By Ed Speed
Just last week, my friend and mentor, Chip Filson, wrote to me that the large number of mergers we have seen of late are mere skirmishes. Chip says what is coming will be “nuclear” in scale. The greed of consolidation will soon become ravenous.
In the CU Daily article just published, “When the Temple Falls,” I used the destruction of Jerusalem’s Second Temple in 70 A.D. as a metaphor for the coming collapse of what remains of our credit union “movement” in its modern, institutional form.
I firmly believe that there will continue to be credit unions, some of them faithful to the cooperative ethos, but the “movement” will lose its animating spirit
‘Dangerous Memories’
What remains to be explored is what follows any movement’s collapse. What will endure are dangerous memories; those truths from the origins that refuse to be erased, and, therefore, keep judging any future built on forgetting.
Johann Baptist Metz, a modern-day German Catholic theologian who died in 2019, gave us the phrase “dangerous memory,” insisting that these are not gentle recollections or sentimental nostalgia.
Dangerous memories are truths from the past that destabilize the present because they expose how far any movement may have drifted from its founding convictions. Dangerous memories do not console. They confront.
The Founders Still Haunt the 5300s
For credit unions, our dangerous memory is not hard to name.
Our dangerous memory is a rich unified fabric of kitchen tables, union halls, factory floors and classrooms; neighbors pooling resources so one family could buy work tools, fix a truck, keep the lights on, or survive a medical emergency.
Our dangerous memory is a cooperative economic life in which no one could extract assets from the community without being seen and condemned by others. No one could claim virtue while administratively transferring wealth out of the community that created it.
Royal Consciousness: When Institutions Stop Asking Permission
Another renowned theologian, Walter Brueggemann, who died just a few months ago, had a name for what replaces memory when power no longer deems it necessary to justify itself. He named it “royal consciousness,” the settled mindset of institutions that have come to believe: (1) their dominance is normal, (2) their direction is inevitable, (3) their decisions lie beyond moral challenge; and (4) see no need to explain what they are doing.
Royal consciousness does not argue. It assumes. It does not persuade. It calmly says: This is just how our world operates now.
Royal consciousness is smooth. It uses professional language. It favors words like scale, platform, ecosystem, synergy, enhancement, alignment, unity. It promises order.
The most telling marker of royal consciousness is this: it softly speaks of inevitability while assuring you there is no alternative. This is just how “we” do things now. Get on board or get gone.
Trade Federations, Empires and Rebel Alliances
We can also learn from a pop culture parable: Star Wars.
George Lucas did not write a story about alien villains descending from the sky. He wrote a story about how a republic collapses internally into an empire, how procedure becomes a mask for power, and how fear becomes the fuel of centralization.
Mega-credit union predators did not rise from any outside alien threat. They emerged from within our own movement. They are us and we are them.
The Star Wars Republic to Empire transition is one of the most accessible cultural metaphors for Brueggemann’s royal consciousness that modern people have and a very good for evaluating these accelerating credit union consolidations. The Republic of Star Wars doesn’t fall because of foreign invasion. It collapses from within because its leaders and its citizens grow exhausted. Complexity increases. Anxiety multiplies. Crisis becomes permanent. Into that exhaustion steps the nefarious promise: Let us manage the chaos for you.
Three Moves
Brueggemann says royal consciousness works in three moves.
First, it deadens memory. The Republic forgets why it exists and remembers only the need for its own continuity. Dangerous memory is attacked as “impractical,” “destabilizing,” “divisive.” Survival and growth become the mission.
Second, it shrinks imagination. Alternatives to centralized control are dismissed as naïve. Debate or opposition is reframed as obstruction. “This is simply how the system works now” becomes the highest form of wisdom; and, of course, the system cannot protect you without “unity.”
Third, it manages fear through administration. Power presents itself not as domination, but as professionalism. Security replaces justice. Efficiency replaces vocation.
The Hope
In the numerous articles I have had published in The CU Daily during the past year, what I most wanted to call attention to was not just isolated examples of individual credit union malfeasance. My hope is to shine light on emerging patterns.
In our credit union world, patterns of royal consciousness are seen when:
- Scale becomes virtue rather than a tool
- Consolidation becomes inevitability rather than a choice
- Executive self-enrichment becomes normal rather than scandalous
- Member democracy becomes a nuisance rather than non-negotiable
- The movement’s origin stories become marketing fodder rather than moral constraint.
Royal Consciousness in Credit Unions
Here is what royal consciousness sounds like in our credit union space:
- They speak of cooperation while swallowing others whole.
- They speak of unity while removing local boards.
- They speak of efficiency while paying executives annual bonuses and merger payoffs larger than most members will earn in a lifetime.
- They speak of mission while transferring community wealth out of the very towns that created it.
- They speak calmly, professionally, procedurally; so calmly that decent people stop noticing what is happening.
That calm is not neutral. It is anesthetic.
Never Complain, Never Explain
The silence of the mega-predators is thundering. One of the oldest rules of empire is simple: never complain, never explain. Predatory power in our credit union movement today no longer argues its case because it believes it owes no one an explanation. This is just how we do things today.
Small credit unions are told you cannot survive. You are unrealistic. You are offered relief from pressure. The offers are generous. They always are.
Imperial power rarely destroys memory directly. It just domesticates it.
Power praises the past while ensuring no one gets to live it again.
It tells the remnant that resistance is irresponsible, that dissent is divisive, that unity requires silence. National associations urge “civility and unity” as the highest virtue because requiring “civility and unity” is simply the safest way to keep truth from becoming contagious and dangerous.
Movements do not die from dissent. They die from forgetting.
If You’ve Seen One Trade Federation…
Star Wars offers another uncomfortable metaphor for our movement. Like the Star Wars Trade Federation, our trade associations rarely name power directly, while quietly conditioning the movement to accept consolidation as inevitable. By the time the mega-credit-union empire fully emerges, resistance already feels impractical, because the real work of domination has been done in the name of unity and order.
Every movement has a Federation phase. In credit unions, this looks like the self-sustaining and self-promoting ecosystem of leagues, vendors, consultants, CUSOs, and credentialed experts who increasingly mediate reality for boards and CEOs. Everything is lawful. Everything is justified by best practices. The Trade Federation is not the Empire, but it enables it, feeds it and feeds off of it.
Perpetual Search
Our trade associations are perpetually in search of external causes to justify dues and demonstrate lobbying prowess. As such, the tax fights, the credit card and bankruptcy “reforms,” regulatory burden, the fate-worse-than-death fear of consolidating regulators, and bank antagonism all performed a useful service for those consolidating power inside the movement.
External enemies kept our attention diverted, ensuring that uncomfortable questions remain safely unasked.
It is easier to rally the faithful against outsiders than to confront the predators within. The result was not negligence but complicity: a movement taught to look outward while it was being consumed from the inside.
“So, this is how liberty dies,” Padmé observes, “with thunderous applause.”
I am not claiming that predatory mega-credit unions are stormtroopers. This is far too serious to be cartoonish; although Chip Filson has written about at least one Midwestern CU that is a Credit Union Death Star.
The Rebel Alliance Doesn’t Forget
Those who resist, like the Rebel Alliance, are dismissed as inefficient, unrealistic, or disruptive. Small credit unions occupy that same uncomfortable space today. Small credit unions remember what the movement was meant to be when empire insists that history no longer matters. Our small credit unions rely on trust and mutual accountability when systems reward abstraction. Their very existence exposes the lie that consolidation is inevitable and that there is no alternative to centralized control.
What makes small credit unions so dangerous? They remember.
[Should readers with to explore themes of empires and power, I recommend: “Star Wars and Philosophy: More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine” and “The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope and the Force.” Both on Amazon.]
Edward Speed is the retired CEO of a multi-billion-dollar credit union and holds a master’s degree in theology. These days, he spends his time serving food, washing dishes, and sweeping floors at a Catholic Worker House, helping homeless senior citizens. email: [email protected]
