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What
is Social Credit?
Please
explain in simple terms, “what is Social Credit?”... Couldn't I sum
up the gist of it in a single sentence? Certainly I could — even in
two words: practical
Christianity!... But let me expand it a little. Social Credit
is a name given to a certain movement of the human mind and spirit (not
an organisation) which stems originally from the mind and writings of a
man of great insight and genius, the late Clifford Hugh Douglas. Its aim
is to “bind back to reality” or “express in practical terms” in
the current world, especially the world of politics and economics, those
beliefs about the nature of God and man and the Universe which
constitute the Christian Faith, as delivered to us from our forefathers,
and NOT as altered and perverted to suit current politics or economics,
which stem from a non-Christian source. What
is religion?
It
was Douglas who wrote: “Christianity is either something inherent in
the very warp and woof of the Universe, or it is just a set of
interesting opinions.” To those who “adapt” the Faith to fit their
politics or their economics, it is clearly the latter. The
pit of Social Credit Parties I
am not denying that some people who call themselves social crediters
have fallen into this pit, notably those who have used the name to
promote the interests of a political Party, with a certain petty success
in Canada and New Zealand. The aim of a Party is «power and status for
us and our group» which is quite incompatible both with Christianity
and with Social Credit. It is significant that so-called «Social Credit
Parties» always end by denouncing Douglas and departing further and
further from anything resembling Social Credit policy... There
is all the difference in the World between changing Christianity to fit
the “realities» of an artificial and man-made World, and changing the
World to fit the ultimate reality of the Kingdom of God. Social
crediters attempt the latter. They sometimes stray from the way, which
is one reason why they need your help. The
social credit This
movement has been influencing the World for sixty years. Its effects
have been widespread, but unpublicised. One of its gifts to the human
mind and at least the English language is the term: the
social credit
(without Caps.) which is the name of something, which exists in all
societies but which never had a name before because it was taken for
granted. We become aware of it only as we lose it. “Credit”
is another word for «faith» or «confidence», so we can also call it
the Faith or Confidence which binds any society together — the mutual
trust or belief in each other without which fear is substituted for
trust as the “cement” of society... Though no society can exist
without some social credit, it is at its maximum where the Christian
religion is practised, and at its minimum where it is denied and derided. The
social credit is thus a result, or practical expression, of real
Christianity in Society, one of its most recognisable fruits; and it is
the aim and policy of social crediters to increase it, and to strive to
prevent its decrease. There are innumerable commonplace examples of it
which we take for granted every day of our lives. How can we live in any
sort of peace or comfort if we cannot trust our neighbours? How could we
use the roads if we could not trust others to observe the rule of the
road? (And what happens when they don’t!) What
would be the use of growing anything in gardens, farms or nurseries if
other people would grab it? How could any economic activity go forward
— whether producing, selling or buying — if people cannot, in
general, rely upon honesty and fair dealing? And what happens when the Of
course, social crediters are not the only people who are trying to
promote the social credit. Most decent, sane people instinctively do so,
including many God-fearing people of other religions, and even some
atheists who were brought up in Christian homes and are living on the
moral capital of their parents or teachers. But social crediters are the
only people who are consciously engaged in it, and know where they are
going, so that they can point the way to those who are unconscious.
(...) Social
Discredit Just
as there are social crediters, conscious and unconscious, trying to
build up the social credit, so there are others — social discrediters
— trying to destroy it and break it down, at present, with all too
much success. The conscious ones include the communists and other
revolutionaries, who quite openly seek to smash all the links of trust
and confidence which enable our society to function until the Day of the
Revolution dawns... But it is the unconscious social discrediters who
are responsible, in the West, for the present success of the conscious
ones.... Why
do the shops and the manufacturers foist upon us so many shoddy,
rubbishy, throw-away things, at outrageous prices, and trick us into
buying them with clever packaging and advertising? Why are most repair
services so scandalously slow, expensive and inefficient, and so many
small services which made life easier now unobtainable? And above all,
why do millions of decent working people of all classes take part in
ironically named «industrial action» (strikes), deliberately designed
to damage services to their fellow men? Just
think of the damage that has been inflicted on the public in recent
years by dockers, firemen, railwaymen, miners, teachers, garbage men,
ambulance drivers, hospital workers, etc. They can't be all com- munists
or callous criminals! What on earth can make normal decent people
descend to this spiritual level? We all know what it is. There is one
common factor running through all this destructive and discreditable
action: the compulsive need for more money to meet the ever-rising cost
of living. Money
and the Experts So
now at last I have come to the question of money, which is what some
people think that Social Credit is all about; but it isn’t! Social
Credit is an attempt to apply Christianity in social affairs; but if
money stands in the way, then we, and every Christian, must concern
ourselves with the nature of money, and just why it stands in the way,
as it surely does. There is a dire need for more people to look deeply
into the operation of our monetary system, though that is not everyone's
job. But when the consequences are so desperate, everyone can at least
grasp the outline of what is wrong, and could be put right, which will
enable them to act accordingly... The
specialist and the expert (economists and bankers) must be held
responsible for devising the correct methods, while the sphere of the
consumer and the public is to insist upon the results required and to
replace the experts who do not deliver them, or require that our
representatives do so. This works well until we come up against a
monopoly of experts (probably paid by a bigger Monopoly such as the
State or Big Business) who decide that they know best what we ought to
have, which is invariably what we do not want, and assure us that what
we do want is ridiculous or undesirable or technically impossible, even
when we have had it before and know it is possible. We then have to look
for honest experts, who will look into the matter technically, advise us
whether it really is possible, and if so propose effective means of
obtaining the desired objective. Douglas, an honest expert
In
a sense, Douglas himself was the first of these honest experts, as he
used his expert knowledge of engineering, including pioneer work in
automation, and in industrial accountancy, to put his finger on the
defect in the financial system, and to propose effective means of
correcting it... He started by simply assuming that the purpose of
production was to produce what people as consumers wanted as exactly as
possible with as little waste of materials, energy or human effort as
was practicable. Having
drawn attention to a failing in the way money was issued and controlled
which prevented this purpose from being achieved, Douglas expected that
it would be honestly investigated and put right if confirmed. Instead
he found that those who controlled the economy through finance were well
aware of the situation, but had quite other purposes in mind, mainly the
full employment of the working lives of the whole population as hired
labour, forced by the need for «pay» to carry out the purposes of
those who issue and direct the flow of money (i.e. bank credit). As
Douglas pointed out, the two policies are wholly opposite and
incompatible, but he soon found that in economics one is not permitted
to raise questions of such a fundamental nature as «What is money, and
what are industry and commerce for?» Such questions are answered, not
by economics or science of any sort, but by religion, and the answers
are most revealing as to the type of religion which they express. It was
in this way that social crediters discovered that the plain common sense
which they were trying to bring to reality was in fact Christian in
origin. What
is money for? The
first point about money is that it has now ceased to consist of a
material commodity, such as gold, a part of the reality of this planet,
given to us freely by the Creator... As the productive power of our
technology increased, there was less and less sense in restricting the
distribution of its products in relation to the amount of one particular
metal which was found. The substitution of a system of pure accountancy
— simply numerals on paper, and nowadays, magnetic charges on computer
tapes — was an enormous advance without which our industry and
commerce could never have expanded as they have. But
notice the changes which have occurred! The new money, commonly called
bank credit, is entirely artificial, written into existence by certain
men, who have a centralised monopoly of its issue and direction. Being
purely symbolic it is subject to no natural limits whatever. It is as
easy to write a million as a hundred pounds. And it does not come freely
into existence, but always as a debt, i.e. a loan repayable to those who
issue it... Make
no mistake! Money is the means to the most complete dictatorship over
human lives which has so far existed. Just consider the power that it
exercises over every aspect of our society, including our own lives, and
all the media and the influences and institutions that press upon us.
Perhaps now you will understand why Douglas and his followers who
exposed these facts about the monopoly of credit are not «acceptable»
to the political parties or to the university schools of economics, or
given any hearing or publicity on the national media. If
you will think it over, you will see that an economy entirely dependent
upon debt-money issued in this way cannot possibly repay the debt
without bringing itself to a standstill in chaos and starvation and
revolution, unless, of course, it borrows more and more. That is, we are
caught in a trap of irredeemable debt from which there is no escape
within the rule of the present money system, that all new «credit»
must be issued as debt... It has been said that Money is the God of this World, and also that the love of money is the root of all evil (not money itself). Also that the test of loving God is that we obey His commandments. So which God do we obey most?...
Plenty
of God-given resources When
Our Lord was asked a trap money question; offering phoney alternatives:
«Is it lawful to pay tribute to Caesar?» he refused to fall into
either trap of partisanship, but re-thought it so that it could receive
a true answer, and that is what we should do when confronted with the
political choice between more unemployment or worse inflation. What,
then, is owing to God in His created world of more than ample economic
resources for all our needs and vast technological know-how inherited
freely from the past inspiration of scientists and inventors by the
Spirit of Truth? Surely,
it is that the choice freely offered by Him shall not be withheld or
distorted by a man-made system of accountancy which ought to facilitate
that choice. It should reflect, not dictate, the choices made by people,
as in fact it does in a very partial and imperfect fashion. The
creation of useless jobs There
is immense confusion of thought about this, much complicated by the
puritan idea that it is wrong for anyone to receive “something for
nothing”, even, it seems, the gracious gifts of the Creator, handed on
to us through our cultural inheritance. We should all “merit” what
we receive, through our «honest sweat» for the common good in some «job»,
but if our labour is not needed because some technical device will do
the work better, then it is demanded that useless or redundant jobs
should be created in order to cheat us into a feeling of
self-satisfaction and righteousness, because we imagine that we can
“hold up our heads” as we are “pulling our weight” and
“earning our living”. Although
in fact probably about half the “employed” population would be
making a bigger economic contribution if they stayed at home, drawing
the same income, and abstained from interference with the economic
process, except, maybe, to look after their house and family, dig their
garden, and give their neighbours or anyone else who needed it, a
helping hand with those little services which have been priced out by
the «employment» system; without, incidentally, flattering themselves
that they were thereby «meriting» all that they were receiving... Despite
all the efforts made recently to convince us that the Earth is a poor,
barren place, already grossly over-populated by a mass of witlessly
proliferating humanity, in dire need of draconic regulation and control
by a central World Government and a vast bureaucracy, it is abundantly
clear that wherever people are free to produce without interference, and
their efforts are financially rewarding, ample produce becomes available,
which may become «burdensome surpluses» when purchasing power is
restricted. Natural catastrophes apart, the extreme poverty and
starvation in the Third World, of which we hear so much, are man made,
and where not due to war, revolution or civil chaos, are due to the
maltreatment of nature under financial pressure. Conservation,
restoration and diversification, which offer the true, long-term
economies, are always too expensive for the poor, and impossible for the
debt-ridden... Debt-free
money and dividends Debt-free
credit, applied to price reduction, is the only way in which the
progressive inflation inseparable from our present system of
debt-financing can actually be brought to a halt without strangling the
economy. In
the same way, the only possibility of liberating people from the
soul-destroying burden of useless routine labour or mechanical work
better done by machines, and the even more soul-destroying burden of
unemployment, is by distributing the «wages of the machine» to all,
not on our «merits» but as our share in the cultural inheritance. This
again would require the use of debt-free credit, not in unlimited
amounts, but precisely to the amount required for the cancelling of
debts, and which would otherwise be met by borrowing, or by «cuts» and
unemployment.... The
alternative is to continue living in this money-dominated world of
wholly loan-financed «employmentism» until either hyper-inflation, or
mass-unemployment, drives us into desperation, revolution and the
totalitarian wage-slave State. The ultimate consequences, however, are
far deeper than the political or the economic. Faith
and works How
then can our aims ever be implemented — especially as Party politics
or other means of imposing them upon other people are quite incompatible
with them? Seek first the Kingdom — and that means returning to God's
reality, and comparing it with the all-too-pressing pseudo-reality of
man's money-dominated world, and taking the trouble to understand how
much the Christian religion, which is in fact a part of the «warp and
woof of the universe», has been corrupted and turned from its path by
the implicit, unconscious acceptance of the domination of «money» with
its false values, as a part of the «reality» — of the «modern,
changed situation» to which, it is constantly urged, our religion must
adapt itself. Until
that is put right, Christians cannot even start to restore the social
credit — the faith of society; they may even be helping to destroy it.
But after that, a great vista opens of hope and faith, thought and study
and action. Hope, because we are not frustrated by «the nature of
things», only by the corruption by power of certain men, and we know
there is a way out. Faith, because it is the substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of things not seen; and we have the hope, and have
studied the evidence; but faith without works is dead, and ours is very
much alive. So that leads on to action... Every social crediter is a
focus for such action among his fellow citizens, helping them and
showing them how to defend or increase the social credit... There is a
place for you in this adventure! Geoffrey
Dobbs This article was published in the May-June-July, 2002 issue of “Michael”, and is also available in the form of an 8-page leaflet (with the articles “It is urgent to put an end to the scandal of poverty”, by Alain Pilote, “Social Credit is the application of the Social Doctrine of the Church”, by Bishop Frankowski of Poland, “and two articles of Louis Even, “Money, an instrument of distribution” and “To solve the problem of poverty”). |
