Is the World Going to Hell or is This Part of God’s Plan?
BY TIM BOTTA
People are scared.
Many report that they feel as though they were “living in the twilight zone.” Others report that they feel that they’ve become trapped in a dystopian science-fiction story, or a fairy-tale in which an entire kingdom has become spellbound by a tyrannical wizard.
I have heard people say that they haven’t felt such a visceral reaction to the state of the world since the fall of the Nixon administration or since the war in Vietnam. Like people who have lost loved ones, many awake in the morning in a state of grief. It is fitting that the phrase
“shook me to my core” has become well-known in this era that feels so shocking and out-of-control.
I’m reminded of a humorous-sounding phrase I heard in my childhood: “The world is going to hell in a hand basket.”
Is this true? Is the world going to hell?
From the early years of the twentieth century, Wallace Delois Wattles, Socialist candidate for office and author of “The Science of Getting Rich” and other works, speaks to us and urges us to have hope that the world is not going to hell, but is evolving.
In his most famous book, “The Science of Getting Rich,” Wattles advises those who are following his success program: “Do not read religious books which tell you that the world is soon coming to an end; and do not read the writing of muck-rakers and pessimistic philosophers who tell you that it is going to the devil. The world is not going to the devil; it is going to God. It is wonderful Becoming.” Wallace goes on to say: “True, there may be a good many things in existing conditions which are disagreeable; but what is the use of studying them when they are certainly passing away, and when the study of them only tends to check their passing and keep them with us? Why give time and attention to things which are being removed by evolutionary growth, when you can hasten their removal only by promoting the evolutionary growth as far as your part of it goes?”
It seems difficult to believe that the strife and chaos which are tearing the world apart are not growing stronger, but are actually passing away.
In another passage in “The Science of Getting Rich,” the Socialist Wattles counsels us not to waste our energy in anger about the outrageous crimes of the Robber Barons. He says that they are being evolved out of existence. Wattles writes, “The multi-millionaires are like the monster reptiles of the prehistoric eras; they play a necessary part in the evolutionary process, but the same Power which produced them will dispose of them.” (It’s significant that they are compared to reptiles, as people of this type display the less-evolved, self-preserving reptile brain rather than the global perspective of the Neo-Cortex.)
Wattles also introduces an idea that may be more difficult to accept. Not only is the negativity passing away, but the negativity is not evil, but instead is perfectly right for the stage of evolution we are at now. In “The Science of Getting Rich,” Wattles again counsels us not to use up our energy in reacting to others, this time stating that not only is their time passing, but that they are presently part of God’s plan: “Do not waste time thinking or talking about the shortcomings or wrong actions of plutocrats or trust magnates. Their organization of the world
has made your opportunity; all you get really comes to you because of them. Do not rage against, corrupt politicians; if it were not for politicians we should fall into anarchy, and your opportunity would be greatly lessened. God has worked a long time and very patiently to bring us up to where we are in industry and government, and He is going right on with His work. There is not the least doubt that He will do away with plutocrats, trust magnates, captains of industry, and politicians as soon as they can be spared; but in the meantime, behold they are all very good.”
Looking at politicians and plutocrats (now sometimes the same person), how can we think of them as being “very good,” the way God viewed creation in Genesis?
Wattles explores this idea further in his less-known work, “The Science of Being Great”:
You must learn to see the world as being produced by evolution, as a something that is
evolving and becoming, not as a finished work. Millions of years ago God worked with very low
and crude forms of life, low and crude, yet each perfect after its kind. Higher and more complex
organisms, animal and vegetable, appeared through the successive ages; the earth passed
through stage after stage in its unfolding, each stage perfect in itself, and to be succeeded by a
higher one. What I wish you to note is that the so-called ‘lower organisms’ are as perfect after
their kind as the higher ones; that the world in the Eocene period was perfect for that period; it
was perfect, but God’s work was not finished. This is true of the world today. Physically,
socially, and industrially it is all good, and it is all perfect. It is not complete anywhere or in any
part, but so far as the handiwork of God has gone it is perfect.
So just as we wouldn’t look at a person in an embryonic stage and be horrified that the embryo is not an adult, we must not be horrified by all the evidence of unevolved, undeveloped, and incomplete states of being and consequent actions. Returning to his comparison of Robber Barons to prehistoric reptiles, Wattles says: “J. P. Morgan is as necessary to the coming social order as the strange animals of the age of reptiles were to the life of the succeeding period, and just as these animals were perfect after their kind, so Morgan is perfectafter his kind.” Naming societal evils of his time, Wattles believes that “All these things are part of the forward movement; they are incidental to the evolutionary process of completing society. When it is complete there will be harmony; but it cannot be completed without them.”
I believe that Wattles is mainly objecting to how we frame the negativity in the world. Calling it “evil” instead of “unevolved” gives the negativity too much power. It also takes away our hope that we can do anything about it. The terrible things that society accepts “are no
more evil than the way of living and the habits and practices of the cave dweller were evil. His ways were those of the savage stage of man’s growth, and for that stage they were perfect. Our Industrial practices are those of the savage stage of industrial development, and they are also perfect.”
Wattles anticipates the reaction to this idea. Won’t embracing this idea lead to a complacent attitude? As we have heard and believe, ““The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Surely Wattles the Socialist is not advocating looking the
other way in smug complacency?
Wattles is not. He writes: “All this does not prevent you from working for better things.”
It’s the attitude we have toward the negativity in the world that Wattles wants us to change:
One viewpoint will make you grow greater and the other will inevitably cause you to grow
smaller. One will enable you to work for the eternal things; to do large works in a great way
toward the completing of all that is incomplete and inharmonious; and the other will make you
a mere patchwork reformer, working almost without hope to save a few lost souls from what
you will grow to consider a lost and doomed world. So you see it makes a vast difference to
you, this matter of the social viewpoint. ‘All’s right with the world. Nothing can possibly be
wrong but my personal attitude, and I will make that right. I will see the facts of nature and all
the events, circumstances, and conditions of society, politics, government, and industry from
the highest viewpoint. It is all perfect, though incomplete. It is all the handiwork of God;
behold, it is all very good.
The almost-universal shock and revulsion we are feeling right now is a sign that something is changing. The hatred, strife, and chaos that we see are not a new, permanent condition, but a stage that evolution is taking care of. In the meantime, though, we must take care of those who are suffering because of the undeveloped, limited, unevolved people who are in many places of power.
People and animals are being harmed and we must protect them.
The environment is being harmed and we must protect it. The damage is real.
But as Wattles argues, we can re-frame our mission in a more positive way, not labeling undeveloped attitudes and actions as “evil,” because doing so empowers the negativity and disempowers us.
Joseph Campbell writes in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” “The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world.” But the curse can be broken the moment we stop believing in the concept of the power of evil.
Tim Botta is an artist, educator and writer with a passion for New Thought and animal rights. His blog and artwork store can be found at www.timbotta.com
It is not my wish to be personally antagonistic, but the theme of this article displays precisely the reason I find it difficult to entertain New Thought principles.
Those principles are appealing and hope-filled, on the surface. I genuinely wish I could say that they consistently bear beneficent fruit. The conclusion to which they commonly point, however – that we do best to ignore the plight of those who suffer, to ignore or suppress the natural revulsion we feel toward the causes of their suffering, and to refrain from acting on their behalf – does not set us on a path of healing the human condition. Instead, it makes us co-participants in the sorts of repressive and tortuous deeds that greatly contribute to the trauma experienced by the human collective.
I could comment on several of the quotes from Wattles offered in this piece, but for the sake of brevity I’ll cite just this edited excerpt of a few strung-together sections:
“Do not waste time thinking or talking about the shortcomings or wrong actions of plutocrats
or trust magnates. Their organization of the world has made your opportunity. Do not rage
against, corrupt politicians. There is not the least doubt that [God] will do away with plutocrats,
trust magnates, captains of industry, and politicians as soon as they can be spared; but in
the meantime, behold they are all very good. [I]t is all perfect. All’s right with the world. It is all
the handiwork of God; behold, it is all very good.”
And in the century after those words were offered, the world witnessed millions of people victimized by the two most wide-ranging wars in history. Men, women, old, and young – traumatized, maimed, tortured, and killed. We saw minorities rounded up into terrible prison camps and gas chambers, people thrown into the Soviet gulag for criticizing their government. An unprecedented weapon vaporized people in Japan. For about half of that century, people with dark skin were jeered and subjugated in the United States. Various dictators murdered a significant number of their own citizens to exert their power, inspiring fear among the rest. Plutocrats knowingly acted in ways that manipulated the global environment in a fashion that risks profound impacts upon human and non-human life.
The tears, the screams, and the anxiety those acts generated do not look to me like God at work, evolving the world and making it better. The people upon whom these deeds were inflicted are not just conduits for a heartbreaking, though Divine, strategy that must be followed for the greater good of the rest of us. Those people each were possessed of immense worth, and the loss of joy and even of life that they endured can be nothing other than the product of evil.
God did not choose to condemn these people to suffering for the sake of evolution. Their suffering was the product of our choices. When we have the ability to enhance the lives of our brethren but instead choose their diminishment, that is not evolution; that is evil.
Many addiction treatment programs repeat the axiom that we cannot solve a problem until we admit we have one. We have one. Fundamentally, we cannot solve it by clinging to rosy thoughts or excusing the damage that we cause by calling it evolution. We can solve it, though – by acknowledging our faults, and doing the work to reform the deficiencies in our characters.
Thank you for your thoughts Todd. I think if you read more articles on this blog you will find they largely agree with your well argued perspective/critique of social justice and New Thought. And the author here, Tim Botta, would as well. There is no room for victim blaming or a “head in the sand” approach to injustice in a reformed New Thought. Keep in mind Wattles was a socialist and a friend of Eugene Debbs. He was also inspired by the social gospel. The New Thought of his era was home to multiple feminists and radicals. If he was overly optimistic or utopian in his expectation that mind power would lead to greater equality is certainly open for discussion. In his own life he ran for office as a socialist so he was not relying on prayer alone. There are many people in contemporary New Thought leaders who also agree with your perspective including Masando Hiraoka and David Alexander among many others.
Thank you Harv. I appreciate the added information, and got a bit of an education just from that single paragraph. I look forward to exploring this blog some more, and also to becoming familiar with Hiraoka and Alexander; I am not familiar with them.