So, I’ve been thinking a lot this holiday season about increasing returns. For those who don’t know, this is the “rich get richer” phenomena which seems pretty pervasive to me. Good college football teams get the best recruits, a few popular artists (music, theatrical, etc.) get a majority of the popularity, ‘hot’ technology companies attract the best talent and thus gain more advantage. Those are just a few examples – you can likely think of more. It may be harder to think of something where this is not true. The opposite would be a dampening process, sort of like your air conditioner – when it gets hotter, cool air comes out to reverse the rise, not reinforce it. Can you think of any societal process which is naturally dampening? I haven’t yet, but I’ve not given up either.
The popular get more popular, the rich get richer, the powerful get more powerful. And there are cycles/crashes, obviously – exponential increases aren’t sustainable, and so the same reinforcing process that gave you popularity can also crush you. Ask Britney Spears.
And then I think of socialism/communism. As I’ve stated previously, my primary gripe with those political theories is that they inevitably lead to centralization of power when the group size gets at all large (bigger than a small commune) because it gets too big to self-govern. Then, you get a situation like communist Russia, which is again a rich-get-richer phenomenon. Those in power use that power to stay in power and profit for themselves at the expense of the masses. And socialism inevitably leads to centralization of power as we discover more social problems that need to be solved by the government to be sure that things are done equitably. But this leads to a very large and powerful government, which the larger it gets, the less accountable it becomes to voters. Rinse, dry, repeat and viola, you have an unaccountable, totalitarian government.
So, how much of this is due to the fall? Doesn’t it seem that humanity at some level was designed to live together in a way that the rich give more away, and the poor find themselves to be the major benefactors of that largess without even needing to ask? This is a big part of Jesus’ counter-cultural message – to give away your riches, to give away power, and to eschew the praise of men (popularity). On the one hand, it is better for you – your soul is less tied to those things when you are able to give them away and you live in freedom and not slavery to them. But it is also better for society. We as Christians are the dampening mechanism, at least in some sense. In another sense, that seems impossible.
A lot of what I’ve said here is probably obvious to some. I guess what feels new to me is that this seeming inexorable push for increasing returns to various things is embedded deep on our society and must be a major target of Christ’s redemptive work.
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