Politics works at the level of institutions, all the powerful and large institutions of all types are net-evil; therefore defending any mainstream institution amounts to defending the indefensible.
At best, this amounts to expending time, energy, and resources in choosing between two evils and promoting the lesser evil over the greater.
But actively-promoting evil, nonetheless.
It is a difficult situation. For a couple of decades or more; almost all current and proposed 'reforms' - whatever their apparent origin: government, NGO, corporate, legal, media... - are in the direction of increasing bureaucratic monitoring and control; which is the totalitarian agenda; which is the major strategy of demonic evil in the modern world.
But resisting these strategically-evil reforms entails defending an already-thoroughly-corrupted institution; an institution that actively pursues net-evil; and doing this, in itself, tends to corrupt the individual.
So, we get the apparent paradox that by 'fighting' strategic, demonic evil - 'fighting' in the way which most people would regard as most the direct and effective form of opposition - itself actively promotes that same agenda. By fighting a new evil, we almost-always defend and promote and already-existing evil.
Fighting corruption is necessarily itself corrupting.
Such it is to live in the end times; or so it seems to me.
Thus, in order not actively to assist in the agenda of evil (which, I take it, is an obvious goal for any Christian) I think we need to refrain even from what seem like obvious political activities.
At least, we need to be aware that the situation here-and-now has been engineered (over several generations) to render evil almost all (but not quite all) forms of group-level action.
It seems that action is a thing we can only do well when we do it
'alone': outside of the environment of a group; lacking the justification of
'group benefit'; lacking protection from a group.
This is a test of faith (of our trust in the promises of Jesus); but also potentially a great stimulus of faith: a stark clarification of the attitude that Christians are always supposed to have had.
It depends on the quality of your local politics. Engaging in "global" scale politics has been evil for a century, and probably always. National politics have deteriorated by nation, with most Western nations having sunk into decadence decades ago.
ReplyDeleteThe local politics around here are very evil, not as outrageously so as some other places, but certainly to a degree that makes engagement a choice between evils.
But there must still be places in the world where the local politics still features a clearly good choice at times. I have doubts about reports of such, I think it is clearly much more common to mistake a lesser evil for "good" than to find cases of actually good politics. Still, the statistical frequency shouldn't be zero just yet.
To clarify - headline aside I am not just talking about politics specifcially, but *all* kinds of institutional-level activity.
ReplyDeleteWhen a line has been crossed, and an institution is net-evil (evil overall, in tendency - because all institutions have *some* good in them), then even to defend it against getting worse, amounts to advocating, propagating, evil.
Which, I take it, we should not do.
This may - indeed - be exactly what distinguishes End Times.