A man can learn and decide to cut his losses. A bureaucracy is incapable of learning because it has no mind, only an instinct like cancer to survive and grow. It is unable to imagine cutting losses and moving on to other things.
Even when that man must make hard decisions for his household, it doesn’t matter how great the size of that burden of responsibility — there are times when something we do is no longer feasible. But when the dependents are under a covenant of care and that man is the shepherd, he is in a far better moral position to leverage God’s nature in such hard decisions. Creation itself supports a valid moral choice because Creation is woven from God’s character. If a man does what God says is right, he can afford to fail completely for all those unknowable reasons that things in this life fail, and still be at peace with God.
A bureaucracy knows nothing of such peace. Like any cancer, it perverts everything it touches and eventually kills. It cannot exist of itself and its wiring does not permit symbiosis. It is cancer; it is the quintessence of fallen nature. It dies with its host.
What we know today as bureaucracy was born in the Roman Empire. Rome wasn’t the first place it was used; it’s the first place where it became a cancer and destroyed its host. A critical element in that culture was the demand of the bitch goddess that all of her children honor her by succeeding in material pursuits. She would shred heaven and earth to remake reality so her least able child could reign over the ruins. Over the centuries, the rise of the cult of equality has locked all things inside the prison of bureaucracy. Alienation from the extended family commitments and loyalty has destroyed the only possible solution to fallen nature. That inborn sense of tribal loyalty has been displaced by any number of artificial constructs.
Some of those artificial constructs are advertised as an antidote, as if the one and only source of loyalty possible in humans (tribal identity) is a disease. But the more successful constructs are those that consciously embrace man’s tribal nature and try to offer a replacement. Thus, we end up with the most powerful institutions acting more like bad religion. It elevates the generic artificial loyalty to a sacred mandate. “Hail Caesar” — and it didn’t matter who Caesar was. Genuine personal loyalty to genuine personal nobility was no consideration, because the empty throne was your god. Deity was depersonalized in the mythology of Western Civilization; it could be expressed as a mere variable in math formulas, a generic thing. For those who occupied the seat of power, there was no incentive to grace.
The common image of equality is a displacement for the more noble due regard, and has actually enabled the worst aspects of inequality. The Apostle John saw all of this coming as he compared Rome to Babylon in his Revelation.
Notice how every human effort falls short of God’s gracious supply. You cannot beat God at His own game. The Curse of the Fall has placed on us a set of requirements for making the most of a bad situation. You cannot go back to Eden without leaving this world. You can awaken your eternal soul in Eden through the Flaming Sword of revelation and repentance, but your soul goes there to await a full reunion with the heavenly body, not the body of flesh. We become trans-dimensional creatures.
Meanwhile, our lives here below are a showcase, a revelation of the shocking difference between what we were made for and what we must endure until the final redemption. It doesn’t matter whether that final redemption is merely your death or the end of all things. For you personally it makes little difference. But you can devote more and more of your personal resources — attention, effort, desire and passion — to engaging the eternal side of your nature as the single best way to fulfill the mission here. Act on what your eternal awareness knows is the best way to do things here.
The state is not God. We can know that God has commanded us to play along and humor the various officers of the state because that is proper moral living. For all their pompous and illegitimate demands, our ability to treat them as mere inconveniences in our pursuit of higher and greater things is the mark of redemption.
