The question is always the same whether it’s politics or war: Cui bono?
If your dream is to destroy a moral evil on the earth, take away the profit. I hear activists talking about the need to stop this or that evil movement, and it comes with the discussion of how to form a countering movement. That’s not how it works. Making lots of propaganda noise can be a useful tactic, but moral evil is actually pretty mundane. There’s always the thrill of conquest, expressed in numerous forms, but in the end, it’s the money. It’s not the people with the vision, or the folks whose charisma provokes the masses; it’s the money that makes it happen.
When the money stops flowing, the evil movement will wither and die.
The vast majority of humanity doesn’t truly believe in anything at all. Destroy the false sense of team identity and the game is over. The methods vary with the context. Sometimes it’s just a matter of disrupting the means of passing that money. It costs money to move money; make it too expensive. Cause the system to skim too much, to hemorrhage until it’s just not worth the trouble. That could mean nothing more than attacking the security of the transfer, or simply sowing distrust between the various parties touching the funds.
Sometimes it means just threatening the courier. At what price will the courier bail out? No man in power is so altruistic as to be without skeletons in his closet. Hack and crack; snoop and gather information — expose what he hides and threaten what he protects. Find the weakness and exploit it.
Ignore the figure heads. Let them posture and spout unless they have real influence over public opinion. Just make sure they are fed some bullshit and you can nullify their power. Figure out how to inject something bogus but plausible into their sources. Then disprove it; make it a debacle.
Meanwhile, mask yourself in anonymity. If this is truly worth doing, then it’s worth letting someone else take the glory. That’s the ultimate question, though: Is this really worth doing?
Is this thing so essential to your being that you would die for it? Is this something that drives you beyond this life? Are you provoked from a deep moral conviction? Otherwise it’s not worth the trouble. You can rest assured that your enemy will counter-attack. Shed your vulnerabilities; divest yourself of as many interests as possible. That doesn’t mean throw down all your tools and weapons, but to ensure that you aren’t dependent on anything in particular.
The only way to beat an enemy is to be stronger where they are weakest. Everyone has one frailty or another, so find that weakness and keep the battle there.
Finally, there are no rules. There are convictions and lines you cannot cross, but don’t make them into rules, or you will cheapen their value. Don’t lose your soul, but do take the time to reevaluate every step of the way what is and isn’t part of your soul. You can bet that just starting such a war will change who you think you are, and you need to recognize that early skirmishes will strip away things you previously thought were essential. But don’t surrender to the darkness; keep your eyes on what drove you into this in the first place. When you can’t see it any more, stop and do some soul searching.
That’s because you need a reason bigger than the thing you first thought was the prize. When it comes to the nasty business of politics, the one thing that never changes is how nasty it is. Don’t pretend you can clean up anything. You don’t have to let that seep into your soul and subvert who you are; the only real reason anyone does this stuff is because of who they are. It has to rest on the necessity of being your true self, because everything else in your world is subject to change. The war will never end. Don’t make your goals your gods. Don’t pretend you are going to save anything for the future.
But if you truly cannot stay out of this fight, then own it and screw the rules imposed by others. Negotiate when you need more numbers, but never take it seriously. Never trust anyone, not even yourself. Still, if you can’t do this for the sheer joy of being alive, don’t get involved or it will kill you.
Addenda: In response to an offline comment…
We who walk by the heart, we who embrace the moral values of God as revealed in the history of Covenants, do not hold to Western values. This is not a question of “saving civilization” if you mean “saving Western Civilization.” God has revealed a way of being civilized that long predates the West, and His brand of civilization doesn’t rest on the heathen mythology of the West. The trick here in getting involved in politics is to follow your heart and bring glory to God; Western values do not glorify God. If after all I’ve written about the failure of Western values you still can’t see that, then you cannot possibly grasp what was behind the above post.
Scripture makes it plain that the macro and micro are two different things. What is moral on the personal level doesn’t completely apply to the family household level. What works for the family household won’t work for the entire tribe/nation. What works for the tribe will not work for the empire. When it’s your job to make the decisions, your dominion of the various levels differs in the exercise. It’s a question of context and protocol, not hard rules.
