Papworth: Bankruptcy - Financial & Moral

BANKRUPTCY

Our money systems are disintegrating under our noses, they reflect
no more than the bankruptcy of the resources of our physical world and the way
we are treating them. Much more to the causative point they reflect the moral
and spiritual bankruptcy that grips us.

We do not see supermarkets as evil, even though they are destroying the cohesion
of local communities and are part of a comprehensive framework of social
malignancy that is destroying the bonds of family and community life so vital to
psychic health.

Nor do we see the cultural barbarity and depravity of mass TV not in local
hands. We accept daily newspapers of hundreds of pages devoted to promoting a
gospel of consumerism no civilisation can possibly survive, as normal.

We fail to grasp that if one man can drive a car anywhere and enjoy life, that
is one thing, but when many millions are lured into it, it creates insoluble
problems of resources and of social cohesion that will defeat us. We accept all
this and more as `normal' when we should be mounting the most fervent opposition
if our children are ever going to have a life worth living, or indeed whether
they will be able to have a life at all.

Our entire lifestyle has been fashioned and distorted by market forces which are
prompting the disintegration of civilisation. It means we must stop accepting as
`normal' what is inherently evil and destructive. It means each local community
must generate the collective forces that will enable moral objectives to take
precedence over whatever market and other forces of greed may seek to ordain,
and democratically enable it to establish its own lifestyle .

John Papworth
Former and founding editor of Resurgence magazine