (take dirty Coltan exports from Congo in our cell phones, for example, or dirty diamond exports from West Africa on our fingers, or dirty coal taken from Appalachia through mountaintop removal). Third, through a whole range of complex and newly invented financial instruments, a rich minority has succeeded in profiting from our retirement accounts and investments and real estate values. Fourth, through skyrocketing debt, we keep trying to prop up both our personal and national wealth … purchasing our own prosperity on the backs of future generations who will have to pay the mortgage.