Making Sausage

All major religious traditions have narratives about moral decline and its consequences. Start by thinking about Christianity. The Bible contains several narratives depicting periods of widespread moral corruption and their consequences. The earliest and most dramatic example occurs in Genesis and describes the pre-flood world as, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” This leads to God deciding to destroy humanity except for Noah and his family. The text emphasizes violence and corruption had filled the earth. Then there is Sodom and Gomorrah, the two cities destroyed for their wickedness. Abraham negotiates with God, asking if the cities would be spared if even 10 righteous people could be found… but they couldn’t. The story depicts attempted gang rape of angels and complete breakdown of hospitality and decency. The pre-exilic prophets’ warnings from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and others condemn Israel and Judah things like exploiting the poor while the wealthy live in luxury, corrupt judges taking bribes, empty religious ritual without justice, sexual immorality and idolatry, and violence and dishonesty in commerce Paul’s letters describe Greco-Roman society as filled with sexual immorality, greed, envy, murder, strife, and wickedness. And of course, the book of Revelation depicts end-times scenarios where despite plagues and judgments, “the rest of mankind… did not repent of the works of their hands… nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.”

And its not just in Christianity. In Islam the Quran contains many stories of destroyed peoples as warnings. Nations like the people of ‘Ad, Thamud, and the people of Lot (similar to Sodom) were destroyed for rejecting prophets and moral corruption.

In Hinduism the concept of the four Yugas (ages) describes cyclical moral decline. We’re supposedly currently in the Kali Yuga, the age of darkness and moral degradation where, truth diminishes, lying increases, people become greedy and materialistic, rulers become corrupt, family bonds weaken and violence and chaos grow. Buddhism has the concept of “dharma decline” that predicts that Buddhism itself will degrade over time. Texts describe five periods of progressive deterioration after Buddha’s death, where understanding decreases, moral practice weakens, and eventually the teachings are lost entirely before renewal. The ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianismhas has a cosmic narrative of the struggle between Ahura Mazda (good) and Angra Mainyu (evil), with human history as a battleground. It says that moral choices matter cosmically, and there will be a final reckoning and purification. Norse mythology has Ragnarök (twilight of the gods) that is preceded by the Fimbulwinter and moral collapse. Brothers will fight and kill each other, father and son will slay one another, adultery and broken kinship bonds are rampant. In Chinese tradition, the Mandate of Heaven concept holds that dynasties fall when rulers become corrupt and lose moral authority. Natural disasters and social chaos are signs heaven has withdrawn its mandate. This created a cyclical view of rise and fall based on virtue. Even Native American, Mayan and Aboriginal stories abound with moral decline and the break down of social order.

The pattern is always the same. Moral decline often starts gradually, compromising on small things, then accelerating. That leads to social breakdown when moral restraints disappear, and violence and exploitation of the vulnerable increases. Prophets especially emphasize that moral corruption manifests in how the powerful treat the powerless and how righteous individuals warn about consequences, but are typically ignored or persecuted. Even in the worst times, small groups of faithful people remain but they are helpless when things get “out of control” with violence becoming normalized, sexual boundaries dissolving, economic exploitation of the vulnerable becoming the norm, increasing corruption of justice systems, pride and self-worship coming with a loss of truth-telling and a general breakdown of family and social structures.

The universality of these themes suggests they address something fundamental about human experience… the observation that societies can and do decline when ethical restraints weaken, and the question of whether such decline is reversible or inevitable. I imagine we are all thinking about thee themes more and more every day in the current environment. Just today I saw an article in The Economist about their investigative reporting about Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, where users can buy, sell, and trade digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and hundreds of other cryptocurrencies. The platform has more than 250 million registered users globally and operates in over 180 countries. In November 2023, Binance agreed to pay a $4 billion settlement with United States agencies, one of the biggest corporate fines in U.S. history. The U.S. Department of Justice investigated the platform for years for failure to prevent money laundering, and the company’s founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to the charges, agreeing to step down. In October, President Trump exercised his pardon rights to grant CZ, as the CEO is called, a full pardon. The Economist has now proven that this settlement and adjudication has not stopped Binance from being a massive money-laundering platform where everyone from Venezuelan drug runners and Hezbollah terrorists are able to finance their operations, evidencing the exact sort of corruption and moral degradation many of us nay-sayers about crypto have always predicted.

When I ran a global private banking business in the 1990s we worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. authorities to prevent money-laundering. With the rise of the digital economy coincident with the rise in global terrorism, the challenge only got more and more difficult and serious. We seem now to have fallen into the historical and somewhat universal pattern of moral decline that the scriptures of every major religion acknowledge and have recorded over time. While everyone will demarcate things by their own standards, I see that decline starting about fifteen years ago. When I ran a distressed Israeli real estate developer I was shocked to see the corruption all around me. I had not been in a seminary before that, I had been on Wall Street, and yet it was all shocking to me. Managerial corruption and theft. Market loopholes that allowed disreputable players (like Trump) to work with Russian mob money and Chinese dark forces that laundered money from every conceivable direction. Greed and arrogance that went overlooked by the forces of government. And then, worse yet, have gotten control of the government and have gone about pardoning all the criminal elements so that they themselves can reap deadly harvests of ill-gotten gains while doing their damndest to push the working classes of the world further and further down to unconscionable places. The haves in today’s world are as bad as the heathens and barbarians of ancient times that toppled prior civilizations at their moments of greatest pride and success. Every single negative trait referenced in biblical and religious scripture that led to the end-of-times are in evidence today and being either ignored or even encouraged by the powers that be.

The Economist is one of the purest sources of truth in my view and they see non-partisan truth that is global and not at all biased. They have liked the situation with Binance, CZ, Trump and crypto as a sausage factory that is the ugliest form of endeavor to feed an out-of-control feeding frenzy of corruption and greed. Everything I have believed and witnessed first-hand in my career is now on full display. The world is clustered around the golden calf and has lost its way. I’m glad I live on a hilltop, but I am still inclined to take every rain shower seriously. I have no appetite for sausage and certainly want no part of making it, no matter how lucrative it might be.