This World Is a Trap

Let’s review: Most people are aware of the basic concept that fear tends to make you dependent. Social chaos and instability have proven very strong factors in creating fear and dependence.

For example, the fundamental factor in Western feudalism was the chaos after the Fall of Rome. People who simply wanted to stay alive were seeking the means to defend themselves from all sorts of known and unknown predators. They knew how to feed themselves, but the business of defense was more complex and required a lot of specialized training. Indeed, martial ability was so expensive in terms of resources and time that only the very wealthy could do it. Thus, throughout human history, people have banded together for protection, and anyone with a talent for handling predators of any sort was encouraged to focus on that task. The rest would support that one, making him a sort of petty king in effect. His first mission was fighting, not growing or gathering food, so everyone else would kick in food to keep him capable and free.

The defender’s expertise gave him priority over whatever choices others might make. He was pampered to keep him in a good fighting shape and mood against outsiders, not the insiders. Actually, this worked pretty well in some cultures, but not so much in the Germanic culture in Europe, the culture of those who destroyed Rome. There was no place for the shepherd’s divine moral calling in Medieval Europe because it was totally absent from that culture, and disparaged when it was mentioned. Western feudalism saw people surrender effective ownership of their lands and livelihood to someone able to protect them from predators. The net effect was choosing one predator over others. In principle, you weren’t directly enslaved, but enslaved to the means of production. Your life was bound to the means of production itself and you were part of the package.

When the peasants began to discover ways to maximize their income through various kinds of trade and means of exchange, they also discovered that the hereditary nobles could be bought off. Thus, we had the rise of the middle class urban traders. But these became the new nobility in refusing to change the assumptions about what kind of authority their new municipal governments could exercise over the residents. All without having to exercise any pretense of actual nobility in the moral sense. (See Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society for a solid explanation of the social history as experienced by those on the lower rungs of society.)

It’s not hard to see how any place under Western influence will exhibit competition for that kind of unaccountable power. The pretense of consent and mandate — managed by removing the perception of any real choice — was all it took to justify the most egregious moral abuses. It was a hideous, nasty form of prissy middle-class oppression over those who preferred actual freedom of choice, and a cultural damnation of any real creativity and human proliferation in uniqueness of character. Lock it all down and take away all the options that don’t keep the burgers in power. “Well, that’s what it means to be civilized!” This was the birth of crass materialism and a very repressive and oppressive middle-class culture. Communism is just the other edge of the same blade shared with capitalist republicanism, while socialism is little more than a compromise between the two. It’s all meant to restrict the question to who gets what, not whether any higher considerations matter at all.

As long as you can be trapped behind the fear for your children and how they might suffer the loss of some imaginary perfect childhood, you cannot follow the God of the Bible. So it’s no surprise that someone dreamed up nifty ways of hijacking Christian religion itself. The whole of Western Christian religion is tied up in knots about questions that arise only from a materialistic approach to reality. Religious leaders have so defined “holiness” to exclude anything that doesn’t mean bigger memberships, budgets and social-political influence.

Keep it if you like. I’m taking a different path.

In our religion of Radix Fidem, we recognize that there will always be predators seeking to control the rest of us because those predators are wedded to materialistic assumptions. Their control rests on keeping the majority of their victims within those same assumptions. They read history, same as everyone else, but with an eye to how this informs their predation. Unlike the nobles of the Middle Ages, and the burgers who ended that brand of feudalism, these predators realize that actual peace and security is impossible for the masses. Instead, they hold forth the same promise of security and prosperity, but as a false hope.

Meanwhile, they will do everything they can to stir up conflict among their victims so that everyone fears losing whatever it is they think is precious to them. Everyone has bought into the materialism and it’s just a question of various flavors of worldly fears. They have implemented a system that makes peace and security utterly impossible.

Unlike the nobles, the plutocrats don’t exercise direct police control, using the system of hired thugs devised by the burgers. In recent decades the stark cultural division between police and citizenry serves to keep tensions high. Meanwhile, the means to feedback and accountability is now gone, because there is a highly developed system in place that rejects it. Some people are suckered into a military that is full of total Orwellian doubletalk and psychobabble that sees them used up and sent home as agents of random chaos. And if some enemy “out there” is accidentally vanquished, they have to fund the creation and training of new ones. Any enemy will do, but the more fanatical, the better. The slightest chance of successful resistance to the program demands infiltration and neutralization.

Maybe at some point these plutocrats will offer some kind of all-encompassing salvation from the Hell on earth they strive to create. Meanwhile, the more hellish they can make it, the better their control.

Do I have to write a book with all the details? Don’t fall for this stuff. Do you understand why I am willing to invest so much effort in proposing a religion with no organization? Question my competence if you like, but try to understand the utter necessity of offering a way to escape this mess while still having a reason to live until that escape is fully realized. And not just a reason to live but a way to live.

Learn about your heart-mind and how to live heart-led. Learn how to implement the revelation of God through His Law Covenants. Learn how to put His glory first in all things as the sole motivation, and allow everything in and of this world to fall free from your anxious concern. That includes your children. Yes, you have a dominion over them from God, but that has been fiercely restrained by human laws and our culture, so you’ll have some hard decisions to make about all that. Yet, at some point you have to let them go into God’s hands and turn your attention to other things. Nobody says you have to stop caring and providing what your conscience says you must, but you cannot save them. Only God can do that. Draw a line somewhere, adjust it as you find yourself moved by the Spirit in different contexts, but at some point you have to let them go.

The same goes for everything else in this life. Let it go, or you cannot find redemption. Make God your true feudal sovereign under a totally different kind of feudalism that is based on the model of the shepherd, as revealed by the Shepherd of our Souls. You will most certainly serve someone greater, but you do have some choice in that matter. Choose Christ.