Coming Clean versus Copping Out

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self indulgence! You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, so that the outside of it may become clean also." (Matthew 23:25-26)

1. This was Jesus Christ, speaking to the Jewish religious leaders, the Pharisees about their preoccupation with all appearances of good and righteous conduct. Through a great many added laws and moral prescriptions these leaders thought they had achieved good standing in the eyes of God. They cleaned up the outer appearance, but the inner remained filthy.

Jesus denounced their blind rule following as not only the wrong way to righteousness, but also utter hypocrisy: the Pharisees frequently performed their man-made rules at the cost of true morality. Any honest or dishonest lawyer can tell you that simply the correct application of law does not at all necessarily entail morality or justice.

The Pharisees denial of Jesus as the Messiah, or the Saviour, came from their other commitment. They had a strong commitment to a standard of righteousness which had been invented by themselves and their forefathers the rabbis. It touched their conduct, true enough, but it did not result in morality and more importantly, it did not resurrect their souls from sin.

2. "And when Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing but rather that a riot was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the multitude, saying, "I am innocent of this Man's blood; see to that yourselves."

Pontius Pilate washed his hands of Jesus Christ, literally, as well as figuratively. When the Jewish mob threatened to riot (John 19:12) if Jesus were not crucified, Pilate gave in. He was unwilling to stir the Emperor's wrath nor have an unruly lot on his hands, so he knowingly condemned an innocent man (Matt 27:23, John 18:38).

Pilate knew that Jesus was no ordinary man, but his denial of Christ was a decision to remain agnostic. Jesus said to Pilate, "You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears My voice." In response to the living example of the "Way the Truth and the Life" (John 14:6), Pilate responded, "What is truth?" (John 18:38). In Christ's wrongful execution, as well as in response to Christ's claims to be God in the flesh, Pilate attempted to cast off the decision.

But there is no such thing as agnosticism with Jesus. The words, made famous by former president George W. Bush were actually spoken by another "tyrant" first: Jesus Christ. "He who is not with Me is against Me; and he who does not gather with me, scatters." (Matt 12:30)

Pontius Pilate did not wash his hands of Jesus, he denied Jesus.

3. "...There was a woman in the city who was a sinner; and when she learned that He was reclining at table in the Pharisee's house she brought an alabaster vial of perfume, and standing behind Him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the heair of her head, and kissing His feet, and anointing them with the perfume." (Luke 7:37-38)

This unnamed "immoral woman" from the gospel of Luke had the gall to approach Jesus in the home of a Pharisee no less. This was most certainly not kosher. A great many things could be said about how this woman behaved toward Jesus: gratitude, tenderness, humility, submission; all of these certainly. However, the end result is what I am interested in here, and that is love.

As a result, Jesus tells the woman her sins are forgiven, that she is saved and she may "go in peace" (Luke 7:48, 50).

Conclusion

The Pharisees tried to clean themselves, as did Pilate; but the sinner washed Jesus' feet in humiliating repentance. The Pharisees were condemned, and Pilate executed Christ, but the woman was saved. There is another great washing in the New Testament I have not mentioned: Christ washing the feet of His disciples (John 13:5), and at first Peter is reluctant to be considered worthy of the honour.

The lesson I draw from all these washings is that Jesus is willing to wash me; if I would but only be willing to admit that He alone can make me truly clean.

A Communique from Zombieland

Zombieland (2009) is, suffice to say, not a family film; but I was struck by its surprising moral undercurrent. In the last ten years or so, the idea of zombie hordes overrunning the planet has achieved greater cultural interest in North America. The numerous films, varying in budget, have captured the imagination of especially teenagers and twenty somethings. I can't give you any great stats to back up this claim, its just something I've been noticing over the years and I am willing to bet you have too...if you at all have any interest in the horrific idea of undead zombie hordes devouring the living; and not just in film.

In fact, some books have detailed with meticulous interest and disturbing, albeit fictional, hypothetical accuracy, tongue in cheek scenarios for survival ("Zombie Survival Guide") and worldwide catastrophe ("World War Z"). Marvel Comics has released zombie themed issues, and Jane Austen's (1775-1817) Pride and Prejudice (1813) has been parodied in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009).

I'm not sure about this next claim, but it would seem to me that zombification of the entire world is being given far more careful attention, detail and marketing than the classic 'B' movies of yesteryear. Maybe you horror buffs can correct me if I'm wrong.

Zombie films I have seen have a strong moral (or rather amoral) undertone. A world overrun by zombies is a world that has totally lost its "humanity". Nobody is innocent, nothing is sacred, survival is everything. The moral dilemmas presented by wasting zombies who were formerly family members or those commonly regarded as "the innocent" of society is frequently an issue; (as well as an excuse to create some dramatic tension).

Ironically, the greatest threat to survival comes not from the zombie hordes, but from the fellow living. (SPOILERS AHEAD) George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) illustrates this by the scavenging gang of thugs which finally dismantle the relative safety and comfort of survivors holed up in a shopping mall. In Zombieland, betrayal is commonplace, though the zombies themselves pose marginal threat themselves to intelligent and sensibly cautious wanderers.

Concurrently, both films contain radical critiques of the stupidity and emptiness of material culture. Woody Harrelson's character craves a Twinkie snack cake but in a world of endless material goods he is willing to smash anything to curb his frustrations. In "Dawn of the Dead" the zombies putter stupidly around the mall doing as they had done as the living. What results is a thinly veiled but powerful critique of consumerism. In a world of survival, the stuff of great worth is utterly devalued and rendered comically meaningless.

The zombie phenomenon is worth great cultural examination: it is a symbol of the current 20th-21st century post-modern wasteland in which we live. It is the nihilism after the great failure of secular existentialism to re-value all values. It's cynicism is the bitter but sober and truthful disbelief of the humanist hucksters who would sell us false bases for our, or nature's supposed intrinsic worth.

The zombie wasteland takes no prisoners. There is no rank, no wealth, no great hero, but simply a tragic-comical waste of human life and existence combined with wanton bloodshed. The shotgun and chainsaw become the weapons of a generation frustrated, bored and only too eager to take up arms to a worthy cause- so long as it is not classified as murder (killing the living).

But zombie films are also about re-discovery - and redemption. In "Zombieland", "28 Days Later" (2002) and "Dawn of the Dead" we see people banding together. In a world that no longer has the blind optimism of modernism, but has seen the ugliness of blind postmodernism, human relationships and the spiritual moral law seem to pop up with new strength. One can bury the dead, but one can't bury what isn't dead. What isn't dead is the human spirit, absolute moral law and the drive to selfless deeds. Where "Columbus" in Zombieland formerly had a personal survival law to "Don't be a hero" he realizes that to save the emo-hot chick and forsake his "World of Warcraft" dominated life, he must adapt and overcome, he must "Be a hero". Where formerly the party knew only cutthroat cold indifference, they learned to band together as family.

No zombie film I know ends with a perfect fairy tale ending, there is one bloody awful mess left in the wake of the metaphorical "disaster" (postmodern death, nuclear annihilation, new world order etc.). This is an ugly world. It is bloody, it is sexually perverse and violating, it is horrific, and full of demonic threats.

The hard but necessary realization? We have done it. The good news? Not even the age of "non-supernatural" zombies (zombies resulting from viruses or some even more ridiculous nonsense than the occult explanation) can eradicate the supernatural order underlying all things.

The message is, don't let yourself be found as the walking dead; in the words made famous by one zombie smasher, "Hail to the King baby."

Instr. for Revolution 4: Get Intel

If you've gathered no intel and are already “shooting” you've adapted the ludicrous Hollywood-style strategy a friend of mine likes to call the “S.A.C.” or “Scream and Charge” strategy. I have news for you, this only works if you have some idea what is waiting for you on the other side. You might think this is pretty obvious for a battle, though it is far less obvious for human relationships. In attempting to win the friendship or good will of persons who have repeatedly repulsed your advances, spoken ill of you and have no respect for you; dropping by for a random visit or a giant bear hug are probably going to be heavy handed 'weapons' for winning them over. The result may be about as pretty as charging a machinegun nest across an open field.

What do we look for against our tyrannies? Vulnerabilities. The random drop by is only going to work on a needy person, a vulnerable person, a person willing to genuinely admit “defeat” (wrongness, illegal actions or what have you.). It is no coincidence that Jesus won souls from those who were willing to admit they were “sick”, He didn't come to heal the healthy (the self-righteous, the spiritually rebellious, the spiritually “undefeated”) but rather the sick.

It is necessary therefore, to be sensitive to persons, to listen to the data, hear the recon, listen to the reports etc and appraise where your enemy stands. Remember that you do not need to annihilate an enemy to win the battle. Seeking out vulnerabilities is not to destroy and enslave your tyrant, that would again, merely be to make oneself a tyrant in his place. Seeking out vulnerabilities in personal relationships is not for the purpose of exploiting them cruelly. Listening to information and using it to pull someone out of deception and delusion is one thing, listening to information and maybe embellishing it to everybody else is another.

Similarly, utterly destroying an enemy's army by means of tactical maneuver from good intelligence is not cruel, it is simply good fighting. Even a defeated soldier can respect, in principle, the superior strategem of his enemy (should it have been the genuine cause of defeat).

Gloating likewise, is worthless. Fighting for bragging rights is the stuff of unruly schoolboys, and even invites the judgement of providence. Superior strategem does not always win over time and chance, which are far more powerful. Khan's army sank before it reached China. Napoleon and Hitler were defeated by the Russian winter. A host of historical horrors should be enough to hold the haughty in humility.

The bottom line is this: get intelligence about your enemy and take it seriously. Don't let arrogance, sentimentality, emotions or memories of the past lead you into terrible defeats. Listen to everyone, even your opponent may give away a hint about his or her weaknesses. Take counsel and advice. Listen to everybody, but do not trust everybody. And remember, you are gaining knowledge to destroy tyranny, not to take it over.

Inst. for Revolution 3: Don't be Defeated Early

You will probably succumb at first to the temptation, in your moral outrage, to use the wrong weapons for the task. It is human to become angry for combat; but combat is best waged without the heat of emotion and rather with the coolness of calculation and cunning. For interpersonal relationships, anger against tyranny all too frequently results in an unwarranted escalation of force. Using the wrong kind of force has the potential to weaken or even destroy your cause, or at least to destroy its credibility.

For example, those wishing to impose a supposed moral Sharia Law upon a people, and these same people attempting to achieve this end by suicide bombings on women and children must be treated as fundamentally deranged in their thinking.

But just as some weapons are categorically wrong for the wrong kind of battle, so also can some weapons be unproductive, inhuman(e) or cruel. Strangely enough, even some weapons of physical warfare bear this stigma, such as anti-personnel mines (landmines) or chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, suicide attacks, torture. By contrast, in relationships these categorically 'cruel' weapons are used all the time: threats, insults, lies, gossip etc. In politics; blackmail, lies, smear campaigns. In spiritual battles; lies, intimidation, threats, temptations, accusations, discouragements and so on. If you resort to these weapons, you are perpetuating the tyranny. Life is full of combat, but there are ways to fight, and there are ways not to fight. Don't let your moral outrage turn into a vicious revenge. Even if you win, you have lost.

You will probably also succumb at various points to the temptation to despair. One of the best, most common, and most rotten ways evil uses to defuse attacks against itself is simply convincing others or the attacker himself that he or she is the evil one. One of the greatest ways of achieving this is to make pretences of peacefulness and then accuse the opponent of perpetuating the conflict when he or she refuses to accept a compromise with an untenably evil state of affairs. To word this again differently, the enemy will pretend to be your friend or have your interests at stake when really they have none, and when you refuse to compromise, they will attempt to make you look like the bad guy. Terrorists (Hamas), communists (Mao) and fascists (Hitler) have been pulling this for years, being diplomatic with one handshake and firmly clasping a dagger in the other hand.

I have always loved Ezra 4 as an illustration of how evil operates. The enemy will always try to identify his evil with your cause, appearing to put you on similar ground (destroying the purity of your values and thus attempting to undermine your will to fight). If that fails, they will resort to any amount of lies, intimidation, threats and fear mongering to destroy your morale.

This is why when one enters into combat with tyranny, the firmness of one's values must be continually remembered. “It is a hard heart that kills. If your killer instincts are not good and clean, you will hesitate in the moment of truth.” as the foul mouthed Sergeant Hartman says in Full Metal Jacket. He's right. If you don't know why you're there, or your commitment is weak, you're already finished. The enemy will find its way into your mind, defuse your will to fight and you will fail.

Furthermore, if you start the fight thinking that it is merely a disagreement, and not combat, you are really in for a world of hurt (see: “The Little Black Book of Violence”). Your enemy has probably “killed” before, he's a tyrant after all. Don't lose your stomach when the fight isn't cordial or pretty anymore, when the enemy then accuses you of being the malicious monster “he always knew you were after all”. It is a scare tactic designed to throw you off your game, and you off his back. Your enemy is trying to “kill” you (control you, exploit you, enslave you, whatever the tyranny may be), don't kid yourself. Combat is not the time for hesitation. Bring out your appropriate and/or sanctioned "weapons", stand your "ground", establish your "beachhead".

Instructions for Revolution: 2. Choose Your Weapons Carefully

The sparks of revolution are predicated by moral outrage and/or despair. The unreasonableness and outright immorality of tyranny reach a fever pitch, provoking the oppressed and/or offended party to action. This is when “violence” begins.

In speaking about the kingdom of heaven and the tyranny of the Old Testament Law, Jesus said,

“...from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force. For all the prophets and the Law prophesied until John (Matt 11:12-13, See also Luke 16:16).” Jesus was speaking on the one hand, about the pharisees, who had been trying to force their way into the kingdom of heaven through their personal righteousness, by trying to obey the prophets and the Law. But Jesus Himself denied that it was possible to reach the kingdom of heaven with the righteousness of the pharisees. On the other hand, Jesus was speaking about the violence with which His true followers were entering the kingdom of heaven. Martin Luther, the spiritual reformer, spoke of the aggression and boldness with which the Christian was able to enter the Kingdom of God due to the death and resurrection of Christ, the violence, he might say, of entering the kindgom of God by grace through faith alone. As Ephesians 3:12 states, “we have boldness and confident access through faith in Christ.”

The lesson here in particular is the kind of violence being used. You cannot access spiritual victory over tyranny by means of physical, emotional or mental labours. Just as you cannot be reborn or have a revolution into a new system by means of a likewise tainted source, neither will corruption overcome corruption. The project of the pharisees therefore would inevitably end in failure. Using the law to combat spiritual death was a lesson in futility. It is incomparably absurd, like literally trying to destroy a tank with a team of lawyers; what we would call a categorical error. Violence must be of the right degree, as well as the right kind if it is to end tyranny.

Jesus knew the right weapon against the power of death: Himself. When accused (unjustly) of being the 'rule of demons', Jesus simply stated that if Satan was casting out his own demons, his kingdom of death would not stand (Matt12:26). With His miracles and status as the incarnate God, Jesus indicated that He Himself was not just a force against the tyranny of sin and death, but also the only 'weapon' against such forces,

"But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or how can anyone enter the strong man's home and carry off his property, unless he first binds the strong man? And then he will plunder his house. He who is not with Me is against Me; and he who does not gather with Me scatters (Matt 12:28-30)."

If this were anybody but God in the flesh, I guarantee you he'd be another tyrant, amongst other not so good things. It's no coincidence that then Jesus stated the consequence of forsaking the Spirit of God as sure damnation (Matt 12:31). Crudely put, if you discard your only effective weapon against a deadly threat, annihilation is only a matter of time.

My point is this, you must accurately appraise the kind of threat being posed by the tyranny you face. Is it physical, mental, emotional, spiritual? Is it other or self or both? A tyranny may in fact pose a threat to all of these, but the tyranny itself, the source of the tyranny must be identified and uprooted. Sometimes it is necessary to uproot one tyranny before dismantling another. It is quite common that before spiritual, mental or emotional liberation can occur, physical safety or health is necessary. But this is not always the case. Once you know what you are destroying, then you know what to pick up, the pen, the Bible, the rifle, or a plate of cookies.

It is my belief that spiritual tyranny is the root cause of all tyranny. This kind of tyranny cannot be directly combatted by any other means than the gospel. However, there are now other moral challenges and realities we must face in a world devastated by human moral failure and rebellion against the rulership of God. Spiritual death has afflicted every part of human existence; there is now also a moral imperative that there are mouths to feed, broken hearts to nurture, minds shattered and helpless people to protect. To ignore one is to ignore another. But that's a topic for an entirely different post.

Hoped you enjoyed this slice. More to follow.

Instructions for Revolution: Part 1

After writing a post on tyranny, I thought it would be profitable to post something about how I thus far understand, in my inexperience, how tyrannies are destroyed.

I say "destroyed" because make no mistake, in order to stop tyranny in any of its corporeal or noncorporeal (physical or nonphysical) forms you will be engaged in battle. When I say "destroyed" however, I do not necessarily mean that the entire nation or person must be erased, but that it is reduced to a state in which it can no longer exert its malevolent control over your person or persons.

History illustrates that war is not a battle unto complete annihilation of one side. As John McCain recently aptly pointed out of the current war in Afghanistan and terror in general, war is "a battle of wills". When one side has lost the will to fight, the war is over. A nation may lose the will to fight because it cannot stand casualties or seemingly unnecessary expenses (which would seem to be our current situation), or perhaps it has lost the will to fight because its general has been captured or killed in battle (This was Alexander the Great's favourite tactic), or perhaps most commonly, the nation has lost the ability to effectively put up a fight and thus surrenders to avoid disastrous damage to its homeland (Partly the issue for Imperial Japan in 1945).

The first step to destroying any system of governance (Tyrannical or not) is to destroy its values, the values held in the hearts of the people or person it governs. This holds two functions, it destroys the ability of the governance to control and manipulate by what rewards it offers for compliance. Secondly, undermining or proving false the values of a system and replacing them gains a convert or converts to the new ideology which then has:

a) The will to fight against what it now recognizes as falsehood, and;

b) The resilience to reject bribes or settlements from the tyranny.

A sure sign that you are dealing with a tyranny is that its values are not centred around the value of truth. Usually this takes the form of appealing to humanity's dark nature: self praise, material possessions, self-gratification etc. It may not be so very obvious though, and deception wouldn't be deception if it didn't try to hide itself at least a little. At the end of my last post I gave some indication of where good governance stands. I argue that humanity does have an inherently dark nature (some political systems will attempt to make you place abundant faith in man's or a single man's/party's overall goodness, like communism or fascism or totalitarianism). What are the signs of good governance?

a)Where there are signs that a person or persons is/are working against the grain of their darker moral nature(s); When the values of the government, expressed by word and deed are in line with, and reflect a primary interest in inalterable universal moral principles.

For example, liberty should have been to all people in the United States from the moment the constitution (a reflection of a nation's values) stated “All men are created equal”. But racism, like any other human crime, is a neverending battle, the Civil War was a major turning point for the United States, and the seeds of that victory gave men like Martin Luther King Jr., the liberty to further demolish ingrained racist tendencies and structures in American Society.

King was able to do what he did because of the revolution in American thinking that men like Abraham Lincoln fought for so desperately. The point stands however, that the encapsulated moral values of the US constitution have made it the bastion of liberty (all cynicism aside) that it is today. Anyone questioning that liberty, at least as it stands today, needs to have a look around the world. Of course, liberty is not something one can leave to the vagaries of human nature lest it be lost.

b) The first sign of good governance was the 'easy' part. The real test is truthfulness; the truthfulness of its ideas. Even presuming that your personal or national governance tells the truth about its intentions, and thinks that its moral stance is best, its moral stance may not reflect truthful values. I have already argued that the best governance comes from universal objective moral principles, and a large part of my reason for doing so is the fact that these kinds of principles are the least susceptible to common human weaknesses. Moral principles are not physical substances, so they rely indirectly for false or truthful fulfilment. What I mean is that the payoff from moral principles is one step removed from say the reward of millions of dollars in illicit cash. It is terribly easy to be bought off by millions of dollars in cash, while manipulating based on moral principles requires more leg work.

The safety of moral principles as a system of value is that in order to achieve effective governance they must be believed by the people or person being governed/tyrannized. Simply put, it is harder to convince someone to your ideology than it is to just pay out some kind of direct bribe (wealth, health, etc.)

The dangerous and powerful aspect of moral principles as a system of value is that if adopted over and above those baser human desires, it produces an adherent (for good or ill) which will be far more likely to remain fanatically loyal to the principle, since the moral principle goes far beyond the individual interest and stretches to the universal.

For example, fighting for “freedom” can be a great and good thing wielded by a genuine leader and can spur political, diplomatic or military action, but wielded by a deceitful or self-interested ruler 'freedom' or 'democracy' can be code words for enslavement. The Nazi's did not call themselves fascists, they were called “National Socialists”. The murderous communist regime of Russia likewise called itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”. Under less extreme conditions, some socialist ideas can produce compassionate social change. Unbridled faith in a communist or National Socialist ideal; does not.

What causes then, an unbridled faith in certain principles to lead to the very disaster the creator may have intended to avoid? Friedrich Nietzsche probably wouldn't have been thrilled to learn that key parts of his philosophies had been adopted in hearty approval by Nazi Germany. The key problem is not precisely the ideal scenario philosophy, it is the factors that we decide to put faith in to make the 'ideal scenario' a reality. An edifice planned to be invulnerable cannot be built with vulnerable parts. A pure glass of water cannot be poured using contaminated water.

If we allow that human beings are fundamentally flawed creatures which tend toward evil rather than good (I leave that to your examination) then a system of governance which places excessive faith in an individual (even self), a ruler, a party or even in fact many people (Plato called democracy the worst form of government! I don't, for the record.) we are bound to end up in disaster. Additionally, we must concede that the 'ideal' scenario or utopia, can never exist. As a corollary, or side point, we must also concede that excessive faith in any factor which can be manipulated by human intervention or dependent upon human satisfaction (eg. Technology, economic prosperity, disco robots) will also fail as a means of creating utopia.

The consequence of the above paragraph is that in order for faith or trust to be well rested in an idea, the idea must rest in a true appraisal of its objects of concern. That is a general philosophical way of saying that if you want to govern human beings, you have to have a realistic or truthful notion about who human beings are, what they need, how they interact, what they are, and are not capable of and especially, how they are flawed. Thus the lament of Solomon in Ecclesiastes 5:8, “If you see oppression of the poor and denial of justice and righteousness in the province, do not be shocked at the sight, for one official watches over another official, and there are higher officials over them.”

Solomon's disparaging message about human nature is a problem which evokes spiritual despair at the spiritual condition of humanity, at the condition of self before God. But politically speaking it is not something to cause us terrible anguish. Solomon's check and balance measure is just a few lines earlier in Eccl 4:9-13, where he expresses the power and survivability of a team working together. Although “one sinner can destroy much good” as Solomon said elsewhere, Eccl 4:12 tells us that “a cord of three strands is not easily broken”.

Although one cannot make an invulnerable armour out of that which is vulnerable, something very strong can be made out of many vulnerable parts. A kevlar vest is made of synthetic fibres woven together. It may not be invulnerable, but it has the power to slow or even stop a piece of pointed lead travelling at incredible speed.

The 'excessive' faith ideologies that I have mentioned are good examples of ideologies which, regardless of their moral stance, have failed the truth test of good governance. Promises are empty if they are based on a false sense of who we are as human beings; and they may even indicate a ruler waiting to exploit his advantage to create a tyranny.

I've already yakked long enough but maybe I'm making up for a couple month's posting. There's just one more thing. You don't really have to be a philosopher to weigh out all the ideas, in fact if you get caught up with just theories, you'll be lead astray. Perhaps the best way is to follow the guidelines that Christ gave when he said, “You shall know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles, are they?” (Matthew 7:16)

The Pharisees had all sorts of moral rules for Jews but Jesus consistently saw through their hypocrisy and saw that although they “washed the outside of the cup” they did not wash the inner. The claims for morality did not match the inward reality of love for God and neighbour. The golden rule of treating others the way you wanted to be treated was the “Law and the prophets” (7:12), not the empty commandments of legalism.

It's kind of common sense that there's something fundamentally flawed with an ideology or value system that says one thing and does another; or claims to be good but all it does is oppress. That being said, its still easier said than done to ascertain the standing of a way of thinking. Tread carefully but decisively when it comes time to consider starting a war against tyranny. You may have to adopt an entirely new sight picture before you start shooting.

My idea in this first installment has not been to lay out to you the reader all the ways in which an ideology may be true or false. That is the task of a lifetime. You probably already have a good idea where I place my abundant faith, but that isn't really the point either. The truly difficult part of revolution is ascertaining the one's own values in relation to the values of the supposed tyranny, whether that tyranny is spiritual, mental, national, familial etc.

If one is not careful in this step, the project is misguided. An untruthful value system, no matter its promises of morality, will in the degree of its delusion, so also promote destruction and of course, tyranny. Just as demons can be cast out of a person and the demon return with seven worse than the first return, as Lenin replaced the self-centred Czarist system with murderous communism, so also can we be guilty of enslaving ourselves or others to an even worse conclusion than the first. Unbridled faith in an ideal can lead to tyranny. Unbridled faith in one's own revolution can be too.

Tyranny & Delusion

Tyranny is vicious, twisted and deluded as it is deceitful. Tyranny often attempts to force adherence from its subjects by conceptually replacing the higher with the lower; but by means of using the conceptual name of the higher for the sake of the lower. In English what's meant here is that tyranny always involves a selfishness, which is the lower concept, but this is disguised with the good of the many or at worst, the spiritual, the Divine. It appears to offer what you need or want, or will create the need or want that it can fulfil (like a cult).

You will encounter various types of tyrants in life; not just political ones. We may have been or may still be tyrants ourselves. It can be ideological, relational, physical, emotional...and so on.

It is the mark of a deluded person that he or she does not see it possible or reasonable that he or she could be deluded. But what really makes tyranny, evil & delusion so maddening and darkly comical is that it always whines longest and loudest about tyranny, evil & delusion. These are the first people to complain, point the finger and loudly accuse; especially when they do it against those who are trying to solve the problem. Those who make accusations of fear mongering, control, manipulation and coercion often follow the same crude rule of "He who smelled it dealt it".

But the truly different thing about tyranny as opposed to common delusion is its aggressive nature. Tyranny happens when a person, either by self-delusion or by knowing selfishness, exploits others or even self for the sake of something falsely considered to be valuable. Tactically speaking, this plays out by misleading others into also misplacing their sense of value.

The tyrant, for example, may believe that money, power, fame, sex, family, religion, ideology or the glory of some perceived atheistic society or religious utopia are the ultimate values for which he or everyone else including him, or everyone but him for the sake of him, must buy into. So, the tyrant embarks on a process of reeducation, convincing his family, or nation, or church, or even himself that the things which his delusion values are supremely valuable and are worth giving up things that most of us would consider inalienable rights.

You might think it strange that I say that we can tyrannize ourselves, but like I said, tyranny isn't just about that Persian guy you learned about from the 300 Spartans or about even something physically present or corporeal. We can be enslaved to many things that aren't even people.

It's okay to give up your "inalienable rights". It's okay to die for something, or give up yourself for somebody else, in fact it can be downright heroic. You just have to do a little searching about what's really valuable in life. If you value the wrong things or the right things even in the wrong order, you will be exploited by someone or something. If you value nothing, you'll be impoverished (and a liar I'd say). Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Like it or not, everyone has a master. There are good masters and bad masters. I'm hedging my bets that the best master is first the one that loves you before himself and his projects or ideas. I think that is a model for following inasmuch as it is leading. I think it is the difference between a Lord and a Tyrant.