Absolutism is death; symbiosis is life.
The ANE shepherd isn’t interested in total control. The ultimate good under God’s Laws will ever be the equilibrium of social stability. The ultimate call of manhood in those ancient civilizations was to track the fluctuating balance point in every context that allowed men to see God most clearly. There was nothing about controlling the results of any encounter, but about matching necessary consequences with the gravity of actual threat to stability. God is always in control; the shepherd depends on God for justice as the ultimate good.
Case in point: There isn’t much we can do about bad parenting. God’s Law demands parents be free in this respect and offers crushing divine wrath when a society thinks of children as a state asset. Yes, that wrath comes on a divine timeline, but it comes nonetheless predictably. Only blood and covenant ties offer any valid influence over parenting. Yes, that means society takes responsibility for the results of bad parenting, but we call it “redemption.” We find ways to maximize the talents God placed in people against the necessity of restricting bad appetites. So, do we then cut off our nose to spite our face? Do we “punish” the criminal genius by removing any opportunity to use their talents? What happens when we let some safely exercise their talents?
There are massive serious failures in our prison systems in America, but sometimes a light of intelligence does shine through. American corrections is based on a badly flawed social mythology coming out of the Middle Ages and seldom shows any useful adjustment to reality. That’s true of our entire social structure because it’s always been about the control and convenience of those who govern, and has seldom given any real consideration to social stability as God views it.
So we see folks often working around this massive barrier of the mind to come up with real answers. When the oligarchs demand control they should never have, eventually people realize how wrong it is, and find ways around it. It’s the nature of the Western state to draw the least intelligent of servants, so the really smart folks are typically outside government service. Given enough harassment from the state, folks will find a means to escape that control. They’ll work together, often embracing some portion of what the Bible considers a valid covenant. This moves things closer to divine justice, and God working through His creation will promote these things.
The social system will always evolve on its own. We are seeing the calcified thinking of TPTB regarding the use of daylight, still resting on the habits of a nation of agronomists, enforcing a rule society mostly ignores. If the idiots in government refuse to take the lead, they’ll be crushed (figuratively, at least) in the embarrassing stampede to another standard. The rising Network Civilization will coordinate on their own terms, with our without state approval.
Western governments don’t have a clue about reality.
