Godmindfamily, Part 2, Chapter 8

Part 2: Man’s Kingdom and God’s Kingdom

Chapter 8: Problems in 21^st Century Society

The theme of Saint Augistine’s Civitas Dei (City of God) is two cities: the City of God and the city of man. In Latin, civitas refers to the community of people with a shared interest and urbs denotes the physical city filled with buildings. According to Augustine, the City of God is currently in heaven, and the saved go there upon death, but at the end of time, the city will descend from heaven to a new earth. The saved will be resurrected in immortal bodies and live in the City of God forever. While the City of God is all about the love of God, the city of man, by contrast, is characterized by love of self, and all the sins that follow from that. Augustine also believed that the City of God is currently intermingled with the city of man on earth, being comprised of the saved, who are the citizens of God’s city.Augustine was a prominent amillenialist: he did not believe in God’s literal millennium reign on earth before the New Jerusalem. Though I will refute this eschatology later, the basic concept of the two cities is accurate, and is a recurring motif in the Bible, with the fornicating, tyrannical, and idolatrous Babylon (Revelation 17) contrasted with Jerusalem, and especially the virtuous, eternal New Jerusalem that comes down from heaven to a new earth (Revelation 21:2). This final part of the work takes up Augustine’s theme of the two contrasting cities in modified form.

The deceiver has tricked a lot of powerful people, but only because they were ignorant and evil. The Bible makes it plain that Satan’s worldly power is limited, guaranteed to fail by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, and temporarily tolerated by God, with God as the ultimate sovereign of the earth and the one who decides the fates of its inhabitants. The Bible is full of warnings about the temptations of the world (1 John 2:16), that God’s will is in a sense opposed to the world or at least misaligned with it, and that believers in Christ are in a partly antagonistic relationship with the world and many of its inhabitants. ‘If the world hates you, you know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. But because you are not of the world, since I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.’ (John 15:18–19).

People have done a terrible job of handling healthcare, crime, technology, education, media, the internet, economics, culture and politics. Saint Paul’s aforementioned prophecy of the last days has come to pass: ‘Men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, not lovers of good, traitors, headstrong, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding the form of godliness but having denied its power.’ (2 Timothy 3:2–5). This section explains just how badly people have done trying to organise society without God. The critiques in this chapter are primarily levelled at the western world, whose systems have to some extent been adopted globally, especially when it comes to technology, business, science and economics.

Healthcare

All kinds of ridiculous treatments have been attempted throughout history, but people at the time took them deadly seriously, including eating tapeworms to lose weight, eating mummies to cure epilepsy, trepanning (drilling holes in the skull), lobotomies for mental disorders and tobacco smoke enemas for drowning sufferers and people with digestive problems. This potted history of medical malpractice is a stark reminder of how paradigms that were once dogmatically accepted are now regarded as dangerous and bizarre. Today’s doctors will in time be regarded as little better than the quack doctors who bled their patients in the 18^th century. The contemporary alternative medicine scene is little better than its precursors, with acupuncture, elimination diets, and herbal remedies topping the list of nonsensical treatments.

Conventional medicine is overly preoccupied with physical-level interventions that don’t really heal anything, they merely mask symptoms, due in part to the placebo effect. Even when a drug eliminates a symptom on a physical level, symptom substitutions emerge in other systems and are called ‘side effects’. The drug doesn’t get to the bottom of anything, because the causes of chronic disease are psychological, not physiological, due to the mind’s power over the body. Healthcare is currently dominated by inefficient bureaucracies and pharmaceutical companies more interested in earning profits than curing diseases. The profit motive is largely at odds with attempts to heal the patient. The best healthcare business model is not to cure a disease, or let it kill the patient, but to manage it with drugs for the rest of the patients’ typically long lifespan (in the developed world, anyway). Accordingly, we have seen life expectancy increase throughout the 20^th century (the curve has flattened in the 21^st century), but chronic disease and mental disorder rates have risen, especially in the last 20 years. This has largely been driven by the combination of the extant flawed, profit-driven allopathic medicine and dubious alternative medicine with the internet and new devices, leading to much greater access to fear-inducing medical misinformation and mass scale nocebo effects.The British NHS, which provides universal free healthcare, has proven that such models are financially unsustainable in our era, having created unprecedented wait times (over 24 hours in A&E), sub-par treatment from overworked staff, and phenomenal waste. Private insurance-based systems, like those found in the US and parts of Europe, function much better, because there is usually enough money coming into the system. Healthcare needs money to work. Of course, the financial burden of disease would be vastly reduced if most people simply understood it and had sufficient faith to heal.

Obviously, Jesus understands sickness and health far better than any doctor, because he is God. The spiritual dimension in healing and the most efficient healing method have been neglected by doctors, therapists and other practitioners – including some in TMS world – for centuries, partly because inefficiency is more profitable (more time to heal means more money) and people don’t want to admit their mistakes. That this process is unconscious – they know not what they do – is not a great excuse, because given sufficient time, we learn what we want to know.

Education

‘Education is a system of imposed ignorance’ – Noam Chomsky

The current education system in the western world is absolutely broken. It is intended to churn out obedient, conformist, barely literate and numerate bureaucrats and employees with a scientifically materialistic and politically liberal worldview, who won’t rock the boat or challenge the system. Modern western education relies on rote learning, rewarding parrot-like repetition of ‘facts’ provided by an authority figure (the teacher), to condition obedience and crush critical thinking and independent thought. This wouldn’t be so bad, if the facts and arguments taught in the schools were mostly true, but they aren’t. The curriculum’s biases are coloured by the scientific materialist worldview in the sciences, and by PC ideology in the humanities and social sciences, both of which are basically false and harmful philosophies, as evinced by the way western societies have declined to the extent that they have adopted these beliefs.

The ‘dumbing down’ process is now becoming painfully obvious, even under the thin veil of grade inflation,[i] as demonstrated by falling IQ scores in developed nations,[ii] as well as reduced reading comprehension and mathematical skills in schoolchildren and college students.[iii] Partly this dumbing down effect is due to young people’s attention spans being reduced by social media and the internet. AI is doubtless having an even worse effect, almost removing the burden of thought altogether and making homework and coursework into a total sham.

Making things easier and simpler and lowering the bar for pass grades virtually guarantees that students on average aren’t going to any get smarter – at best. The one thing school does successfully, is produce conformists who tend to obey authority figures and want to fit in with their peers, out of the fear of being thought ‘weird’ or abnormal. School is designed to crush the human spirit and individuality before it even reaches adulthood, and it is largely succeeding, because most people are no match for the system. This applies to both state comprehensive schools and private schools, though the latter are engineered to produce slightly better educated, more driven conformists in order to furnish a tame ruling class preoccupied with competing over empty trophies. The fact education is compulsory in most western nations demonstrates how vital it is for the state to maintain control. Mandatory uniforms in UK state schools and certain private schools throughout the world are blatant attempts to instil obedience and conformity. The deceiver has encouraged the dumbing down of children in schools and universities and the infiltration of ideology into the curriculum and the universities, via the minds of the relevant parties, who nonetheless bear responsibility for their actions. Aside from ideological bias, many degrees in the western world, especially the UK and the US, are absolutely pointless in that they do not provide vocational skills or lead directly and reliably to a career. This includes most of the humanities and social sciences. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour government encouraged up to 50% of school leavers to attend university (a goal achieved in 2017/18), which has produced a glut of unemployed, overeducated young people who feel they are overqualified for menial, low-skilled jobs. Many American graduates are in a similar boat, except they paid even more for their tuition – and so we have the bizarre phenomenon of the Oxbridge alumni barista – a sure sign of a dysfunctional society that misallocates resources and human capital.

Increasingly, employers in the western world are realising these degree certificates aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, but many have yet to get the memo. At least vocational degrees – law, medicine, psychology, financial accounting etc. – can lead directly to high-paying jobs, but there are serious biases and flaws in the way that virtually every field is taught, which must be more or less agreed with by students if they want to receive their degrees. This means that you end up with an army of professionals who have been selected for their ability to submit to groupthink and regurgitate a slew of falsehoods or half-truths on cue. The degree requirement for these kinds of jobs weeds out many who are incompetent, for sure, but it also excludes original thinkers, which admittedly are somewhat thin on the ground these days.

The Media, Social Media and the Internet

I have rolled media, social media and the internet into one section because most of the media is online nowadays. The majority of the mainstream media, at least in the US and UK, is renowned for its left-wing bias. For example, a 2017 Pew Research Center Analysis found that coverage of Trump’s first 100 days was mostly negative in the press; from January 21 to April 2017, 62% of stories about the Trump administration were negative, while only 20% of news stories about Obama were negative following his 2009 inauguration.[iv] The media in the US and UK is dominated by a small number of billionaires, corporate conglomerates and tech giants and is consumed largely via search and social media platforms. Are we supposed to believe that these extremely rich individuals and corporations do not have editorial agendas that support their interests? Any news outlet has to choose which stories and issues to cover, and which to ignore due to space and time constraints. This creates room for selection bias, before we even get into narrative bias (how the organisation chooses to portray the events covered).[v] Consequently, by far the most important issue for humanity – salvation through Jesus Christ – has received scant attention in the mainstream media, which has chosen instead to focus on various scandals in the church in its religious reportage.

In their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky proposed that consent in a democracy is manufactured via five mechanisms: 1. The Media are large corporations owned by even larger conglomerates who are going to use their investment to represent their interests.

2. The media need advertising for revenue, especially in the internet age, and must cover the news in a way that does not alienate advertisers, who are themselves companies, often large ones.

3. The media rely on ‘expert’ opinions from scientists, politicians, civil servants, military leaders etc. for their content and commentary. But these individuals are often financed by elites and were given their positions largely to represent the interests of the corporate, political and academic elite.

4. ‘Flak’. Media outlets that deviate from the interests of corporations can receive a negative response in the form of campaigns, legal threats, and criticism from other outlets designed to make an example out of news organisations that don’t tow the line.

5. Fear ideology. The population is rallied against a perceived enemy they are taught to fear and hate, traditionally communism. Enemies and wars on various things have multiplied in recent decades, which has certainly kept the media busy.Chomsky wrote that entertainment media is used to distract the populace from important issues and is used to convey elite ideologies and reinforce social norms. This has become increasingly obvious in recent decades with the excessive use of Mary Sues and the prevalence of anti-white, anti-men and anti-Christian agendas in films, television and contemporary trad-published books becoming increasingly obvious and tiresome. This is especially implausible and jarring when it comes to historical fiction, TV shows, games and films, which are littered with inaccuracies. Moreover, entertainment media has become incredibly dreary in the last 15 years especially, with an overabundance of dysfunctional, traumatised characters providing messed up role models for children and adults. Even the basics of TV and film production like sound-recording are increasingly bad, with movies and TV shows becoming quite hard to hear due to mumbling and poor audio quality. Comedy is basically dead at this point, killed by ideology.

Chomsky observed that the biases of the media are so subtle and deeply ingrained that many reporters don’t even realise they are biases. A fish doesn’t realise it is surrounded by water; it just takes the water for granted. The creep of PC ideology into all forms of media has been done gradually enough that some people have barely noticed how dramatically things have changed in a relatively short timeframe, like the frog in the proverbial pan of boiling water. But when you rewatch movies from 20 or 30 years ago it becomes very obvious.The title ‘manufacturing consent’ was inspired by Walter Lippman’s usage in his 1922 book, Public Opinion. Edward Burnays also wrote a book in 1928 called Propaganda, in which he argued that it was necessary for an orderly democracy that consent should be ‘engineered’ and the masses manipulated (the term propaganda has since gained negative connotations, motivating the pivot to words like ‘public relations’). Burnays believed these efforts should not be confined to wartime propaganda, but should be proactive, to promote the interests of the society and the economy and guide the public through a chaotic world full of information they cannot digest on their own. He recommended using tricks of the trade from advertising and public relations in the consent engineering process. Burnays was not some crank conspiracy theorist, he worked with many large corporations such as General Electric, Lucky Strike and United Fruit Company, and was known as the ‘father of public relations’.

Ever since the 2000’s and the diffusion of the internet disrupting their print-based business model, the media has been pressured into running clickbait videos and articles to survive. And what articles and videos are people most likely to click on? The ones that scandalise, polarise, panic, depress, titillate and irritate, because many minds tend to focus on the negative and are driven by, and addicted to, negative emotions. This is because of broken human nature, following the fall. And so we end up with news feeds filled with irresponsible doomsaying and panic mongering about health, the environment, crime, the economy, etc. Due to the power of the mind over the physical world, extreme panic-mongering reportage actually makes some of these problems worse, in yet another instance of the self-fulfilling prophecy. The internet has amplified humanity’s tendency for self-destruction.

This is especially obvious when it comes to fear-inducing coverage of health-related news, typically centring around some dire warning about the health risks of this, that or the other, and spurious correlations found in empirical studies. There is empirical evidence showing that excessive consumption of the news can lead to anxiety, depression, and physical symptoms.[vi] There is also strong evidence showing a link between excess social media use, psychiatric symptoms and somatic symptoms.[vii] From 2000 to 2020, the prevalence of chronic disease rose in America by 7 or 8 million people every five years; this is the time period in which people really started using the internet and social media.[viii]

One of the main drivers of this phenomenon is people searching their symptoms online, in an effort to relieve health-related anxiety, but of course the result is that it typically fuels their anxiety. There is a strong correlation between people obsessively googling their symptoms and negative health outcomes, a phenomenon known as cyberchondria.[ix] This frequently leads to misdiagnosis, unnecessary medical procedures and worst of all, nocebo effects. Worrying about health makes health worse. Digital technology has proven to be an incredibly effective vehicle for the nocebo effect.

The most egregious example of panic-inducing health news in living memory was the coverage of the covid 19 pandemic. In days gone by, the government and media withheld information or downplayed concerning events because they didn’t want to create a panic. That approach well and truly went out of the window during the pandemic, with some exceptions, that were mostly outside of the mainstream media. Daily death counts were blared at the population from various devices, in a sickening display of alarmism. If the media kept a running total of deaths resulting from car accidents, they’d have a population too scared to get in the car and drive anywhere, since auto-related deaths far exceeded covid-related mortality, which primarily affected those with comorbidities. Headline after headline focussed on the dangers of the virus, and deaths supposedly resulting from the virus, with no regard for the potential mental (and physical) health effects of all that fear-inducing coverage in a populace that had little else to do but watch the news, because they were subject to lockdowns and furloughing – huge and unprecedented mistakes with untold economic ramifications that we are still feeling to this day, in the form of ballooning national debts. The immune system determines whether a pathogen produces symptoms or not, and the immune system is controlled by the autonomic nervous system, itself directed by the brain and the mind. And we know from the success stories of people who have healed from long covid via mindbody techniques[x] that long covid is a mindbody illness largely caused by fear. How many were literally scared to death by the alarmist coverage of the pandemic? Many people never recovered from the collective trauma of the pandemic and still live in fear to this day.

Likewise, focus on social divisions has increased dramatically since we entered the information age, and has actually exacerbated the polarisation of society, especially in the USA.[xi] The nocebo effect, or negative self-fulfilling prophecy effect, extends way beyond health. Covering society negatively in the news makes society worse, because perception creates reality due to the superiority of mind over matter.

For example, there is solid evidence indicating that sensationalist and detailed media coverage of mass shootings, other violent crimes and suicides exerts an influence on others to imitate those acts.[xii] This is called the copycat effect, or the media contagion effect, and is a well-recognised phenomenon. Research has shown that within 13 days of a mass shooting, the odds of another mass shooting rise significantly. That is why certain media outlets and journalists restrict the details shared surrounding certain violent crimes and try to focus on the victims. The incidence of mass shootings in the USA has increased drastically since the 1960’s and especially the year 2000,[xiii] and serial murder was rare before the Second World War, but increased exponentially from 1960 to the 1980’s.[xiv] These violent outbursts are symptoms of a society with declining self-differentiation, fuelled by sensationalist media coverage that makes celebrities out of monsters, and the internet’s role as a petri dish for mind viruses.

The Big Lie theory, postulated by Adolf Hitler, holds that the bigger the lie, the better the chance the people will believe it, because though the average person is capable of relatively small lies or minor distortions of the truth, they do not generally tell huge lies, and do not expect anyone else to, either. This theory has been used successfully, including by the Nazi’s, but it is nonetheless flawed; fantastic lies and even extraordinary truths are often disbelieved precisely because people think they sound ridiculous, especially in our era of widespread disinformation where the public have become far more jaded and less trusting than they were in the 1920’s, a result of all the lies they have been exposed to and personally engaged in, during the course of the last century.

Another, related theory of lying holds that the more an idea is repeated, especially by confident authority figures, the more people will believe it. That is why most people believe what they believe.

We cannot simply blame it all on the news and social media, however, because exposure to them does not need to make people sick, depressed or anxious, if they don’t believe the negative, panicky content they encounter on those platforms. And if they really can’t moderate their use of the internet, social media and devices, people can always unplug, delete their social media accounts and trade in their smartphones, although with the rise of online banking, this is becoming increasingly hard to do. Government regulation of social media, while justifiable to a limited extent, is not really a solution to these problems, because the lack of self-differentiation that has made many people addicted to social media will find another, potentially even more dangerous outlet, if those platforms are banned or restricted. If they are not addicted to social media, they may be addicted to gaming, drugs or pornography or suffer from some other dysfunction, unless they possess or develop sufficient emotional discipline (self-differentiation) to control themselves. It’s really the responsibility of the parents, who buy the devices and pay for the internet, to determine what kids are exposed to online – not the state. Just because there are some bad actors in the tech sector, doesn’t mean people are just helpless victims who have no choice but to fall right into the trap. The internet and social media have also hit people’s attention spans like a neutron bomb. There is evidence showing that the average time people look at an application on a computer screen is as low as 40 seconds; way down from 2–3 minutes in 2004.[xv] Smartphones, the internet and social media have created a largely zombified populace with hunched shoulders, heads buried in phones and blunted sensory awareness of the world around them, sometimes leading to surprising deficits in basic skills like walking and getting out of the way, in the absence of disability.

The Bible takes months to read all the way through. To truly understand it demands a lot of patience and superhuman reading comprehension. Nonetheless, a certain amount of scriptural understanding is vital for salvation. If most people can’t even watch a YouTube video for more than 40 seconds, what chance do they have of comprehending the Bible sufficiently to receive theosis from God? Make no mistake, the deceiver wants an ignorant, incurious and distracted population. Evil and incompetence go hand in glove.

Finance and Economics

Mainstream economic theory is largely based on abstract mathematical models that bear little resemblance to reality, have no concept of history, and take human rationality as a predicate. Humans are fundamentally irrational, and the economy obviously changes over time, based on causes that lie largely in the past.[xvi] The practice of economics is actually largely dictated by central banking, because central banks control the money supply in an economy; they print the money (or, increasingly, issue the currency digitally) and set the interest rates, determining the availability of loans from commercial lenders. Some central banks, despite masquerading as governmental institutions, are actually privately owned, typically by the large commercial banks. Why else would so much government spending in the US (14.8%),[xvii] often more than the defence budget, go on repaying the interest on loans, most of which are from the nation’s central bank? Why would the government waste money on repaying itself? The answer is that the Federal Reserve is a private concern. This is why the central banks’ ‘independence’ is touted as some important social benefit that must be preserved. The existence of the Federal Reserve means that every dollar issued in the US has to be repaid by the US federal government, plus interest. In exchange, all the Federal Reserve has to do is cover its relatively modest costs (offices, vaults, security guards, computers, paper and printing costs, etc.). No wonder the US government has frequent shutdowns due to lack of funding. Japan, Switzerland, South Africa, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Turkey and San Marino all have central banks that are at least partly privately owned.

The economy is driven by people’s beliefs. If they believe they need something, they will buy it. If they believe a stock will rise, they will buy it. A classic example of the self-fulfilling prophecy is when a large investor believes a recession is around the corner, and sells his stock; this can and has led to actual economic depressions, as share prices plummet and increasing numbers of people sell their stocks because they believe the economy is going down the drain. Banks have created recessions – intentionally or otherwise – by undermining public confidence in the economy countless times, most notably during the crisis in 1929, that sparked the Great Depression. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates too sharply in response to Black Thursday, which worsened the panic. Of course, after a market crash is the perfect time to buy stocks at rock bottom prices, in the knowledge that many stocks will tend to rise in value again over time. The boom-bust cycle that has characterised the economic history of the last 100 years is therefore the most potentially profitable for investors, and it is fuelled by groupthink, greed, fear and self-fulfilling prophecies. The media has consistently played a role in causing or exacerbating economic depressions, by broadcasting hysterical, doom and gloom headlines that feed the financial panic, and engaging in overly optimistic reportage of rising share prices and the growth of certain companies and sectors – notably tech, in the dotcom bubble and more recently. The herd instinct is also a large driver of financial panics, in which investors withdraw their deposits and sell poorly performing stocks en masse.

There is an amazing phenomenon that I call the nonsense economy, whereby a large chunk of western nations’ GDP (especially in the UK) is dependent on falsehood, to the point that if most people in those economies stopped believing those falsehoods, the economy would temporarily suffer to a significant degree, probably going into recession. Of course, in the long run it would be beneficial to cease squandering money and resources that could be better allocated elsewhere, but there would nonetheless be a painful adjustment period. Many western countries had stronger economies when they had more factories and trade surpluses. But western manufacturing has been severely curtailed by excessive labour and environmental regulations, and after decades of offshoring key infrastructure, onshoring will take too long in a lengthy process.

Wars are tremendously profitable to banks, the armaments industry and other corporations. For example, the Second Gulf War was obviously about obtaining private commercial access to the oil in Iraq and selling armaments to participating governments. The longer a war goes on for, the more profits are generated for defence contractors…It has even been admitted that the rationale for invading Iraq – the supposed WMD threat – was false.[xviii]

Capitalism in its early stages certainly helped to build the conveniences we have today through its incentive structure. Whether or not that was a good thing, the free market was effective as a form of economic Darwinism, generally allowing good companies that delivered value to thrive, and the worst to go bankrupt. That is no longer the case. Meritocracy has officially left the world economy. Even in its heyday, there was an element of robber barons muscling out competitors with aggressive and even illegal business tactics, but there was at least a competition for resources. Over time, power and wealth has concentrated in fewer and fewer hands leading to the creation of a financial elite, who have pulled up the social ladder behind them and resorted to cartelism. Karl Marx’s theories have been incredibly destructive and led to the deaths of countless millions, but he was right about the principle of infinite accumulation, whereby surplus profits are reinvested, leading to increasing capital accumulation in the hands of the wealthy few.[xix] The result is massive and widening wealth inequality, super-rich individuals who can afford tax lawyers to help them find the loopholes deliberately embedded in complex tax codes,[xx] and the formation of monopolies and oligopolies that don’t have to care about delivering value to customers, because they lack competition and can afford to comply with onerous government regulations.[xxi] Late capitalism has become as non-competitive as state socialism. The concentration of wealth in the hands of the super-rich has led to disproportionate political power being wielded by the wealthiest, via donations to political parties, SuperPACS, golden handshakes, revolving doors and intelligence gathering and blackmail traps, as evinced by Epstein’s operation on his island. All of these factors are driven by greed and fear.

Socialism and Communism

The track record of socialism and communism is even worse than capitalism, which has at least raised living standards and created innovations. Socialism goes so far against the grain of human nature it requires that power be concentrated in the hands of an insane dictator and his secret police apparatus. God did not make people equal. Everyone is obviously different! The world would be a living nightmare if everyone was identical, without any individuality, which is what communism strives to impose. Communist regimes can only maintain themselves via a network of informers and fear of secret police brutality. They lead to the destruction of the most talented in the society. There is no profit incentive to do well under socialism and communism, because the state will take the money via taxation – or someone will accuse the successful person of being an exploiter or a rightist and have them lynched by the mob or shot by the secret police. This leads to widespread mediocrity and low productivity. The Russian Revolution was soaked in the blood of innocents from its inception, fuelled by desperation and jealousy. Stalin killed millions in his great terror and Mao’s failed Great Leap Forward led to the deaths of millions. While most western states are not technically socialist today, they have incorporated many socialist ideas, such as the welfare state and the universally free British NHS (National Health Service). Under Josef Stalin at one point in the thirties, the highest bracket of personal income tax in Communist Russia was around 15%. Most countries around the world exceed that today. Bottom line: socialism disincentivises ability and hard work, and rewards conformist mediocrity, leading to poor economic performance and a Kafkaesque nightmare of inefficiency and terror.

Culture

Western culture has been degenerating ever since the First World War, when people stopped believing in God and started abandoning religion en masse. What was good about the west – the wonderful architecture, the great cathedrals, the renaissance artworks, the work ethic, ideals of fairness and justice – were rooted in the Christian faith. Accordingly, since people have begun drifting away from that faith, under the influence of false scientific and postmodernist doctrines, western culture has witnessed a marked decline in the quality of art, literature, film, television, music and other forms of entertainment and work, that has been accelerating since the 2010’s. Postmodernist continental philosophers building on the work of Nietzsche are largely to blame for this trend, criticising power structures and the oppression of disenfranchised minorities. By making the dominant philosophy of society one concocted by largely French and German philosophers, is it any wonder most people in the west feel life is meaningless and many are depressed? Of course, PC ideology, by criticising the oppression of the white western patriarchy, has ironically become racist and sexist against white straight men, in a classic instance of projection that Freud would have spotted a mile off.

The world population has more than tripled since the Second World War and there is increasing demand for a limited supply of natural resources. The elite are concerned about this. Very concerned. So they developed an ideology aimed at lowering the birth rate under the guise of liberalism, ‘rights’ and the fight against prejudice. Say what you like about the recent promotion of homosexuality, but if there are more gay people in a society, obviously that will tend to lower the birth rate. Feminism, abortions, birth control – all tend to lower the birth rate and control the population’s size. Western elites and governments have been trying to play God for too long, without the intellect to back it up. This has resulted in unintended consequences. With declining birth rates in the west, combined with technological stagnation, one way to generate growth is to expand the population by bringing in immigrant labour to work and buy. Another way is to get middle-class women into the workforce in far greater numbers by telling them that it is empowering to work, and that they were being somehow oppressed by not having to work that much before. Persuading middle class women to give up the highly privileged lifestyles they enjoyed in the 60’s – taking care of children and doing domestic chores, sometimes with the assistant of a servant or nanny, while the husband worked – was a masterpiece of manipulation, centred on exacerbating their grievances against men. Don’t forget that the serpent targeted Eve as his top priority, with misleading promises of empowerment (Genesis 3:5)...even without preferential treatment in court and the workplace, women were very powerful, because they had the natural power to reject men, many of whom spend most of their lives trying to impress women, and they had a massive influence on children by raising them. The postmodernist philosophies have been used and adapted by the elite to divide and rule the population, to silo them off into opposing echo chambers – especially in the internet era, with social media. If a society is comprised of fragmented groups who hate each other, these groups are so preoccupied with each other that they are less of a threat to the elite. It’s a classic Roman imperialistic strategy called divide et impera, and many have naively fallen for it.

Scientific Materialism and Technology

Since the 18^th century, scientific materialism has become the dominant paradigm in the culture, a position it has shared with postmodernism since the seventies. Scientific materialists believe there is no God, and that the universe and humanity were created by purely materialistic causes, matter and energy. This is wrong of course, for the reasons given in chapter 7.

At its worst, modern empiricism fosters the increasingly prevalent attitude of, ‘If I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist!’

In reality, of course, very many things exist that we cannot observe. Germs existed before Pasteur, genes before Mendel and DNA before Francis and Crick. Yet in the year 1750, there was no published evidence for any of these theories. Strict empiricists and ‘men of letters’ scoffed at these geniuses. Now we have spent over a century looking for the evidence, we have tons of it. People today are no more intelligent than their forebears. There are still numerous truths few people believe in for ‘lack of evidence’.

The problem with empiricism is the little understood concept of confirmation bias: the tendency to search for, interpret, favour and recall only information that agrees with our existing beliefs. This means we are likely to look for and find evidence in support of whatever we already believe but may miss data that contradict those beliefs. This is all well and good if you start with the right assumptions…but it leaves the modern mind extremely vulnerable to cherry-picked evidence. The result is that we tend to only see or remember evidence in support of the current paradigm and are shown little or no evidence to the contrary, because alternative theories are seldom investigated under experimental conditions and/or rarely aired in public.

Many empirical studies find correlations, a relationship between two variables. But correlation does not automatically equal causation, and there are often hidden confounding variables – such as the beliefs of the subjects – that are not recorded in empirical studies.

And then there is the influence of money on the scientific process. Scientists study what they have funding to study. Therefore, whoever provides the money, controls what type of experiments are done and what evidence gets found. Understandably, financing for studies that go against the prevailing theories is limited and tends to come from the corporate elite. There is however a body of evidence contradicting or falsifying some of the current paradigms…such as the evidence for mindbody medicine and some of the studies cited in this book – but such evidence is rarely broadcast to large sections of the public.

Widespread belief in scientific materialism, particularly evolutionary theory, has undermined belief in God and Christian faith in the past 200 years, leading to the pernicious cultural effects outlined above. Scientific materialism and evolutionary theory have destroyed morality in many people because if you believe you’re descended from animals and there is no omniscient judge then the only think keeping you in line is fear of detection and the incentive is to be a jerk but lie about it and not get caught. Again, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy because when people believe they’re merely evolved animals they behave more like animals, without morals – that’s one reason why the Antichrist is called ‘the beast’ in Scripture – and the net effect has been an overall decay in morals and the elevation of unprecedented numbers of psychopaths to positions of power. Judge a tree by its fruit.

1 Timothy 4:1: ‘But the Spirit says expressly that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, through the hypocrisy of men who speak lies, branded in their own conscience as with a hot iron.’ Evolutionary theory definitely fits the bill.

For example, Bowen’s belief in mankind’s limited capacity to improve self-differentiation was rooted in his belief in evolutionary theory, which led him to suppose that rational thought was a recent development, relatively weak when compared to primal emotions, which he thought have a deeper phylogenetic past. Bowen believed in the emotional system as a biological, automatic response rooted in human evolution from animals, a throwback to chimps baring their teeth at intruders. He also saw feelings as distinct from emotions, a more recent evolutionary development, that were nonetheless mixed up with emotions. Bowen discounted some psychological explanations about patient’s thoughts and feelings, believing they were rooted in animal instincts, because he saw humans merely as evolved animals. Bowen thought religious beliefs were mere subjective opinions, driven by base emotions. He wanted family systems theory to be accepted as a science, ergo it had to be grounded in evolution. Similarly, Doctor Sarno believed that pain was an evolutionary adaptation to ‘protect’ the ego from unpleasant feelings – but there is obviously not much of an evolutionary advantage to rolling around the floor in agony when there is nothing physically wrong with you. The most damning evidence against evolutionary theory is the fact that most human behaviour is not optimal for survival and reproduction, it is in fact self-destructive and self-sabotaging. If you were to design an organism optimally adapted for survival and mating, the frail human being with all of its many weaknesses and neuroses, would not be it.

Technology, whilst making life more superficially convenient, has largely been used for ill throughout history. The more advanced the technology, the less freedom people have had, the more social control has been enabled, and the more distracted people have become from the spiritual search for God. Scientific materialism and technology are humanity’s prideful attempt to undo the curses of the fall – suffering, birth pains, death and labour (Genesis 3:14–19) – without God’s help. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and the head of his Organisation Todt, explained that the Third Reich’s totalitarian regime and the death camps would have been impossible without modern technology. [xxii] Look at all the weapons of destruction that have been developed – the bombs, guns, tanks, fighter jets, missiles, nuclear warheads, that have been used for killing and maiming. The internet has been abused for mass surveillance of people by intelligence agencies.Low SD is not necessarily a curse, it generates suffering, but the ulterior purpose of that suffering is to bring sufferers to the point where, like the prodigal son, they appeal to and reunite with God in salvation experiences. That is one of the main reasons why God has permitted the demons to run amok in this era, and why society has been allowed to become such a mess.

In the future, AI, nanobots and robots are particular areas of concern. The beast’s ‘mark’ (Revelation 13) will be the outward token of an AI-nanobot implant that the Antichrist will use to control the minds and bodies of his populace, reducing them to automata with less agency than slaves. This is them selling their souls in exchange for the material perks that come with the mark (such as not getting executed by the Antichrist’s authorities). It will be impossible to buy or sell legitimately within the Antichrist’s empire without his mark (Revelation 13:17), because it will be tied to programmable cashless digital finance. The mark of the beast brings about an inner abomination of desolation – the Antichrist is described in Scripture as he who ‘makes desolate’ (Daniel 9:27) – as it renders the temple of the human body permanently bereft of the presence of God, because those people let materialistic technology into their bodies instead, and chose the False Messiah in preference to the true, resulting in their irrevocable destruction in the lake of fire (Revelation 14:9–11). AI is dangerous because human governments and corporations use it for totalitarian control, mind control, propaganda, censorship and surveillance, all of which are already happening and will get worse when the beast reveals himself.

Then there is the image of the beast constructed in the likeness of the Antichrist that is made to live and move and kills those who don’t worship it (Revelation 13). The Greek word eikon, translated as image in English language Bibles, can mean a material image, a statue. With our understanding of technology, a living, moving, killing statue is clearly an armed robot.[xxiii]

Scientific materialism and technology are humanity’s prideful attempt to undo the curses of the fall – suffering, birth pains, death and labour (Genesis 3:14–19) – without God’s help. AI, nanomachines and robotics represent the nadir of that centuries long project.Even independent of the Antichrist, AI and robotics will lead to mass unemployment because they do work that was previously unique to humans to a higher standard than many humans, and much cheaper. This will mean an extension of the benefits system, and probably a universal basic income will have to be introduced to prevent mass poverty. AI brain implants will be offered as a way to retain human usefulness, and not all of them will be the mark of the beast offered by the Antichrist, but with any such product there are huge risks of mind control. These trends will continue.

Employment and Work

The protestant work ethic drove the industrial revolution in northern European nations and the United States of America. Since religious faith has declined, the work ethic has also gone to pot. One of the biggest problems with the contemporary western workplace, especially in the corporate world, is affirmative action programs, diversity quotas and so-called equality legislation. These laws and initiatives have led to people being hired or rejected based on their race, sex and sexual orientation, with straight white men typically getting the raw end of the deal. Okay, men still tend to earn more than women, but that is due to women’s preferences, not employer bias, at least in most of the western world. [xxiv] Ironically, affirmative action aimed at disproportionately hiring ethnic minorities is discrimination. Whether someone gets a job or promotion or not shouldn’t be about their sexual orientation, their gender or race. It should be about hiring the best candidate for the job. That’s it. As the workplace has slid further away from meritocracy – a word many native English speakers don’t even understand, illustrating how foreign the concept now is – the whole of society has suffered.

Productivity has declined in the UK[xxv] and there is a long-term decline in productivity in the USA and other advanced economies as well.[xxvi] Incompetence has risen to almost unbelievable levels worldwide. Absurdly, a person’s ability is not particularly well-valued in the modern western workplace, with experience, connections, education, gender and ethnicity being larger considerations for many employers. The consolidation of wealth and power by elite families over the generations is an obstacle to meritocracy.

The corporate world has come to understand in recent decades that delivering good products and services is not the best revenue generating strategy. Too many companies are deliberately making bad products or sabotaging their products with bogus ‘updates’ so that you’ll have to buy a new one sooner rather than later.

Social media has hit productivity in office jobs very hard indeed, creating innumerable distractions and the pandemic has been an absolute disaster for the work ethic, leading to steep declines in productivity,[xxvii] a reduction in the number of hours worked and an increase in people working from home. Working from home is fine if you are just as productive at home as you are in the office, but that is not the case for most people, who clearly need the discipline and supervision of a structured work environment in order to be productive.The word sin is a translation of the Hebrew chet, which simply means to miss the mark, to make a mistake. Incompetence is a sin. It is a more harmful sin than deliberate malice, when you consider how many lives have been lost to improper healthcare over the centuries, the total vastly outnumbers the amount of people murdered or killed in war. According to CDC and FBI statistics, Americans are many times more likely to die of medical malpractice than they are of murder. The implication of this is that people have a moral obligation to at least strive to be good at their jobs – even if that means going against what they have been trained to do, where that training was wrong.

Organised Religion

Organised religion, even Christianity, at best only captures part of the truth of God. So we are left with faiths, that people believe in, and most believers are just that, believers, who do not truly know God on an intimate and personal level, as they would a family member. It is that closeness that God wants, and that knowledge of God will dispel all doubt about his existence and benevolent nature. But because the church merely believes in God, and seldom demonstrates absolute proofs, it has struggled to defend itself against attacks by the new atheists and other scientific materialists. The church is overly defensive and ‘nice’ in the face of a relentless onslaught from multiple directions, when the best way to win spiritual warfare is by going on the offensive and being proactive against demonic forces. The result is a lot of pleasant believers, who embrace the meek, turn the other cheek aspect of Jesus and ignore how he made a whip and violently chased the moneychangers out of the temple (Matthew 21:13), as well as how he called the Pharisees ‘serpents’ and ‘offspring of vipers’ (Matthew 23:33). But Jesus did not sin when he was violent and angry and cursed the Pharisees. Everything he does is right. Bible prophecy is overshadowed by the dark colossus of God’s wrath on the Day of the Lord (Zechariah; Revelation; Zephaniah). God can handle vengeance without being corrupted by it. That is why he said, ‘Vengeance is mine.’ (Romans 12:19). Anyone who is tempted to vengeance should see the lake of fire. The damned are going to meet an absolutely terrifying demise, regardless of what people inflict upon them, so take care that you don’t end up in that fire with them. That doesn’t mean Christians shouldn’t speak the truth boldly, which is exactly what Jesus and the apostles did.

Most believers also shrink from literal interpretations of Bible prophecy, because they are too afraid to handle the truth: that there will be a roughly seven year period of tribulation, there will be asteroid impacts (Revelation 8:8–9), millions will die, one third of humanity will be slaughtered by a marauding supernatural army (Revelation 9:13), there will be earthquakes, wars, rumours of wars, false prophets (Matthew 24), false messiahs, the waters will be made bitter (Revelation 8:10–11), the Antichrist will come to power in the Middle East and persecute all who refuse to worship him (Daniel 7:25), primarily within his empire but also worldwide via his followers in other countries. Pre-tribulation dispensationalists believe in most of the above but cop out by saying that they will be raptured off planet before things get nasty. For a comprehensive refutation of pre-tribulation rapturism, see my book Godmindbody.

The Greek word pisteou, used in several key Bible passages about the requirements for salvation (John 6:29; John 5:24; John 6:40; Romans 10:9), translated as glaube by Luther and belief and faith in English language Bibles, means so much more than the English and German words, which basically boil down to mentally accepting something as true. Pisteuo (pronounced pis-tayvo) means to believe and to act according to that belief. The Catholics are right in that faith and works are needed for salvation, but the works cannot be done without the indwelling spirit, since the virtues are the fruits of the spirit (Galatians 5:22) and apart from the true vine, Jesus, people can do nothing good (John 15). The result in most churches is a watered down religion, and churches filled with people, many of whom do not know Christ and are not saved, though they believe they are simply because they accept Jesus as the Lord.

That is not enough, as Jesus himself said (Matthew 7:21): ‘“Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.’In Revelation, at the Last Judgement people are judged by their deeds (Revelation 20:12). Matthew 7:21 was written of such nominal Christians who do not do the works. John 3:36: ‘one who disobeys the Son won’t see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.’ Then there is John 15:1: ‘I am the true vine and my Father is the farmer. Every branch in me that doesn’t bear fruit, he takes away.’

Also, the church has done a decent job of spreading the gospel (at least since the Reformation, when it was translated into vulgate instead of being reserved for a clerical elite who understood Latin), fulfilling Jesus’ prophecy that the gospel would spread throughout the whole world, and then the end will come (Matthew 24:14), but has largely neglected its duty to heal the sick. The reason that miracles are accounted so rare is that contemporary Christians mostly lack the faith to pull them off. Most church services thereby miss the point of Christianity, which is redemption through merging with the Body of Christ and the active use of his extraordinary power for good, involving combat with the spiritual forces of evil.‘You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,’ said Leon Trotsky, the commander of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. We are engaged in a spiritual war. Act like it.CrimeCrime, like all sin, is basically a manifestation of low differentiation. Of course, some good deeds are reckoned crimes under evil regimes like Stalin’s Communist Party, and to commit these ‘crimes’ actually requires courage and is indicative of higher differentiation. Examples include the German industrialist Oscar Schindler’s saving of Jews under his employ during the time of National Socialism, and Christian martyrs’ proclamation of the good news under repressive Roman emperors like Nero and Domitian. Poverty exacerbates crime, of course, but is not the root cause, which lies in fallen human nature. The overall crime rate has apparently decreased since the nineties in most western nations, but nonetheless remains a problem. One of the reasons for this decrease is that people are more domesticated now than they were in the 20^th century – not exactly the best reason for a dip in the figures.

Immigration

The fact is, people inherently prefer the company of people who are like themselves and tend to dislike those who are different. This has always been the case, and is an inherent feature of the human race, including all of its constituent races. This applies not just to people from the same country who speak the same language but people with similar interests across borders. As someone who has little in common with most people. This tendency of like going with like may not always be great, but it is a fact of human nature. When reckoning with fallen human nature, it is not a good idea to just let everyone into your country who wants to come, as the UK has discovered lately. For one, if they lack the skills to work and nonetheless claim benefits, it is not feasible to support them on a financial level. Every pound spent housing, feeding or healing illegal immigrants is a pound that could be spent saving the lives of citizens or legitimate immigrants in hospitals – people who have paid their national insurance.

Another factor is that, given fallen human nature, and the natural tendency to prefer people one has something in common with, illegal mass migration was bound to result in polarised, low-trust societies, and that is broadly what has happened in the west over the past 30 or so years. There is not only a language barrier but a culture barrier too, and it is quite impressive, even between European nations, as anyone who has lived abroad understands all too well. Language and cultural barriers originate from the curse of Babel, when God scattered the various peoples of Babel to the four corners of the earth by giving them different languages and making them unable to understand one another (Genesis 11). This was a punishment for humanity’s prideful attempt to create a vast empire under King Nimrod, without God’s blessing (Genesis 11). No amount of brainwashing or illegal immigration can stamp out the curse of Babel, so it must be reckoned with sensibly as a political factor. Disregarding it leads to social division and unrest, which in turn engenders pressure for more draconian laws to contain the unrest ­– presumably, the elite are well aware of this. A minority of immigrants to western countries are criminals (except illegal immigrants, who are obviously technically all criminals) and an even tinier minority are terrorists, but there is nonetheless a national security threat that comes with open borders and unrestricted migration – that is why we have borders. The result of mass migration in the west in the last 20 or 30 years has been an erosion of trust in society, more social division and a related loss of basic freedoms. That doesn’t mean there should be no immigration – with an aging native population in the west that is relatively reluctant to perform menial tasks, there’s a decent case for some immigration. But it should be limited and properly controlled.

Antisemitism

Nobody understands the difficulties of assimilation better than the Jews. From at least the Sack of Jerusalem by the Romans under Vespasian and his son Titus in 70 AD until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Jews lacked a national homeland, and lived in diaspora, as immigrants among Gentile peoples. They experienced regular pogroms in the Middle Ages, for religious reasons, most notably during the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades. Under the Ottoman Empire, though the central government was relatively tolerant, they were treated as dhimmi, second class subjects who had to pay extra taxes for being non-Muslims and were occasionally locally persecuted. Later, in the late 19^th century, the rationale for antisemitism shifted from religion to race, a worrying tendency that was to culminate with Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.

In 1896, Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (the Jewish state) was published in Vienna and Leipzig. Herzl wrote the book in Paris, while witnessing the antisemitism on display when the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfuss was falsely accused of espionage by the French authorities. In the Stadtcasino Basel, Herzl convened the World’s First Zionist Congress, which gathered some Jewish community leaders together to discuss practical means for bringing about a Jewish state.Herzl devised a remedy for some problems facing Jews. He proposed that because antisemitism seemed to be inevitable in a country when a certain number of Jews emigrated there, a Jewish state should be founded in Palestine or Argentina, to provide a safe haven from antisemitism for the diaspora. This was the inception of the modern state of Israel, though Herzl’s vision of the Jewish state differed from the present country of Israel. But the creation of Israel has hardly solved antisemitism; antisemitism has increased since 1948. Israel began with a war against Arab peoples, including the Palestinians and Transjordan; and there have been many Middle Eastern wars since, the holy land remains hotly disputed, and as recent events have demonstrated, the great powers of the world have become embroiled in the region’s tensions. There are global consequences to Middle Eastern instability, notably migrant crises involving people displaced by the wars, social unrest around the Israel-Palestine conflict, and inflation from rising oil prices.

Politics

Humans have been left to run their own countries for centuries and have consistently done a terrible job of it. Regardless of the political framework, the sinners generally seem to rise to the top. The leaders, the powerful and the wealthy, are manipulated by the deceiver, because it was their ambition, pride, lust, envy, anger and greed, which drove them to the top of the hierarchy. The revelations contained within the Epstein files, which everyone knows are merely the tip of the iceberg, underline this point. Sexual immorality (including paedophilia) and power all too often go hand in hand.

The virtue of the government is typically determined by the virtue of the people, especially in a democracy. People tend to get the governments they deserve – not always, but more often than anyone would like to admit. The Nazi party received the largest share of the vote of any political party in the 1933 German elections. The Austrians voted 99% in favour of the Anschluss with Nazi Germany, a result unfairly influenced by lack of secrecy and intimidation, that nonetheless reflected a clear majority of the populace’s support for Adolf Hitler. The Labour prime ministers Keir Starmer and Tony Blair were elected by landslide majorities, but later became incredibly unpopular with the British public. The Swiss system of direct democracy via referenda only works because the relatively low percentage of Swiss citizens who regularly vote have quite a good understanding of, and engagement with, the issues they vote on.[xxviii] You could not simply transplant that system anywhere else and expect it to work so well, as the Brexit referendum demonstrated.

The political philosopher and monarchist Thomas Hobbes knew that human nature was evil, and described life in the state of nature as ‘nasty, brutish, and short’.[xxix] He knew that autocracy was the most effective form of government, in that it was the most capable of action, but of course when you get a bad autocrat the state is worse than it is in a typical democracy, because the mad king has all the power. In God’s kingdom, that won’t be an issue. Hobbes compared a republic to a body with two heads, being pulled in different directions, to illustrate the inefficiency of republics.

Montesquieu, in his seminal classic The Spirit of the Laws, advocated for constitutional monarchy with a separation of powers into legislative, judicial and executive branches, with the legislature the main law-making body, the judiciary interpreting laws and determining their constitutionality, and the executive responsible for implementing, enforcing and administering laws and managing national security and everyday government operations. The separation of powers prevented despotism via a system of checks and balances, enabling more political liberty for subjects. Montesquieu praised the English system (of the 18^th century) as an exemplar of the virtues of separation of powers. Checks and balances were also built into the American Constitution. The total separation of powers will not be necessary in God’s kingdom, with judicial, religious, executive and legislative power concentrated in Jesus’ hands, because God is beyond corruption.

The German historian Oswald Spengler observed in his magnum opus, The Decline of The West, that every civilization rises, declines and falls. Before the collapse there is usually a long period of decay, characterized by a loss of faith in the old religion, accompanied by hedonism, moral laxity, a crisis of identity, mass hysteria, obsession with safety, public dependence on the state for bread and circuses, military defeat at the hands of more virile peoples and excessive bureaucracy that ossifies the economy, like the brittle bones of a nonagenarian. Witness Belshazzar’s feast in dying Babylon, depraved Caesars and their obsession with chariot racing in decadent Rome. The hedonistic decadence, mania for sports and general laxity of morally corrupt late societies is of course promoted by the deceiver. Spengler observed that all of this social decay engenders a second wave of religiosity. In Ancient Egypt, it was syncretism of their old gods with the Greco-Roman pantheon. In Ancient Rome, it was Christianity. The idea is that the psychological and materialistic consequences of atheism and nihilism become so unbearable that the people turn back to God or religion in a different form. “Sophisticated” atheism makes life so meaningless that people yearn for meaning again. The second religiousness this time around will be the Second Coming of Christ, and the revelation to all of the true Christian religion that Jesus originally preached in full to his disciples. When the deceiver is released at the end of the thousand years, Gog and Magog will be swiftly defeated and there will be a transition into the New Jerusalem on the new earth, in which everyone is immortal, the deceiver is in the fire, and ‘death will be no more’ (Revelation 21:4). God’s kingdom will break the civilizational cycle of rise, decline and fall, because it is an eternal kingdom led by an eternal king (so there can be no succession crisis), co-administered by immortal saints, and ultimately comprised of exclusively eternal subjects.

One of the main reasons that civilisations and nations decay is that few laws are repealed, but every successive government wants to make new laws. The effect is that over time the number of laws and regulations explode and in late stages you are left with too much red tape to do anything, grow economically or even defend yourself. The UK government’s creation of quangos, quasi-autonomous governmental bodies with the power to make and enforce regulations, not subject to parliamentary control but funded with government money, leading to a culture of ‘health and safety’, and overly restrictive red tape fed by bureaucrats who want to justify their wages, is a classic example.Spengler also found a common pattern in declining civilizations – their inability to prevent mass migration and invasion by foreign armies, due to more ‘formless’ borders, loss of values, and heterogenous populations caused by the imperial expansion. This is seen in for example the Roman Empire being sacked and conquered by the Visigoths and others.

Plato: The Power Paradox

Plato recognised the problem of politics in antiquity and proceeded to critique the various forms of government.

In a hereditary monarchy, the founder of the dynasty may have possessed some wisdom and strength, but again, he is likely to place his own desires and his family above the interests of the people. His successors do not have to fight and scheme their way to the top, but they do have to fight and scheme to hold onto the throne. If a dynasty lasts long enough, inevitably it will produce evil and inept heirs to the throne, who alienate the people and the aristocracy, provoking revolts, coups, intrigues and civil strife.[xxx]

The United Kingdom of Israel ruled by the House of David failed because although David was as virtuous as a mortal could be before Jesus’ atonement, his son Solomon, though wise and just to start with, was eventually tempted to sin and idolatry by his luxury and vast harem. His son Rehoboam was even worse, because he helped to bring about the breakup of the kingdom into Israel and Judah as a divine punishment (1 Kings 12), thus illustrating the problem of succession in a hereditary monarchy (and lower intergenerational levels of SD). Another famous example is Edward I of England and his son, Edward II. Edward I, called ‘the Hammer of the Scots’, wasn’t the nicest man you’d ever meet, having crushed the Welsh and defeated the Scots, but he was most definitely a strong king. Edward II was weak and dominated by favourites, especially the infamous Piers Gaveston. Edward II was defeated at the Battle of Bannockburn and died under suspicious circumstances.

Oligarchy doesn’t work because it prizes wealth above merit, leads to vast social inequalities, creates a ruling class who love luxury and are therefore weak and indolent, and spurs the rise of demagogues who rise up as champions of the people against the rich, then turn into tyrants. Or rather, they reveal the tyrant they were all along, but had to temporarily conceal for lack of power. For example, Putin rose up in response to the corrupt oligarchs who ran Russia in the 90’s, disciplined them under his leadership and established his formal personal control over the country.

Plato mistrusted democracy because the freedoms it provides render the system vulnerable to oligarchs who use that freedom to accumulate vast wealth and exert covert power over politics. In a system that is about freedom, many pursue their individual desires, and this naturally leads to division, chaos, instability and conflict. One elected leader steers the ship of state north, the next steers it south. There is a lack of long-term planning and the ability to see projects to fruition, unless the democratic system is stealthily captured by an oligarchy, and then the long-range projects will tend to be for the enrichment of the wealthy. Plato also criticized democracy for giving power to an unskilled citizenry, lacking knowledge in the art of ruling, which is a specialised skill that requires training and experience. It should be noted that the democracy in Athens involved selecting rulers by lot from the citizenry and differed in many ways from our modern representative democracies, in which the citizens vote for representatives who conduct the government and make laws. Nonetheless, the choice of representative is a type of skill, that citizens are currently unprepared for by their mediocre education systems and misleading media. One notable exception to this rule is Switzerland.

Plato viewed democracy as inevitably decaying into tyranny, when a popular leader emerges in the guise of a protector and promises to bring stability and order to quell the chaos and division inherent to the democratic system. Again, a champion soon reveals his true tyrannical colours when he has eliminated or removed all of his domestic opposition in the democracy, as occurs in decaying oligarchies. For most of the 20^th century, western democracies were largely influenced by the wealthy, and choices were artificially narrowed to two or a handful of establishment parties squabbling over relatively minor differences – higher or lower taxes, more or less welfare – to provide the illusion of competition. The recent rise of nationalism has shaken things up a bit, but is at least partially the result of a widening of the parameters of competition within the elite ruling class. Trump, for instance, is a billionaire. A mass political phenomenon like Brexit does not happen without at least a part of the ruling elite supporting it, even if they are a minority faction within that class.

An example of a republic decaying into tyranny was the rise of Julius Caesar in the Roman Republic. Caesar was too talented, successful and ambitious to be contained within the bounds of the republic and its partially democratic political system. His military conquests and soaring popularity led his opponents to attempt to curtail his power, out of fear of tyranny, which became a self-fulling prophecy. Eventually, Caesar crossed the Rubicon, embarked on a civil war against Pompey and seized control of the Roman state. He showed mercy to many who fought against him and was assassinated. His great-nephew Octavian was determined not to make the same mistake. When he came to power, he was ruthless. Though the office of emperor was not strictly hereditary, with the successor being appointed by the emperor, Augustus’ successors demonstrate the limitations of monarchy even removed from hereditary succession. The Julio-Claudian dynasty that started with the amazingly talented Julius Caesar ultimately produced two of the most inept leaders in history: Caligula and Nero. Tiberius selected Caligula precisely because he wanted to pick a bad successor, that would make him look better by comparison, to punish the Roman people who did not love him.[xxxi]

Plato regarded tyranny as the worst form of government, because the tyrant is a man driven by lustful desires and nobody likes him, which means he must rule by fear and enslave his people. The tyrant himself is the most miserable of men, a slave to demonic passions and lives in fear of uprisings because of all the terrible crimes he has committed against the people, leading him to employ a personal bodyguard who are used in the repressions. The tyrant kills, imprisons or exiles the best citizens of the state, who will by definition oppose such an unjust ruler. When the best citizens are destroyed or exiled, it is to the detriment of the state as a whole; the state cannot benefit from the wisdom and virtue of its best minds. The tyrant becomes a prisoner in his own palace because of all his enemies, and he has no friends, only flatterers.Hitler’s Nazi Germany is an example of a tyranny that everyone is familiar with. Hitler arose as a demagogue in a democracy (as is often the case), assumed power, became a tyrant with his own personal bodyguard (the SS) whom he used to persecute his political opponents and other groups, eventually led his country into a self-defeating two front war, and was forced to a prisoner-like existence in a bunker because of bombing raids.

Plato identified the best possible state as one ruled by a philosopher king. That is, a wise, self-controlled and virtuous man who does not want power, but is trained to use it, and acts in the interest of the common good.[xxxii] The problem with the philosopher king is that if you do not want power, you do not seek power, and you generally do not get power. The one who wants power the most will tend to obtain it, and he or she will not be virtuous precisely because of the very hunger for dominance that drove them to pre-eminence. This is what I call the power paradox.Plato also recognised that his idea of the philosopher king was impractical, so like Aristotle, he later advocated in The Laws for a constitution with a mix of monarchy and democracy, in which the law is supreme above the rulers, and a board of guardians is balanced by democratic elections for most offices.

In the Politics, Aristotle similarly argued that the best possible government was a mixed regime that enabled a balance between too much order (authoritarianism) and too much chaos (anarchy). He believed that the cycling between autocracy, oligarchy and democracy via revolutions could be prevented or ameliorated by combining the forms of government. This was put into practice, most notably in the government of Great Britain with the king, the aristocracy and the people represented in the monarchy, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and in the United States, with its President, Senate and House of Representatives, subject to the written Constitution. Britain and America in days of yore were two of the best governed states, and Britain is rare in that there has been no civil war for over 300 years, but the situation in both nations has obviously degenerated since then.Even if a virtuous person somehow became the head of a state, the pernicious tendency of the world and our age would mean that they would probably be libelled by unscrupulous rivals, and that these smears would likely be successful precisely because the majority are superficial, generally prefer lies to truth and do not even want a good leader, because deep down they know they don’t deserve one. If the virtuous leaders could not be discredited, they would be assassinated by their evil opponents. An example of this type is Abraham Lincoln, who won the American Civil War, issued the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery in the United States, and was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth for his troubles. Politics is typically a moral race to the bottom, in which the one who will stop at no sin to win, including deception, murder, blackmail, libel and vote rigging, generally beats his opponents, and so political systems reward those who are the least ethical yet the best at not getting caught, as Machiavelli realised in his classic of political philosophy, Il Principe. For this reason, human governments will always fail to some extent in this era. This pernicious tendency of ‘the world’ has been accelerating and will culminate in the reign of the Antichrist, who is opposed to truth and Jesus and will persecute his followers.

The problems of politics, economics, culture, war, and healthcare are all the result of humanity’s ignorance and errors since the fall due to the separation from God and disobedience to his will. In Eden, humans chose to listen to the deceiver (in the form of the serpent) rather than God, and so they got a world with a lot of sin, which is largely one of pain and suffering. In a word, the world is messed up because of human ignorance and masochism, encouraged by demonic nonsense.

[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation#:~:text=Until%20recently%2C%20the%20evidence%20for,grades%20of%20A%E2%88%92%20or%20better.

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

[iii] Layne, H. 2025. Very Carefully Educated To Be Idiots. https://www.hilarylayne.com/p/very-carefully-educated-to-be-idiots

[iv] Pew Research Center. October 2017. Covering President Trump in a Polarised Media Environment. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2017/10/02/trump-first-100-days-methodology/#:~:text=Media%20coverage%20of%20President%20Donald,period%20(the%20comparison%20sample).

[v] I’ll provide an example of narrative bias. A news organisation could cover the 1954 CIA backed coup in Guatemala as a ‘liberation from communism’ or as ‘American imperialism via a military dictatorship’, depending on their perspective.

[vi] https://mhanational.org/resources/negative-news-coverage-and-mental-health/#:~:text=Watching%20upsetting%20news%20footage%20starts,involved%20in%20the%20news%20story.

[vii] Zubair, U et al. 2023 Mar 27;85.  Ann Med Surg. Link between excessive social media use and psychiatric disorders. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10129173/#:~:text=Conclusion,on%20their%20health%20and%20lifestyle.Prasad, S.  2023 Jul 7;85. Ann Med Surg.  Anxiety and depression among youth as adverse affects of using social media: a Review.https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10406047/#:~:text=Night%2Dtime%20media%20consumption:%20Smartphone,aggravated%20by%20SM%20use35.

[viii] Holman, H. 2020. The Relation of the Chronic Disease Epidemic to the Health Care Crisis. ACR Open Rheumatol. Feb 19; 2 (3).

[ix] Starcevic, V. World Psychiatry. 2023 May 9;22. Keeping Doctor Google under control: how to prevent and manage cyberchondria. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10168140/#:~:text=The%20Internet%20has%20become%20the,of%20obsessive%E2%80%90compulsive%20disorder%201%20.

[x] https://www.rebeccatolin.com/success

[xi] Political Division in the US Surged from 2008 Onwards. University of Cambridge. https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/political-division-united-states

[xii] Meindl, J. Ivy, J. 2017 Mar; 107(3). Am J Public Health. Mass Shootings: The Role of the Media in Promoting Generalized Imitation. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5296697/#:~:text=When%20mass%20shooters%20imitate%20other,so%20can%20directly%20influence%20imitation.

[xiii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_States

[xiv] https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/04/26/serial-killer-decline/

[xv] https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans#:~:text=So%20back%20in%202004%2C%20we,less%20of%20people's%20attention%20spans.

[xvi] Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

[xvii] Zengin, D, Yildirim, E. 2026. US interest payments exceed defense spending. AA.com. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/economy/us-interest-payments-exceed-defense-spending/3812997

[xviii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier#:~:text=The%20term%20Dodgy%20Dossier%20was,Network:%20A%20Guide%20and%20Analysis.

[xix] Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

[xx] Ibid.

[xxi] Thiel, P. 2014. Zero To One.

[xxii] Speer, A. 2020. Inside the Third Reich: The Classic Account of Nazi Germany By Hitler’s Armaments Minister. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

[xxiii] John Rich: Donald Trump, the Darkness of Eminem’s New Album and the Song Inspired by God. Tucker Carlson. YouTube Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaFNktRoTbo.

[xxiv] Gino, F et al. 2015. Compared to men, women view professional attainment as equally attainable, but less desirable. Prot Natl Acad Sci USA. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4603465/#:~:text=Abstract,the%20desirability%20of%20professional%20advancement.

[xxv] https://www.productivity.ac.uk/news/what-explains-the-uks-productivity-problem/#:~:text=It%20is%20in%20the%20bottom,of%20improvement%20in%20recent%20years.

[xxvi] https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/why-has-productivity-slowed-down

[xxvii] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/impact-covid-19-productivity#:~:text=Conclusions,are%20expected%20to%20become%20smaller.

[xxviii] Bewes, D. 2018. Swiss Watching: Inside the Land of Milk and Money. John Murray Business.

[xxix] Hobbes, T. Leviathan. Penguin Classics.

[xxx] Plato. Lane, M. Lee, H.D.P. 2007. The Republic. Penguin Classics.

[xxxi] Suetonius. Graves, R. Rives, J. 2007. The Twelve Caesars. Penguin.

[xxxii] Plato. Lane, M. Lee, H.D.P. 2007. The Republic. Penguin Classics.

Read the next chapter here: https://www.robertensor.com/post/godmindfamily-part-2-chapters-9-and-10