If we can embrace by faith the doctrine of the Fall, then our hearts can lead our minds to a more realistic philosophical frame of reference. Mankind is broken and cannot be fixed in reference to this world. The only fix is personal and individual, something spiritual, not social or political. It requires an individual commitment to another world beyond; Christ warned this was simply not possible via any human structure. The old national covenant was an experiment, a proof that it was not possible to redeem mankind en masse.
At the same time, the Old Covenant was very clearly a revelation of how things actually work in this world, if only humans could be made to listen. And the Old Covenant tells that truth so forcefully that it doesn’t bother to explicitly state some points that should be painfully obvious. Not just humanity, but all of Creation itself is hard-wired for eastern feudalism expressed in a tribal social and government system.
This is quite contrary to human reason, but that’s the whole point of the narrative on the Garden of Eden: human reason is not capable of discerning how things actually do work. Only revelation can answer that question. So we can justly say that virtually all of our world today is enslaved to a hideous lie.
The biggest factor in that lie is the brevity of human life itself. It’s a vicious circle that feeds on itself, as moral blindness makes life even shorter. The power to see beyond our limited human range of awareness is possible only in the heart, not in the intellect. The mind can see it in theory, but cannot actually touch it, so it remains an abstract nothing. The only way to see moral truth is with a much longer range viewpoint. We can see shalom only in terms of multiple generations.
Here’s a divine paradox for you: It is exceedingly hard to get good moral people into government. Good moral people do not want that kind of power over others. Revelation warns of that, but the message has apparently been too subtle for most to grasp. The best rulers in human history were those who came to power while pursuing other plans. They accepted the necessity of being rulers as the only means of helping those they loved. The greatest high moral examples of conquering heroes were those who crushed only those who threatened even worse than they got.
Whatever it is that you might invest into the meaning of the word “democracy,” it cannot possibly work. It never has, and it never will. It appears to some to be a rational and effective way to do things, but it never has actually worked in the long run. Instead of granting the masses power over themselves, it simply changes how they are enslaved. It demands they be deceived with materialism so that the worst people can rule over them.
There will always be a ruling elite. Everyone serves someone — that is a fundamental fact of human existence. It is not part of the Curse of the Fall; it is the nature of being human itself, even in Heaven. We are not deities with our own powers, though our intellects (without the constraints of the heart) will certainly believe there are no limits to what we can dream up and accomplish. But a system of choosing one’s government via any rational system will invariably fail, because it demands that government authorities have the ambition to rule. That ambition comes only with an evil heart.
So the only hope for occasionally having a good government is to have a system that, at the very least, inhibits ambition. It’s a system that makes expanding power very costly and impossible to maintain, so that the norm is small government close to you. It’s the system we call tribal feudalism. Hereditary tribal chiefs are the only hope for any decent government, even if it comes only sporadically. There is no better system.
Since there is no way we can expect to see anything like that in our world today, beyond a tiny handful of blessed tiny kingdoms, you and I should recognize our best hope is simply staying out of the way of bad “democratic” government. It’s a Beast. Sure, we can attempt in various ways to recreate that feudal dominion on a much smaller scale, a partial application that brings a measure of peace and harmony. It’s exceptionally hard in a Western society because our mythology of western feudalism is ass-backward from the eastern version. It requires some careful reshaping of personal expectations, and most people have no patience for that.
My point is that you learn to see the situation from the heart. Recognize with your intellect that the heart-mind is superior. Just sharing this idea should cause your heart to rejoice in the truth. If you can compel your brain to bow the knee to the heart, you’ll understand the logic of such things.
