One of the challenges of our society is reducing issues to words and finding that we are always over-simplifying. We are unable to include all subtleties and variations that would fully honor the given issues, let alone the wide variety of people involved. So, I humbly submit these simplified observations to the larger chorus of voices for the reader’s consideration. If you tire of my summary of conditions, please skip to the paragraphs under the heading “Is this all we have to work with?”
The Expectations of Some
A segment of American society feels the system has betrayed them, that the right of material wealth and the rules commanded by God have been blocked by the system. Their protest is, “We have not been given the moral culture and good life of the American dream!” Basic religious materialism.
These people want revenge, not policy change or meticulous efforts to solve complex problems, just to vent their anger and rip up the system, justified by a perceived biblical imperative to install their view of righteousness as the law. They want a strongman to be their bully and do the demolition. A few of them are willing to do violence in his service.
The one who stepped into the bully role is a performer educated by TV and movies, a conman with a decidedly unrighteous history who is playing the angry part demanded by his base. He has created the personality cult around his role by amplifying their over-simplified description of a failed system and promoting the view that he is the only one who can fix it. He has played them with their religious materialism and convinced them they will finally get their wishes when he has re-ordered conditions.
Change by Deletion
Re-ordering conditions entails eliminating certain people that they all have focused on as the ones who have betrayed them: immigrants, non-whites, “educated elitists,” scientists, “unsubmissive women,” “abortionists,” those of non-traditional sexual orientation, “non-Christians,” poverty “leeches” on society, … The list is endless, and they would have a hard time agreeing on who to include in the list because they just want people like themselves. So, ultimately everyone is a threat. Hence, everyone has the basic right to be armed and to exterminate as needed.
To satisfy them, the bully has set about destroying the system of American democracy and setting up a Fascist state which personally benefits himself. This facilitates the conditions which were causing the system to betray the people in the first place: oligarchy, the gap between the poor and the wealthy power mongers who use the masses as their worker assets. The masses are manipulated to think their worldview is being fulfilled, while the oligarchy shifts wealth and power away from the lower classes to themselves.
Winning Loyalty
This requires absolute control of all people and society, ultimately an impossibility, but attempting it inflicts much destruction, tragedy, and death. Controlling people’s minds entails limiting what they know and replacing reality with plausible-sounding fantasy. It depends on cult members not fact checking, not remembering their education, and being given an “education” framed by the regime’s convenient version of reality. The cult establishes itself as the sole source of Truth.
The cult must take on a spiritual tone by co-opting religion, claiming the endorsement of God and holy scriptures. Emotionally charged preaching and apocalyptic descriptions are employed by loyal religious leaders of “flocks.” Religious loyalty is dependable since members tend to claim persecution and martyrdom as proof that they are right. Martyrdom, or at least suffering hardship, is exalted as the ultimate good with eternal rewards. The cult promotes the message that hardship will be part of the progress toward their eventual utopia, similar to the motto of false hope displayed over Nazi concentration camps, “Work sets you free.”
Does No One Oppose the Cult?
There is an opposition trying to make the system being destroyed stop the destruction. They do have the following of a majority of the populace who see representative democracy as superior to fascism, especially in its provision for correction and adjustment. But the destroyers play the role of having a mandate from “the people” making themselves appear just close enough to the republic to claim legitimacy.
Some of the regime followers are awakening to the con by realizing no material wealth is appearing in their accounts and feeling uneasy with the lawless cruelty of the regime’s tactics. But the problem is complicated by the con positioned to use “legitimate” force by police and military against popular uprising. Sheer numbers protesting is not enough against armed troops unless protesters are willing to risk their lives daring their fellow citizens in uniform to fire on them.
Threatening Loss of Wealth
Alternatively, the oligarchs may be moved by threats to their wealth such as a general strike and the spectacle of overwhelming numbers refusing to keep the country running. Their empires require healthy, happy slaves, and a functioning economy.
All along this timeline self-centered people can take advantage of the situation, further complicating humanity’s detours.
Is this all we have to work with?
This outline of brinksmanship is chilling at best. The hope comes when we quiet ourselves and humbly contemplate the fuller reality of humans in this world. We wait respectfully for inspiration and allow ourselves moments of insight to trigger our capacity for transcendence. All humans are gifted with this capacity for we are more than this predicament which is an opportunity to respond to the beyond.
We can see signs of many people around the world responding to the beyond, people who are living a new way of turning from self-centered materialism to demonstrating God’s way of healing, generosity, creativity, facilitating each other’s fulfillment, advocating for the common good, unity in confronting evil, growing in knowledge of Truth, and practicing Love.
Those who live this way must not cease expressing it for this awakens people possessed by the cult. It awakens humanity to the spiritual reality of God calling us across the threshold into new creation. This is the beginning of wisdom, the life that is endeavoring to survive the old ways which keep asserting themselves in forms like this cult.
Material utopia is no longer the goal. Spiritual renewal is a call to the work of creation, not to making ourselves physically comfortable, or to satisfying our insatiable appetites as the cult promises.
Behavior as New Creation
We will consciously conduct life in a faith that collaborates with the Spirit, rather than view ourselves as underlings of some entity far off in heaven, a view Jesus rejected. He demonstrated and taught us to be extensions of God’s Love (John 14:12; 15; 17).
Each of us is called to acknowledge our True Self as growing humans inspired to wisely choose our way, using our intellect and physical capacities to evolve out of old ways into the better. We are being guided
out of fixation on the material into a new creation incarnated by spirit,
out of self-indulgence to fulfillment of all creation,
out of consuming all things to connection with all things,
out of exclusive independence to the greater benefits of the common good.
God honors and energizes us to take initiative, to choose collaboration with the Spirit, to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. (Micah 6:8)
