Loading up for Survival, Church and State
I don’t know what the prophets, seers, and revelators of the First Presidency have been shown, what ISIS may be plotting, what German intelligence suspects, nor what the future has in mind for us. I do know that Matthew 6.34 counsels:
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
and that this is generally considered sufficient precaution for the lilies of the field, but that readers of John Robb may well find it insufficiently flexible — if taken literally — to survive encounters with a succession of inbound black swans. And as is often the case with scripture, preparedness too has its place, as indicated by the “kingdom” parable of the wise and foolish virgins of Matthew 25.1-13.
I note here that the spiritual claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints affords the First Presidency the opportunity to call for far more extensive planning than the German Chancellor can ask of her citizens without considerable brouhaha.
Hence:
Three months (minimally) to two weeks (suggested) is the recommended preparedness ratio between the (Mormon) Church and (German) State.
Whence does authority derive?
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T. Greer:
September 3rd, 2016 at 9:32 am
Difference is coercion. You can opt out of a church but not a state. In any case there are no penalties for not keeping your food storage anyways.
T. Greer:
September 3rd, 2016 at 9:34 am
Ecclesiastical penalties, I mean. No consequences but a poor conscience and a trouble when disaster arrives.
Charles Cameron:
September 3rd, 2016 at 5:15 pm
Hi, Tanner:
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That’s one difference, to be sure. Gradualis is another. And I wouldn’t have posted the LDS advice if I hadn’t been triggered by the German version, because it’s twinning of concepts rather than individual ideas that interests me here, as so often.
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Ten years ago, I might well have thought even the German “fortnight” version wasnanny-ish and needless — today, I think the Church’s position looks well-adapted to the times. I’m certainly not favoring Merkel over the LDS here.
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On a more wide-angle note:
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The anthropologist Colin Turnbull wrote a book I very much enjoyed about the Mbuti pygmies of the Ituri, The Forest People. I enjoyed it so much because it was permeated with their own joyful generosity, and with ther music of the molimo, a quasi-magical instrument. I eagerly purchased his “companion” book, The Mountain People, hoping for more of the same, and was sadly disappointed, since it narrates the vicious, “kill your mother for a scrap of food” culture of the Ik, a Ugandan tribe that had suffered devastating group trauma a couple of generations earlier.
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Ever since, I have had a sort of mental model of a slope between warmth and generosity (the Mbuti) and coldness and hostility (the Ik), and have the impresion that we in the western world have slipped from, shall we say, two-thirds Mbuti to two-thirds Ik during my lifetimes.
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It may well be that the LDS preserves a continuity of cuoture and thus also a sense of community and mutuality far better these days than the society exemplified by the so-called “elites” of both parties.