Two independent essays were written at the same time. One by myself, and one by Bruce Charlton. Take the time to read them both.
First is my essay (with some edits):
I cannot keep track of the thing that never happens which is happening all the time. In CA, MN, OR, ME & my home state of PA.
If you don’t stand up & resist now, girls sports will officially be “open” soon enough. They already are. But we’re dangerously close to never turning back territory.
A decade or two ago the issue was gay pastors and gay marriage. Everyone who opposed the change ultimately surrendered, even when they held the majority. The same will happen here.
You don’t control the narrative. You can’t “stand up and resist” and you cannot win. The outcome has already been decided.
Your reaction—your behavior—would be different if you knew already that you had lost. What should be driving your choices is this reality. By the time you realize that the war is already lost, it will be too late to react as you should have.
This behavior is explained by the Sunk Cost Fallacy.
It took almost 50 years from the Roe v Wade decision for it to finally be undone. Fifty years of abortions. Fifty years and millions of murders. And “undoing” it couldn’t even move the needle back to where it was.
In the time it took that one “victory” to be achieved, a great many new detrimental and destructive policies were enacted in the meantime.
The best you can hope for politically is a compromise in which you are ultimately conceding defeat. So why would you spend years or decades of your life fighting for that?
Second is Bruce Charlton’s essay:
People who regard themselves as of the Right are displaying an insane and blinkered optimism that they are winning, and rolling back Leftism.
This is because they do not understand what the Left is in its fundamental nature.
If they did understand, those who proclaim themselves of the Right would realize that they are merely a subtype of the Left.
The political Right supposes that the Left is an ideology rooted in some principles. They believe that the Left IS these policies that I call the Litmus Tests: I mean things like socialism, feminism, antiracism, antisemitism, the Climate Agenda.
In general terms, the self-identified Right they define the Left in terms of Political Correctness, SJWs, Wokeness – and their manifestations in the mass media, law, employment regulations etc.
Because they suppose that the Left is an ideology of “Wokeness” the Right imagine that reversals of specific social practices and regulations represent a rolling back of Leftism in their nation, or in the world.
When the Right sees such laws, fundings, rhetoric being undone; they think the Left is being defeated.
But this is completely wrong; because the Left is a negative ideology, an ideology of opposition, and none of the Litmus Tests are core features of Leftism – they might all, in principle, be undone and the Left still be as strong as ever.
All the Left ideologies are negative in form: the Left is (in various times and places) against many things (capitalism, the bourgeoisie, inequality, patriarchy, European people, Christians) – but is not in favour of any state of affairs as an ultimate and real goal.
In other words the Left is protean in nature, fluid, adapting – it is continually discarding old ideologies and taking up new ones.
The Left used to be in favour of economic communism – but not any more; in favour of native-born male industrial workers (the working class) – but not any more; in favour of equality of opportunities and unequal outcomes – but not any more.
Leftism can and does discard anything that is currently inexpedient; because there are an endless number of alternatives.
And there is in fact no coherent thing as “the Right”; because the Right is merely opposition to the various Leftist oppositions.
This is why the Right is so wrong about the rolling back of Leftism. It supposes that the Left abandoning some of its recent woke agenda represents some kind of a defeat, but it is just the usual slippery shape-shifting of Leftism; which now has other priorities – especially war.
Since Leftism is fundamentally oppositional and negative – Leftism is essentially destructive.
War is very destructive; hence world war is perhaps an ultimate expression of Leftism.
(And it matters nothing that pacifism, anti-war, anti-violence; was one of the original roots of Leftism – from more than 200 years ago.)
War can give Leftism everything and more of whatever losses it may suffer from dropping a few strands of political correctness.
Just look at what the Leaders of Western nations are actually doing, where they are putting most of their effort – they are in practice (not in what they say, but in what they do over time) angling for more war.
Not to win a war, but for the maximizing the destruction of war: destruction of economies, societies, trade, positive national identities, of nature (aka “the environment”) – expansion of such negations as lies, resentment, and despair.
We are – and have been for a few years – seeing more and more wars, and what war brings. expanding and escalating the already existing World War with its multiple fronts – but especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
We can see the globalist totalitarian leadership class at work engineering wars all over the place; recently on the Asian Subcontinent. This isn’t easy to do, there are plenty of people who don’t want war – for obvious reasons. But that is what “They” are serious about.
Ultimately, of course, politics is downstream of the spiritual war of this world; Leftism is a tool of evil in its opposition to God and Divine Creation.
Yes, the sexual revolution was and is a deadly tool of corruption; but a self-righteous and hate-driven war of each against all would be deadlier still.
When the Right celebrates a few small “victories” (many of which turn out to mere words, and no substantive change; they miss that the Left now has bigger fish to fry, and other things it care much more about.
The woke agenda might be “forgotten” as thoroughly as the days (a century ago) when white European men were the Left’s heroes! – but the Left is continuing to win, and win where it matters most.
And this will continue until those on the Right recognize that they are part of the problem, and repent.
Faith in Christ is a focus on what is good, what is positive. It is not about fighting evil, but doing good. Be the light of the world, don’t contribute to its darkness.
Put your hope in Jesus, not politics. If you play politics, even when you win you will lose. But if you align with Jesus, even when you lose you will win.
This post is in defense of impotence and passivity. It is the sort of excuses that the weak men who bring tough times give for their inaction and refusal to resist the devil.
By this same weak logic, you wouldn’t discipline your kids to prevent them from being overcome by unrelenting evil and falling into destructive habits. You’d say that even if I somehow prevent the kid from falling to a certain “few strands” of evil, it will be a Pyrrhic victory as he will undoubtedly fall again and again into other sins.
This sort of fool thinks that “resist not evil” was a literal command of God while “sell your cloak and buy a sword” must have been Jesus Christ using sarcasm. — Do-nothing doctrine.
This post is excuse-making for weak men’s nonresistance to the rise of evil on their watch.
You have it reversed.
Fighting evil—being against things—is impotent. It is obviously impotent. I could list failure after failure after failure after failure from foolishly trying to fight evil. Only idealists expect a different result this time.
By contrast, doing good—the will of the Father—is never impotent, no matter the earthly outcome. That is where lives are transformed.
Your claim is patently absurd, irrational, and silly: for to affirmatively do good is not “do-nothing.”
I recently saw someone give this quotation:
This is good advice. It really coheres quite well with yesterday’s post and the OP. Wouldn’t you agree?
I think that’s the clue. When it really comes down to it, most self-identified Christians who claim to oppose the Left are more interested in politics, and the absolutely Do Not Want to stop talking about (maybe doing) politics.
Push comes to shove, bottom-line; politics is far more important to them than anything else in the public domain.
And That is how we know they are actually – themselves – of Of The Left; whatever they may call themselves.
Oh, politics.
One of the things I have been noting for many months on Twitter is how virtually everything that President Trump does is modeled after the Left’s tactics. Nothing he does is original to him. All of his abuses are the same abuses done by his critics many times over before. (The latest example is the U.S. relationship with Qatar)
Meanwhile, the Right is largely fine with the things that Trump is doing, even though they hated it when the Left did the same things.
To the outside observer, the Left and Right are indistinguishable. What determines the “right” or “wrong” side is completely (negatively) defined by whether or not it opposes the enemy.
I strongly believe that Political Activism is one of the Litmus Tests.
Ll, exactly. I remember in the 1980’s the “left” was screaming in my area of the USA (the Northeast / rust belt) for his entire presidency
“Reagan needs to enact Tariffs. Now! Its the only way to preserve jobs, wages, and a standard of living. Regan claims he’s pro USA and yet has no problem of decent jobs leaving for Japan, Mexico, and China”
The Right would say “We believe in the free market and capitalism and trade”
Now? Trump and “the right” are all for Tariffs because they create jobs and protects ‘Murica.
Myself? The “tarriff soup” I call it. This county this percentage, that country this percentage, but exempt on this product, that product and this product if / only 35% of it is built in the USA and if this state or that state have so many tax credits or thresholds met, they wont apply, or will they.
Honest thought? If the president went to CONGRESS and proposed the tariffs and made it simple, or on certain products / goods. He probably would have had a decent number of Democrats siding with him “on this issue only”
But no….we had a thrash about. On one day. Off the next. This one for sixty days, that one for 90 days. The markets went nuts (as they should have) and the clauses of “only if / but also” thrown into each one….and that confsuing chart he had looked like Hillary Clinton’s plan for “free healthcare for all” during her hubbys first term as president.
It just showed me that his team in matters like this is no better than Biden. Poor communication. Defaulting to smears immediately if an ounce of criticism happens.
In the end, the commerce dept is going to be so busy untangling this or applying it…..little or nothing will be done on how its to work.
Also, reopening Alcatraz. After the retrofit, the Unions, the contracts, the building / reconstruction, the hiring process…….it will be 2040 before it open and all your DOGE savings will be eaten up by that….wait, they already have been. Military budget is going to be over a trillion dollars this coming budget (or spending bill)
And they still wont be audited. Hesgeth is now even wavering on this.
Something I have noticed about Real “weak men” is that they nearly always comment (or blog) under cover of a pseudonym; are full of excuses why this must be so (their opinions are just too dangerous, see?); and some weak men have even developed theories that blogging under one’s real name is prima facie evidence of being an agent or shill.
It’s a rather typical instance of value-inversion: Courage is weak, cowardice is brave – and so on.
One problem with all politics, I find this in myself recurrently – is that it entails supporting actual evil, because it is (we judge) not so bad as some other evil.
To take a side in a particular war, for example, may be necessary. Some wars (including a current one, in which my nation is involved – on the wrong side!) do have a good and evil side, in terms of that war – although this judgment often depends on where you start the clock, and which group you most care about – which are assumptions.
After all, taking a neutral stance is to assume that both sides are as bad as each other – which is a moral evaluation in itself.
But I think we need to know that such judgments need to be stopped short of some kind of overall blanket approval of the good side.
Even the best historical examples of a good side in a war – perhaps something like the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople just before it fell to the Turks? Or the side of the Saxons against the Normans. Or the side of the Chinese against the British Empire in the Opium Wars…. The good side was always and necessarily a society permeated with and dependent on multiple and serious evils.
In a strong sense, all human societies ever, and all possible societies – but particularly large scale organized civilizations – are systematically coercive and manipulative of their members: All their members, top to bottom.
Some would call this original sin… Not me; but the point is that there is a real and deep sense in which all groups and individual persons in this world are somewhat and ineradicably evil – including of course our-selves.
This is what Jesus saved us from – but after death, not before*.
But it is the reason why it is spiritually lethal for politics, (or psychology – eg promoting happiness, or alleviating misery) will be evil if it becomes the bottom-line motivation. We always need to keep remembering that, and pulling back from our tendency to forget and deny it.
*Note: This is why I find the Second Coming, and New Jerusalem, to be a false because this-worldly distortion of Christ’s message and work. What do you think? A post on this theme maybe?
It isn’t just politics and wars that involve choosing the lesser of two evils. And often you cannot know everything about the choice you’re faced with.
At the store trying to pick a can of peas, you are faced with a choice. There may be 10 brands of canned peas, how do I know which one to pick? Must I pick the cheapest one to be a good steward? Or is the cheapest can of peas the most likely to have taken advantage of illegal aliens and contributed to human trafficking? If I chose a well-known name brand, how can I be sure that I support all of their corporate stances? How do I know which can of peas Jesus would choose? Should I try to support a small business, versus a larger one? How do I pick a can of peas without becoming a partaker, entangled in all the evil and greedy deals that were necessary to get their can of peas onto the shelf of that store which also tries to unfairly eliminate their competition? Should I spend more time trying to resolve the many moral and ethical dilemmas inherent in that purchase choice, or would that be squandering the time which God has allotted me?
Everybody is forced to make constant choices in life. All of those choices could be viewed through the lenses of morality and characterized as moral choices by which we try to choose the least evil and the most holy choice. How does a rational person argue that picking the best possible option, between two politicians, taints your soul, while selecting the lesser of two evils between greedily produced and deceptively marketed cans of peas purchased from a monopolistic retail chain, is not to be viewed in that same light?
If choosing the lesser of two evils is inherently an immoral choice, then it always is, in every choice in life. It can’t be said with perfect integrity that it is immoral for me to vote, but that it is perfectly acceptable for you to make choices in your life. We live in a cursed and fallen world, peopled with sinners, misled by unclean spirits. Solomon said that it all was vanity. Yet we must live here and make choices.
God said that a king was not the system of rule that His people should ask for. What is God’s system? It is Patriarchy! Father rule. God, the Father of all spirits and all flesh, has told us so. The Godhead is a holy patriarchy, a Father handing all power to His Son. God commands His chain of command. (1 Corinthians 11:3)
If y’all want to advocate for God’s ways, advocate for patriarchy. Otherwise hush your secular foolishness, every idle word is retained for judgement against your souls.
Bruce,
I’m inclined to agree that the solutions are largely after death. Activism, unlike more tempered and limited political involvement, simply places too much hope on this-worldly ways.
As for the return of Christ and New Jerusalem, I have never written on the subject. I have a big draft on the Olivet Discourse which discusses Christ’s return, but it is not finished. For now, I’ll say this. Jesus “returned” in AD70 to establish the heavenly kingdom (under the New Covenant) that Daniel predicted. But the earthly kingdom that is found in Daniel and the Synoptic Gospels is yet to come. I have some ideas of what this stands for, but have never written about it. Perhaps I will.
Peace,
DR
@redacted – On the other hand; you could learn to read what is written – which answers your point exactly.
I didn’t intend my response to be directed at you, Bruce. It was just a follow up thought, taking off from what you wrote, directed at those fools here who try to discourage Christian men from voting.