Yes, If God is for everyone, why is it that black people are most suffering even in their own land?

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The Western world has mostly figured this out. It goes like this.

The world is really, really, really, unimaginably, big. Systems of social order just don’t scale anywhere close to being big enough to do that. Where the social order is established and the people believe in it, people don’t suffer.

But the feeling that people nowadays are suffering, that’s a feeling borne out of comfort in Western plenty. This plenty was built with capitalism, not with religion. Religion just, initially, made it possible for people to cooperate on the scale that capitalism requires.

Capitalism relies on two things. First, an established regime of law and order that can protect the second thing, which is a large accumulated bundle of resources, called capital that goes in there and build the things that people need, what we call real estate development.

Once the property is developed, with things like running water, electricity, these days Internet, then people can start to build things and trade with each other, this brings entire societies out of what we call poverty.

Why do I keep saying “what we call poverty?” It’s because poverty is a new invention that describes the natural order of things. To say people in poverty are suffering is a classist assumption. Some of them may be suffering, lots of them aren’t. There’s an existing social order in everywhere that humans live and the humans in that social order derive meaning from that order.

What capitalism does is it offers these people something different, something other than the established order to find meaning in. That something is money and resources. It replaces the existing cultural identity with love of money. We Westerners are so comfortable with our largesse that we believe anyone without it, well they must be suffering unimaginably.

But they’re not necessarily. And to the extent that they are suffering, a big part of it can be boiled down to the economic angst of being almost forced into working hard for little green slips of paper that don’t buy nearly as much happiness as being forced to work for them takes away.

Most places in the world do not have existing law and order regimes that can protect capital. The biggest threat to capital in most cases isn’t thieves or bandits, it’s the country’s own government, that has enough guns to just loot the capitalistic enterprise. This is ultimately what’s holding Africa back, the awfulness of their own institutions. We tried replacing them with our own, but that didn’t work out as well as we hoped.