In the end of A Brave New World by Huxley, the "Controller" of all Western Europe tells Bernard Marx, Mr. Watson, and the Savage about why comfort and happiness were more important than truth and beauty:
"It's curious...to read what people in the time of Our Ford [yes, the carmaker--Henry Ford--early 1900s] used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely, redardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific research was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowlede when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled--after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for."
We are facing an economic fallout and we don't know where it will take us. Great Depression, worse, or possibly nothing of the sort. We just don't know where all this will go. What people fear the most, including myself often, is the loss of comfort. This is the time for us to make decisions. Is it our relationships with God and others that is most important? Or, is it our comfort and ease of life? In the end, I can have a spiritual conversation with someone over a glass of water just as well as I can have the same conversation over a frappachino and a cherry danish at Starbucks. When all I have is water to drink, I'm sure I'll get tired of it. But, in the end, we can still spend time together, whether we eat steak at Applebee's or Raman Noodles at home, as a family.
The Controller of Western Europe never understood this, nor did his society. Jesus, however, did understand this, and gave us the deep spiritual truths of this world, in the midst of the poorest place you could ever think of--worse than the Great Depression ever was. It's all relative. Therefore, let's all pray that if severe economic hardship comes, we will make our adjustments and heartily rejoice in the great truths of the Gospel. It is the Truth that will set us free.