Too Big To Fail
"We're still under the weight of this impression that the ocean is too big to fail, that the planet is too big to fail." - Author: Sylvia Earle
“I don't really understand why there needs to be so much tension about this. The country is facing the worst economy since the Great Depression. If the financial system collapses, it will take every one of you down.” PAUL GIAMATTI
"Too big to fail" describes a business or business sector deemed to be so deeply ingrained in a financial system or economy that its failure would be disastrous to the economy. Too Big to Fail Definition - Investopedia
“If a financial institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.” - Author: Bernie Sanders
“I'm really concerned that too-big-to-fail has become too-big-for-trial.” - Author: Elizabeth Warren
What if other types of systems and institutions can become so big and strong that they are “unfailable” in our minds because if they were to fail, they would bring down individuals and communities with them. The term began with banks but can also refer to public, private, nonprofit, for profit, religious institutions, as well as political institutions like democracy, capitalism, socialism, communism, marxism, or any totalitarian or authoritarian government. Even whole countries are not too big to fail. They are all human constructs, nothing more than stories we conjured up in our heads. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/01/19/957240511/why-nations-fail-america-edition
Fragile States Index
“The country which saw the largest year-on-year worsening in their total score in the 2021 FSI is the United States. Over the past year, the US saw the largest protests in the country’s history in response to police violence which were often met by a heavy-handed state reaction along with sustained efforts to delegitimize the election process, which escalated violently in early 2021. Despite the country’s abundant material wealth and an advanced health system, political polarization, a lack of social cohesion, Congressional gridlock, and misinformation contributed to a failed response that left over 350,000 dead by the end of the year and a steeper contraction in GDP than any time in the past 60 years.”
"If there’s one thing that 2020 taught us it’s that if we prepare for a health crisis as if it were only a health crisis, then we miss the boat. We learned that when a shock hits, as important as a strong economy might be; or even a good health system, or infrastructure, a necessary precondition for resilience is a stock of social capital. A country that cannot take collective action, a population that cannot make shared sacrifices, a country where there’s no collective buy-in to a national strategy, cannot be resilient, no matter how good the economy is or how many doctors or ventilators you might have." (Nate Haken, Programs Director)
Check out this staggering list of sovereign nations that no longer exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_sovereign_states
The thing we tend to forget is that things, ideas, and people can become too big to fail in our minds. It is a story we tell ourselves, a story we want desperately to believe. The story then directs our lives. But the reality is that nothing is too big to fail, nothing is too fixed to fail, nothing is too absolute to fail, because nothing is certain, absolute, or fixed; everything is temporary, uncertain, and eventually it’ll all pass away.
When Institutions Become Too Big To Fail
All my life, I’ve worked in public institutions like education, nonprofit institutions that provide services for people with disabilities or at risk youth, I’ve sat on boards of small grass roots organizations working toward peace and justice, community development, housing development for the poor, neighborhood organizations, and church boards that were focused on social justice. Everything I did, I considered to be my life ministry. I saw myself as developing potential and creating capacity for both individuals and communities. I never made much money and retirement is sparse but adequate. And my life has been fulfilling and very satisfying as I see the fruits of my labor in so many directions. Even though the money I made was sparse, especially as a single parent, money was still the bottom line of sustainability for all of these organizations. After all, this is America! Actually, as I grew older, wiser, and more aware in my work, I started to see the “principalities, powers, and politics” that underlie everything that each organization did. That is the same for all of life. Even though they are nonprofit organizations and their primary focus is to provide a specific good work and needed service, without money sustaining that good work, this is impossible.
I worked for 25 years in special education and then another 15 years working with adults with disabilities. As my eyes and mind opened, I could see the power structures behind the espoused priorities and how easily these espoused priorities became submerged under hidden agendas that always tied the work back to money. Bottom line is not so much whether we are doing high quality good work as much as whether we can afford to do high quality good work. Without funding, staff are cut and those left are running on burnout day after day. Without funding, there can be no development and progress toward high quality and best practices. Too often we ended up with organizations that were only able to prop themselves up enough to maintain jobs for key staff, nothing more than a straw man without the guts to do the real work. There had to be constant diligence to keep our eyes on the ball so that we could provide that good and needed work that was their reason for existence.
Due to the fact that capitalism, even with all the good it does, cannot provide for all the needs of communities and generate a profit, as is required by law for for-profit companies. So anytime we need to provide goods or services that are not profitable, then legally we must create what we call nonprofit organizations so we can organize human, financial, and community resources to make us stronger together to do the work that is needed in our communities. But what I began to see underlying these nonprofit organizations is what I call “institutional behavior” meaning the less visible, behind-the-scenes forces that drive organizations; the money motive. Although these organizations exist visibly in our communities, often what is behind the curtain, pulling the strings, is institutionalization that has as its sole purpose, staying alive, i.e. sustaining itself, no matter what it takes.
As I got closer to systems of power within these institutions, there was often a real ugliness that would keep grinding us under like a machine. Have you ever studied institutions that housed or warehoused people with disabilities for a long time? Have you ever seen teachers that have lost the passion for teaching and for kids and that only work for summer break and for retirement? It became very clear to me that educational institutions exist, not to educate children for the sake of children but to provide jobs for the sake of teachers and administrative staff. Now that institutions have been eliminated for people with disabilities, have you ever known people with disabilities that live in group homes and have services provided in large congregate settings? These mini-institutions are the way that financial sustainability through economies of scale could be accomplished. Have you ever really listened to those people and their sense of being lost in a life that is meaningless due to the extent of the isolation and loneliness, voicelessness and powerlessness they live with everyday due to being grouped together for the convenience and efficiency of providing services that are medically necessary? Sadder still is when the congregate day programs started being eliminated leaving people without their only outlet to get out of their homes and interact with peers because they were never a part of their own communities.
When Banks Become Too Big To Fail
“The banks that each of you gentlemen cater to have been allowed to become too big. Not too big to fail, as you have said in the past, but destined to fail because they are too big.” (Author: Kenneth Eade)
In a very similar vein, in the for-profit realm, I’ve noticed the parallels with the great recession of 2008 that was primarily caused by the financial institutions that had become TOO BIG TO FAIL. Just like nonprofit organizations that I worked for, our community depended often symbiotically on the goods and services supported by these monolithic institutions. They had become so institutionalized and embedded in our communities that if they were to fail, we perceived that our communities would fail. If I remember correctly, this bailout included other industries like the automotive industry. After all, we cannot live without our money or our cars in America.
“When the long slow deregulation of the banking industry allowed some of our wealthiest lending institutions to venture into high risk speculative investments and exponentially lucrative derivative markets until, like a rubber band reaching its maximum strength and then snapping, the whole industry nearly collapsed upon itself instead of holding those banks responsible for reckless lending practices and for cooking the books and inventing trillions of imaginary dollars out of nothing, the governments of the world just forgave them and looked the other way. And precisely the moment they should have been punished for high crimes of finance, these banks got handouts and were told, ‘Try to be more careful next time okay?’ What's going on here?
“What happened here was that those banks whose assets make up such a sizable portion of the world's wealth that their failure could spell the doom of the whole system were deemed ‘too big to fail.’ It's not that it's impossible for them to fold and go broke, rather it's that allowing that to happen would have such dire consequences that the system had decided it cannot allow it to happen. Governments depend on their lending, companies depend on their assets, and consumers depend on their financial products. The tentacles of these banks have been so deep and so wide around the world that allowing them to fail could spell the collapse of some of the most basic goods and services on which modern society has come to depend.
“Obviously this introduces a major conflict of interest between governments and the banking industry. Those legal institutions which are supposed to watch over the banking industry cannot really do their job impartially because this is the hand that feeds them. Trillions of dollars can be flushed down the toilet and hundreds of thousands of jobs can be lost yet no one is held responsible because punishing those behind it could significantly restrict the entire world's economy. So they just kept doing what they were doing, playing around with trillions like it's play money and leaving those of us at the bottom of the food chain to suffer the worst of the consequences from all the folded businesses and consolidated competition.”
Just like there is a huge parallel between nonprofits, public, and for-profit organizations, this also extends to religious organizations. How much corruption; financially, spiritually, intellectually, and morally, has been overlooked because those religious institutions were too big to fail? What would be lost if they failed? How much of our communities might crumble if these stalwarts were to fail? All of these organizations are the way that we organize and sustain civilization. These too-big-to-fail organizations are the glue that holds together civilization itself, or so we think. Personally, I don’t think we can allow our foundations to rot through corruption because even though we have sustained those foundations so far, they are crumbling anyway, although slowly and less visibly, through the incoherent rot of their own demise.
Anyway, this brings us to the main point of this blog post. What happens when BELIEFS BECOME TOO BIG TO FAIL???
When Beliefs Become Too Big To Fail
“My standard one-liner for when someone asks me what I think about the afterlife, I say, ‘I’m for it!’ But the fact that I’m for it doesn’t make it true. In fact, the more passionately we want something to be true, the more skeptical we need to be of those beliefs because we know how powerful these powerful biases are and they lead us to find evidence for what we want to be true.” (Michael Shermer)
I have been blogging Living with Open Hands for 15 years. Until now, I have been puzzled about why it took me so long to wake up and see the instability of the foundations of my faith. As always, when the storms grew and my faith grew, I felt the ground under my feet giving way. The questions that I’ve been asking since I started blogging were still hanging there in the air, in my face, waiting for me to really face the truth of my faith compared to the truth of reality. I’d catch glimpses of the disconnect and hear sounds of the dissonance ringing in my ears, my head, and my heart. And yet, I couldn’t go all the way to the ground with my doubt and skepticism. I see now that I had been continuing to lie to myself and justify my doubts because my FAITH WAS TOO BIG TO FAIL. I was told that this is what western civilization was built on. This faith was what our country was built on. And that we have this Word of God that is infallible and inerrant and inspired and would give me everything I need for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3). But all of these are temporal and are passing away. After 12 years of contemplative writing, reflection, research, and studying all of the things that I have been taught, I finally saw that, even though I knew it was crumbling, I kept trying to patch it together and make it work. My values and beliefs are not only foundational for western civilization but for my own identity! This faith also was foundational to many social groups that I depended on; my family, friends, church groups, neighbors, work groups. This faith was like a 2000 year old bank that was too big to fail. And if it did, it would also take down everything around me that I depended on… including me!
Then I realized that most of the people that had been following Living with Open Hands 1.0 (80,000 people from 150 countries over the years) often were also dependent on this faith of our fathers. I didn’t want to disrupt relationships or convince others to think like me. But I needed to keep writing without provoking argument, but rather challenging myself and others to think differently. I ended up deciding to start a new blog, this one, Living with Open Hands 2.0 so that I could be fully honest about my doubts and critical about the things I have been told all my life. The last thing I wanted to do was have people coming after me to save my soul. Nor did I want to offend anyone. I’ve done that already and need to move on. So this blog is not something that I automatically share when I write. I mostly write for myself and for my own grounding as I discover all that is new as I let go of all dogma. I’ve also always written so that I can go back and review and remember what I am learning along the way. At the beginning of Living with Open Hands 1.0, 15 years ago, I had this image of blogging being like in the bible, when the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, not knowing where they are going, not knowing what is around the next bend, there would be times when something startling, enlightening, or significant happened. Often these experiences would cause a total paradigm shift in perspective and understanding. So they would build a monument with a pile of rocks so they could return and remember what it is that they learned. So much of life is simply remembering what I already know, especially that there is no faith, no dogma, no creed, no belief that is too big to fail or question or doubt or let go of as I continue to sort the treasures from the trash all cluttered in my head. Each of my blog posts is a cairn of remembrance for me.
The Clergy Project
The Clergy Project is a great example of how one’s faith can feel too big to fail even though its foundations are crumbling underfoot. You are not alone as a minister that has lost faith but feeling like everyone thinks beliefs are too big to fail. As of 2021, the Clergy Project has supported over 1000 ministers in all fields of ministry so they know there are others out there that have lost their faith and helps them to connect with those that have gone through similar experiences. The in-group community in Christianity is great support for the average person that is comfortable and wants to stay that way. But the out-group experience once you are no longer a Christian can be incredibly lonely and isolating. This I know through experience. I can’t imagine it happening as a professional minister.
Are you a religious professional who no longer believes in the supernatural?
Have you remained in vocational ministry, secretly hiding away your non-belief?
Are you struggling over where to go from here with your life and career?
Maybe you’ve been out for some time, out of the ministry and maybe even publicly out as a non-believer…
Maybe you’ve found that the challenges continue to come with your new life and you’re in need of some good community with people who understand the issues you face…
Maybe you’d simply love to connect with other religious professionals who have likewise left belief behind…
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2015/03/10/when-beliefs-are-too-big-to-fail/
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