Of God and Government
I brought up the subject of the old Soviet Union with God today. The battle between the USSR and the USA was often pitched as the godless communists versus the Bible thumping Americans and I was wondering how God himself had viewed the whole thing. As usual he refused to really take sides but he did give me an insight that I’d never had before. While the battle was sold as Communism against Democracy, that doesn’t really make sense, because that’s an economic model versus a political model, so it’s essentially orthogonal. The other pieces, then, are the political model of the Soviet Union, which was Totalitarianism, and the economic model of the United States, which is Capitalism. So the more complete struggle was between Totalitarian Communism and Democratic Capitalism.
Now God didn’t exactly say any of these things himself, he mostly just kept asking me questions until I managed to fill in the details on my own. What I came to realize is that Totalitarian Communism is about the few demanding that the many work together to reach common goals and that Democratic Capitalism is about the many demanding that individuals each compete to reach individual goals, many of which will doubtless be held in common.
I don’t really know what this says about the value of one system over the other but the key thing that I note is that neither system really involves God.
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