Of the G-20 and Running the World

When you think about it, it is ridiculous.  In fact, it would be pitiful, if they were not so serious and did not have the power to do seriously bad things.  I am referring to the leaders of the Group of 20 (G-20) nations, who recently met in Mexico, thinking that they run the world.

If the question were put to you, “Who runs the world?” there could be several correct answers, but none of them would be this group of people, or any subset of them.  Nevertheless, because they think that they do run the world, and because they act on that belief, they do a lot of things that not only do not work but that make things worse.  Then they gather again and try something else, much of which is designed to clean up the mess caused by their previous foray in hubristic action.

The world is a complex place, with billions of people each doing complex things and interacting with each other in complex ways.  Then the planet itself does a lot of complex things.  Take the weather, for instance.  With computers and a hundred years of scientific study, weather forecasters have succeeded in the ability to predict the weather with a passable degree of accuracy two or three days out.  Beyond that, the accuracy of forecasts declines to about 50-50 (flip a coin) and drops from there.  The ability to change the weather, after a lot of work and investment, remains elusive. 

You have to be very smart, or think that you are, to convince yourself that you can in any significant way control the economy of your own nation, let alone of the world together.  The Russians, who are very smart people, tried it for 70 years with less than success and with the death and misery of tens of millions of their people.  The communist Chinese gave it a go, too.  Lately they have been reluctantly recognizing that there might be a better way—though they act like they are still not so sure.

Consider how many of the most serious problems facing mankind today are caused by people like these G-20 government leaders who fancy that they run things.  A few examples:

• The economic malaise in the United States.  The U.S. economy has just passed through a very deep recession, caused by government programs that encouraged people to buy houses that they could not afford, investors to invest in the mortgages used to buy those houses, banks to take government investments in their capital that they did not need, and people who could afford to pay their mortgages to walk away and leave the keys on the counter.  To solve those problems, the U.S. government spent a trillion dollars it did not have, increased rules and regulations on businesses that could otherwise create new jobs, “created” a quarter of a million new jobs at the cost of eliminating a million jobs in the private sector, and threatened investors and small businessmen with stiff tax increases.  Economic activity remains in the doldrums.

• The second economic recession in Europe.  The European economy went into recession about the same time that the U.S. economy did, for rather similar reasons.  It then weakly recovered, briefly, and then went back into recession when the promises that the governments of southern European countries made over decades to buy votes at last became more expensive than they could borrow money for—let alone pay for.  Now, every couple of weeks Greece, Italy, or Spain goes into economic crisis, the rest of the European leaders make empty promises to solve the problem, followed a couple of weeks later by new crisis and another round of promises.  That has been going on for about a year, while economic activity heads south.

• The availability of energy.  From the gasoline that we put in our cars, the electricity that lights our houses, to the natural gas that warms our offices and homes government rules affect the availability, price, distribution, and supply of energy.  The United States imports enormous amounts of oil from unstable countries that use the money we pay for it to threaten our people at home and abroad.  Meanwhile, we have more than enough supplies of coal, natural gas, and oil located in oil shale and oil sands and off our own shores to meet all of our needs now and for the foreseeable future, but government efforts to run the energy business prevent us from using them.

These are just three groups of examples of many.  Once again I call on the wisdom of William Tecumseh Sherman, the great Union general of the Civil War, who famously refused to run for President of the United States with the assertion that if nominated he would not run, if elected he would not serve.  He gave his friend and colleague, U.S. Grant, who did not make such a refusal, a piece of excellent advice:

My opinion is, the country is doctored to death, and if President and Congress would go to sleep like Rip Van Winkle, the country would go on under natural influences, and recover far faster than under their joint and several treatment.

(William T. Sherman, letter to General Ulysses S. Grant, February 14, 1868, in William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of William T. Sherman, p.922)

If someone should ask you, “Who runs the country?”, the correct answer is, “no one.”  Plenty pretend to, and many others wish to, but none do and none can, and we would all be better off if they would stop trying.  Our nation’s founders would have recoiled in horror at the question, because they intentionally created a nation that no one could run.  Why else have three branches of a federal government, one of which is divided into two separate houses, and state governments take their share of governmental authority?  They had seen Europe and knew of Asia where people for thousands of years had royally messed things up by trying to run their countries.

Instead, the American founders created a system where each person would run his own life.  The leaders in government were to run the government, that for the most part was to stay out of people’s lives and keep foreign governments at bay should they have any thoughts of trying their hand at running the lives of Americans.

That vision of the founders has been fading.  Today, make a list of the things that you can do that do not involve some sort of authority or permission from government.  It will not be a long list, and it has not been getting any longer in recent years.  Then ask yourself if life has been getting any better.  If it has, congratulate yourself on your power to overcome.

Of Scarcity and Life without Limits

When you have an unlimited supply of something, do you even notice it?  Do the fish in the ocean know that they are in water?  How many thousands of years did mankind enjoy gravity before someone pointed out its existence?  Presumably men have long recognized the existence of air, because we could feel the wind and there was the occasional suffocation that demonstrated what lack of air would do.  Nevertheless, we all go through each day little thinking of the air that constantly surrounds us.

The almost universal aspect of our mortal existence is scarcity, the fact that there are limits to things.  Scarcity is as basic a law of economics as motion is to physics.

When we think of God, the limits are removed.  Is that a human conception, to make God seem to us as otherworldly?  Or is the overcoming of limits a characteristic of eternal life, the limits of mortality serving to help teach humans the value of the eternal things we will soon experience?

Consider the mortal condition and how many problems are tied to scarcity.  Most wars have been fought over scarcity, whether scarcity of land, resources, or power.  How would things be different if there were no limits to food, wealth, or water?  

Such speculation is the stuff of intriguing science fiction writing.  Certainly the galaxies of the universe seem infinite.  Man’s fascination with the night sky over the millennia has in no small part been due to its ability to draw the mind of man out of the mortal world where all seems limited, attracted and uplifted to something that appears to have no end.

Stepping from speculation to revealed knowledge, God has indeed taught us that mortality is temporary, as are its limits.  Throughout man’s existence on earth God has called to His children to overcome their limits, to learn from them and then to exceed them.  God has taught us how to do so, endowed us with the divine ability to rise above obstacles, and sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to make triumph over limits possible.  That triumph was symbolized by but not limited to His victory over death, rising from the tomb to immortality.  That gift of immortality has been promised to all.  Other victories over life’s limitations are offered to all, but the offer must be received.

While triumph over the limits of physical death is guaranteed to all, transcendence over many other limits is optional.  The intentional rejection of the means offered to transcend human limitations is what makes sin what it is, intentional action that limits human potential.  Sins such as dishonesty, covetousness, cowardice, violation of the laws of chastity, and all other evils make us smaller, stop our growth, undermine our progress, close doors to the advancement of our character.

Virtue, on the other hand, is to embrace all that ennobles, that builds character, that strengthens courage, that develops the divine capacity to love.  Honesty generates trust, generosity increases our fellowship, chastity reinforces the bonds between husbands and wives and sets the foundation for eternal families, and each act of kindness leads to greater kindness, revealing the divinity that is at the center of our humanity.  In every case we become more, without end to the process.

Prophets throughout the ages have taught that damnation means to be limited where otherwise there would be progress and increase.  The modern prophet, Joseph Fielding Smith, described damnation as “being barred, or denied privileges of progression. . . or stopped” (Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, Vol. II, p.227).

Does not death impose an end on all of this progress?  Indeed it would, if mortality were the last word.  Without Christ and His atoning sacrifice it would be.  Damnation would be the lot of all, progress forever foreshortened, all efforts ultimately meaningless, the grave the final limit.  All good would be temporary, swallowed in the permanence of death.

Christ in life, death, and resurrection, was the constant reminder that mortality’s limits could be overcome.  He walked upon the water and calmed the sea.  He fed the thousands with a few fishes and loaves of bread.  He restored sight to the blind and healed all manner of diseases.  Christ summoned the dead back from the world of spirits.  He suffered death Himself, and yet in three days walked again among men, never more to die or to experience any other of mortality’s limitations.  Christ brought examples of eternity to us in this world to remind us what could and would be.

The ancient American prophet, Abinadi, joined with the prophets of all ages to proclaim,

And now if Christ had not come into the world . . . there could have been no redemption.  And if Christ had not risen from the dead, or have broken the bands of death that the grave should have no victory, and that death should have no sting, there could have been no resurrection.  But there is a resurrection, therefore the grave hath no victory, and the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ.  (Mosiah 16:6-8)

To those who fully embrace the Savior’s offered redemption this promise:

Wherefore, all things are theirs, whether life or death, or things present, or things to come, all are theirs, and they are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.  And they shall overcome all things.  (Doctrine and Covenants 76:59, 60)

The destiny that God, our Father, has planned for all of His children who will accept it, is life without limits, provided that we learn how to live in such a world.  For that we swim today in an ocean of limits, with instructions from the eternal worlds on how to thrive and overcome.