So, we earlier this week avoided global financial meltdown by about a day.

Isn’t everyone happy that some creeps in the US went around selling mortgages to people who couldn’t really afford them but who could be convinced that they could? Or, to put it another way, isn’t everyone happy that the spirit of individual responsibility is so alive and well in the US that people don’t know enough about what they can afford to say no to the creeps trying to sell them those mortgages?

Anyone who has followed the link to How the World Works at Salon.com will know that the current financial debacle has been predicted for at least some months, if not a few years. And though this week offers a great chance to point out just how little the US government seems to be in the business of protecting the interests of its people, I want to write about something else that the subprime crisis brings up.

There are any number of stories in the international media (here’s one; here’s another.) focusing on the effects of America’s subprime crisis on markets around the world. And that got me thinking about Martin Luther King, Jr. Stay with me on this.

In his very famous letter from Birmingham Jail, King wrote his even-more-famous words, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” I’d like to quote more fully from that paragraph of the letter, to show that King’s statement is not some airy sentiment but expresses a deeply penetrating and accurate vision of society. King writes,

“I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

Now, read that again: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” This is the fundamental insight of all transformative leaders, and I would say that in the past it has been an insight accessible only to a relatively few people, those who thought deeply, deliberately, and at length about how the world works.

This week’s events show that such an insight is now available to anyone who can be bothered to pick up a local paper (or to have a look at the internet). That new availability, I think, is part of the emerging reality that will contribute to the spiritual progress of humanity. How and when we make that progress, of course, depends on how we understand it. If we recognise our linked destiny and decide to continue our exploitation of each other, our collective spiritual progress will only come as the result of our near self-destruction. If, though, we use our recognition of mutuality as a springboard to a new development of nuturing communities, then we will make our spiritual progress through a series of experiments in mutual human development.

That would be prime.

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