In his booklet, "The Approach To Reality', Major Douglas, says, "...it is not of the technique of Social Credit that the powers-that-be are afraid; it is of the fundamental change it would make in the whole problem of economics and human life.".
A few lines further on he states: "Social Credit... involves a conception of the relationships between individuals and their association in countries and nations, between individuals and their association in groups."
In other words, Social Credit involves two things: a change in economics and human life, and a particular way of viewing the relationships between individuals and the groupings in which they live.
Now, this paper, The Union of Electors, devotes considerable space to such problems as state health insurance, fluoridation, socialism. It does so because in each of these cases the inalienable freedom of the individual is attacked. This paper and the movement it represents, the Social Credit movement of the Union of Electors, also attacks the existing financial system and seeks to replace it with the financial theories of Social Credit.
It does so because the regime of Social Credit would make it possible for the individual to maintain and safeguard his essential liberties and God-given rights while continuing to live comfortably and securely within the framework of society and discharging his obligations and duties towards it.
This, in a very general way, is what Douglas meant by fundamental change and "a conception of relationships". For it is a sad feature of mens' social organization today, that, bit by bit, the individual is becoming less and less an individual and more and more a unit in a great machine, his original, glorious destiny lost sight of, his lot now, to serve a vague depersonalized being known as the state.
The tragedy of mankind's descent into slavery is a fact which no one can deny. It is a spectacle which we can witness in almost any part of the world. Across the vast reaches of the Soviet Union, 200 million souls are held in bondage to the iron rule of the communist party led by Khrushchev and those other men of blood.
Bordering this great land mass is that of China where 600 million Chinese carry the communist yoke under Mao Tse-tung. In the very heart of the European penninsula, the once proud nations of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary, East Germany, Yugoslavia, all pay homage to the communist doctrine of the supremacy of the state over the individual.
In France and Italy the communist parties are a constant threat. Spain and Portugal have only staved off the Red tide by assuming dictatorships which while hostile to communism, are themselves totalitarian. In the countries of Asia, Africa and the Near East, we have the spectacle of newly awakened nations tormented by the decision they must make of choosing western style democracy or socialism; and in the turmoil of decision many of these countries have turned for stability and order to the military rule of generals. In Latin America, revolution is almost an every-day occurence. What chance has liberty to survive in such an atmosphere?
Whilst it cannot be strictly asserted that Communist conspirators are at the roots of all these evils, still it cannot be denied that the theories and doctrines of socialism, which were sowed abroad in the world with the development of the industrial revolution, play a very considerable part in the plottings and schemings and the stirring up of strife, which marks so much of the social and political activity in the world today.
Wheresoever men have looked up to, and reached for, the ideal of security and liberty with freedom from want, there have been the socialists to tender them the welfare state with the classless society wherein no one may rise and all must obey the state.
Wheresoever the Christian ideal of the supremacy of the individual has fallen into disrepute and been cast aside because the socio-economic regime has not benefitted the masses but has only served to subjugate them to a hidden power, there the socialists and communists, crying revolt against this hidden power which they erroneously identify as 'capitalism" have reaped a rich harvest of followers.
Where will men look for salvation from the spreading flood of communism and socialism?
To the west? To Germany, France or Italy, threatened from within by the forces of the Left and from without by Russian divisions? To England, which so quickly embraced the socialism of Attlee, Bevan, Gaitskill and Beveridge and the welfare state which would care for man from the cradle to the grave but leave him with scarcely a shred of dignity, self-reliance or liberty?
Where then? To the colossus of the West — the United States of America?
But even here in the very stronghold of the spirit of private enterprise and personal independence the tide of crisis mounts daily. What is this crisis? it is the crisis of statism, the crisis of the subjugation of the individual, of the groupings of individuals, to the power of the central government embodying the state. It is the crisis of socialism.
Whenever an emergency arises in any grouping of men, the tendency of men is to centralize power in order to surmount the difficulty and effect a quick return to the routine of normal times. Today in the western world, specifically on the North American continent, we find society faced with one emergency after another: inflation, unemployment racial strife, surplus production, the threat from the power of unionism, the threat from subversion by the communists from within and by attack from the communists without.
The men who govern, present an almost pitiful picture as they scurry from this solution to that in a vain attempt to stem this tide of crisis. And when everything fails they are forced to fall back on centralization. Thus they surrender the liberty of the people in order to gain a few panting moments of security.
And this tendency to concentrate power in the hands of the central government (the state) is aided and abetted by those who would take from men the sense of independence and the instinct for personal liberty. These are the socialists, the avowed socialists whose aim is to put all men under the paternal tyranny of the state; these are the fellow-travellers who disavow the doctrines of socialism but applaud those who preach them and put them into practice; these are the dupes, who are unable to think for themselves, yet insisting to be heard, can only bray the same socialistic utterances they have preached to them from every medium of communications.
But then, from whence spring these crises? What is there source, their origin?
They have one source and one source only: the perversion and corruption of the system of finance whose original purpose, namely, to distribute to men the bountiful production which nature and man's energy and genius have been able to effect, has been twisted to that of adding to the riches and powers of those who control the creation and flow of money and credit.
What is it that man fears most in the ordinary day-to-day life? It is want of course; what Maurice Colborne so strikingly calls, Fear for Tomorrow's Dinner. Man's constant battle, his never-ending anxiety, is to provide food, clothing and shelter, not only for today but to make it possible that he will not have to worry about these things tomorrow. From adolescence to the day he is buried, his constant preoccupation is to see to it that he and his have enough to eat, enough to wear and shelter from the elements.
This is the fear that is so ably exploited by those who would dominate men. This is the state to which they have brought the world through their manipulation of finance. Today if we have communism, if we have unionism, strikes, the grab for power by the gangster bosses of powerful syndicates; if we have the hoarding or destruction of surpluses of products in the face of a vast and ever-increasing want; if we have the ever-mounting spiral wage-increase, price-increase, chasing one another up and up and up; if we find the citizens bending lower and lower under mountains of taxes; if municipal, provincial and central governments turn frantically hither and thither to find money without adding to the astronomical national debt; if more and more the state is taking over the functions which in all justice should be exercised by individuals or private enterprises; if more and more men are looking to and calling for the state to care for them and shelter them and protect them to the extent where men lose all personal liberty, and what is worse, all desire to be free, in their anxiety to be secure; if all these things have come to pass, it is simply and solely because the system of finance is the tool of private interests and is used by private interests to enslave men and enrich those private interests.
Is this exaggeration? Sensationalism? Then why is it that in the face of the enormous production of the world, actual and potential, the vast mass of men and women are either suffering want, living on the verge of want or living in constant fear of want?
If every man, woman and child had enough food, clothing and shelter to keep them living in decent comfort, and had the assurance that they would never lack these necessities, do you think that there would be one one-thousandth of the unrest and turmoil in the world that there is? Or that it would even be possible? Would men be so ready to surrender their God-given gifts of self-reliance, independence, pride, if they were not so deperately harrased by the spectres of want and privation?
Can anyone doubt the ability of the world's productive system factories, farms, laboratories, etc., to produce all that is needed to feed, clothe and house adequately, every man, woman and child living? The means to this exist, here in the present. The needs are there. Then what is lacking? Money! This alone is lacking; this creature of man is the only missing element.
The pattern of slavery is there. Whenever men are in want, there you will find the familiar pattern of centralization; anxious men, desperate men, men in want, listening to the siren call of the welfare state, the state that subjugates. Surrender your liberty, it says, and we'll look after you; join the union; support state health insurance; vote for measures which will give the central government more power to order every detail of your private lives — do all these and whatsoever else we tell you of a like nature and we'll see to it that you have food, clothing and shelter. But then the men in prison have these three also.
Social Credit presents the only antidote to this poison of socialism; it has the only alternative plan to socialism today. Next issue we shall discuss Social Credit as the pattern of liberty and security; true liberty, true security!
Earl MASSECAR