There are no masterminds. The people with power over us are not somehow gifted with brilliance and intelligence significantly above the rest of us. What distinguishes them is a serious lack of moral wisdom. They are damaged people, not supermen. Good moral people would never seek power over others. So their only advantage is access to a deeper knowledge of the system kept secret from outsiders. They are allowed to cover their tracks. At the same time, they are inherently more evil; they are actually weaker.
Even their evil is rather mundane. How many of us would not succumb to the temptation if we were brought into their council? Even in this, it’s a middle class kind of thing. The plutocrats with any real talent and intelligence aren’t in government, but are driven to private and corporate positions of power. The system of government is wholly owned and run by quite average greedy thugs, who are steered and manipulated by the folks with real talent. People with real genius are too smart to burden themselves with all the complications of actual government.
Real geniuses are not morally better. The non-government elite still keep some smaller portion of the truce of elite privilege for their own convenience. This broader plutocrat agenda is mostly a matter of protecting their privilege. Among the government officials, it’s all about the privilege itself. With the truly talented, it’s privilege as a means to their dreams. It’s patently obvious they compete amongst themselves over the spoils of oppression, but up to now they have maintained an uneasy agreement to protect the system of privilege that binds them together. It’s a symbiosis that works for now. However, you should understand that the people in government positions are all replaceable. The system itself will spawn new thugs to replace those who go down.
The real geniuses are driven to restrict their control to things they actually want to handle. They follow their own rarefied dreams. There are limitations on genius, as well; the broader system restricts their options. On top of that, there simply is no possible way any human can hold the kind of genius it would take to actually rule the world. Genius itself tends to focus on particular threads of human endeavor.
What’s left is a bunch of mythology about some imaginary Antichrist figure, elevated above other humans and subservient to Satan. But this is not in the Bible; it is no what God’s prophets warned us against. This myth is part of the wider Myth of the Great Man, something restricted entirely to Western culture. It’s foreign to the culture of the Bible. The image of the Antichrist was a symbol of the Devil’s influence over fallen humans. No one in the Bible took it literally as a particular discrete human who would arise some day. If you can ditch the mythology, you’ll understand that Scripture is pretty clear that Satan is not allowed to work that way. He can only spoil, twist and pervert humans. Moral evil is degrading; it cannot result in someone being superhuman.
Like nuclear radiation, it is always inherently destructive. It cannot possibly result in improvements. The silly notion that there could somehow be a mutation that creates a higher and more effective adaptation is foreign to the Bible, and arises only in Western mythology. It is certainly not science. Moral evil is like that, too — always fundamentally degrading. Creation (reality) itself is alive and will not support anything that departs from God’s moral character.
Let’s restore biblical doctrine. A part of what happened in the Garden of Eden was God granting stewardship to mankind. Not control, but management of operations — it was a matter of feudal privilege. This feudal grant was forfeited. What Satan gained was the consumption of human energy in ways we cannot comprehend, but he didn’t gain control over any part of Creation itself, only us humans. That control is restricted, but the only way we can possibly understand the whole thing is in terms of Biblical Law. Satan’s only real power is in our reliance on anything other than the heart-mind. If we are heart-led, his power over us is greatly weakened. He can tempt and deceive, nothing more.
Thus, his power is purely degrading. He cannot lift in any way. A critical element in his deception is the myth that he is permitted to raise up an anti-Messiah with superhuman powers. There is no anti-Law; every power of Christ to perform miracles was contained within Biblical Law. That would obviously be true of His Apostles. The only “secret” power in this universe lies in Biblical Law itself. The “dark arts” mentioned in the Old Testament were mere deceptions. I’m not saying it was fakery in the sense of Western “scientific” thinking, but such arts are fundamentally deceptive with very powerful results for the people who were deceived by it. It could never really harm the heart-led servant of God.
That’s the whole point here: God will not permit genuine harm to His own glory. It’s entirely possible you’ll lose things, and suffer in some ways, that will cause you human misery. But what God allows to happen in your life promotes His glory. It is inherently in your best interest. Don’t cling to the things of this world. Be ready to endure pain, but know that physical discomfort itself is not a part of the Curse of the Fall. It’s entirely natural and has its own purpose in Creation. You need to learn where it fits — your heart will tell you. And your heart will also tell you that nothing mere humans do will ever hinder the blessings of His glory in your life. Satan can’t take from you what you don’t willingly surrender.
This post reminds of a pet theory I have that the scientific method replaced a pagan view of the physical domain. Instead of the pantheon controlling the universe at their whim, there are physical laws that we can theorize at some level, being more certain where we can actually engineer things based on those laws. Not making any value judgments, we could say science replaced paganism as a method of controlling the physical domain.
I’ll go with that, Jay. Back during the first few years after college, it occurred to me that the ancient roots of magic were an attempt to recover Eden. I believe fallen humanity is born with an instinctual awareness that we were meant for better things. It began as a misguided attempt to recover the communion with nature, but as time wore on, it became more focused on simply manipulating the natural world. The academic roots of science in the West are in alchemy, so you can see how the trend runs.