High Holyday Hangover

Did Your Favorite Anti-Christs Win the Elections? Or Did Those Other Anti-Christs Prevail?

If only the LIBERTY dumpster contents were on fire! Photo by Bertrand Colombo on Unsplash

Election Season is when I feel most like an outlier. I don’t worship the Government-God, which makes me an extreme minority, even among self-identified Christians.

Maintaining good cheer and trying to offer something constructive, require effort. It’s a test of cognitive empathy and a test of an honest reckoning with my own past.

Yes, I mock government — and, therefore, democracy and elections — but I do have some sympathy for folks who see all of the nonsense as more examples of overlords intruding on people’s lives and livelihoods.

I see the same intrusions. But because I no longer expect government to be good, I don’t feel especially let down by the evil.

In other words, I don’t drink the bad spirits the government serves, so I suffer with neither the inebriation nor the inevitable hangover.

Instead, I try to keep a sober outlook — which includes acknowledging failures and outright evils — and try to promote something smarter and better.

Acknowledgments …

Historian Niall Ferguson gave a 20-min. speech, published last week, in which he characterized the allegedly strong U.S. economy as “essentially running on fiscal and monetary steroids.” A video of his speech is embedded below:

The numbers touted by government agencies and their apologists pretend that the ratcheted-up government spending — made possible by inflation of the money supply — counts as “economic growth.” Nonsense.

Government spending isn’t a wealth-generating activity; it steals real resources and purchasing power from the productive economy and attempts to redistribute them. But this kind of coercive spending isn’t production, even though it’s included in the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) statistic. This is a big reason why the GDP metric is so dubious as a measure of the economy.

Ferguson also noted that public-health data — “this is where we need to look past Gross Domestic Product to look at well-being in a more meaningful sense,” he said — shows increases in deaths of despair and decreases in life expectancy. There’s also plummeting trust in major institutions (including, but not limited to, government).

Most telling, to Ferguson, is the growing chasm between the values of “ordinary Americans and the Ivy League elites.” It resembles what he observed of the late-stage Soviet Union, choking toward demise.

I know little about life in the Soviet Union, none of which is first-hand knowledge, but I do see plenty about the U.S. The politicization of nearly everything isn’t healthy. It seems to happen as people crave more and more control over their own lives through attempts to control others’ lives. It’s a poisonous cycle. The way out of the cycle has to do with breaking something fundamental, rather than simply changing who occupies some political offices.

… Motivations to improve

Adam Haman invited me to his podcast, “Haman Nature” in October, and released the conversation in two parts, the second of which is available exclusively on Substack.

Adam began the second episode (No. 67 in his catalog) by quoting a passage from my book, Good Neighbor, Bad Citizen (Amazon, B&N, Lulu), about control-freak behavior. I’ve shared part of the citation before, including in graphic form …

… but Adam included the lead-in question for context, plus the longer answer:

Does this mean humans may violently impose upon each other in accomplishing God’s will?

No.  God is all-powerful and all-knowing, but not all-controlling.  The urge to control is a human desire based on human psychological weakness;  it is not a Divine characteristic.

To do God’s will, involves putting aside any control-coveting tendencies and treating others as God does, always respecting the dignity of each person.  For a Christian, the ends never justify the means.  Evil tactics fundamentally taint any allegedly good goals.

This urge to control is the aforementioned “something fundamental” that must break, which means more people must learn to relinquish their reverence for the most extreme, systemic manifestation of “control-coveting tendencies”: government.

It won’t be easy, though. As I said in response to Adam’s question about the challenges of leading people back to the Gospel / Early Church mindset of neighborliness:

I think control-freak behavior is the psychological path of least resistance. … Control-coveting is the default condition of humans. It’s very easy to slip into, and it’s very, very easy to reinforce in each other.

Click the graphic above or HERE for the complete list!

And voting is one of the worst ways this terrible pathology is reinforced on a grand scale.

The culture of voting tells people that seeking violent control over others isn’t a vicious domain of the few, but a virtuous calling of the many. It disguises the evil nature of government and incentivizes factionalism within the populace.

Christians, of course, should be equipped to lead the way out of this pathology; it is, after all, what Jesus modeled for people during His public ministry. But most self-identified Christians favor government, even if they disfavor some of the people involved in it.

Can anything be done to promote smarter, better beliefs than this chimpanzee-like devotion to government?

I hope so!

After all, my aim in starting this Substack — which completes its first year of weekly articles today, the first Wednesday of November! — was to provide regular, timely encouragement to people who are curious about the anarchism/voluntarism of Jesus and the Early Church.

Being a good neighbor, even if it makes you a bad citizen, is a worthy pursuit! And this genuine Gospel message is the best remedy for a government-worshiping hangover.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

The Comments section is much cooler than government elections …

…so, let me know your thoughts!

Do you feel like an outlier during election season, with all the politically obsessive behavior in pop culture?

How do you counteract the pressures to conform to this poisonous culture?

What do you think of Niall Ferguson’s analysis?

Anything else on your mind regarding this article’s topics?

Please share below … and thanks for spending a full year with me here at Substack!

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