In spite of endless promises and ever-increasing budgets, healthcare, state schooling, tertiary education, agriculture, infrastructure, and more, are in crisis throughout the Western world; and debt levels are astronomical to the point where they have become meaningless. Yet in the lead up to every election, the same old promises are wheeled out, as politicians assure voters that new systems will bring progress.
Politicians typically promise utopia but deliver dystopia through socially subversive policies and the old political tactic of divide and rule. The word ‘utopia’, meaning ‘nowhere’, is based on the Greek words ‘ou’, meaning ‘not’, and ‘topos’ for ‘place’. It was first used in the book Utopia by Thomas More. The ‘dys’ in ‘dystopia’ comes from the Greek for ‘bad’. Sadly, utopia is nowhere to be found, but dystopia is everywhere.
The reality is there are no new systems – they have all been tried. The ones that have worked best have invariably worked because of virtuous people – leaders and followers – rather than the merits of the system. Good people will make a bad system work; bad people always bring good systems to ruin.
Systems can help to a degree in reducing abuse of power, but not in eradicating corruption. That depends on the human heart, which no socio-political or economic system has ever been able to control; the fall of empire is a constant theme throughout history. Human beings are a fusion of mind and body; the latter is susceptible to control by tyrants, while the former is far less so when properly shaped by an adherence to truth, as history again readily attests.
The great irony of the crumbling secular managerial state is that despite information banks of Himalayan proportions, proliferating channels of communication, and ridiculously expensive state schooling, people are typically ignorant, confused, and distracted. For all the hoopla around the possibilities presented by artificial intelligence technologies, the essential problem – deceit – will continue to plague a civilisation built on untruth. AI is fed the lies that prop up the establishment elite, and its output will always reflect the input.
Our challenge is daunting: the political class, on both sides of the ideological divide, have made it abundantly clear that they are not to be trusted. And as G K Chesterton told us, “The main mark of modern government is that we do not know who governs, ‘de facto’ any more than ‘de jure’. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or (what is most important of all) the banker of the backer.”
We deplore violence, yet ignore the fact that it is inextricably bound to the lie. As Solzhenitsyn said: “Violence does not always necessarily take you physically by the throat and strangle you; more often it merely demands that subjects declare allegiance to the lie. And the simple step of a simple, courageous man is not to take part in the lie, not to support deceit. Let the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not through me.”
It is a flaw in human nature that we tend to lie, to a greater or lesser extent, in all our dealings. Often consciously, but more often subconsciously, we represent reality in ways favourable to our own interests.
Armed with all the subtleties and ambiguity of language, the choice of content, the refuge of silence, and the diabolical poison of deliberate deceit, we negotiate relationships primarily for personal gain. The only possible way back to truth is through the submission of self to the Author of Truth. And how is that possible, unless you first accept that you are living a lie?
We rail against the deceit of politicians, but things will only get worse until we address the dishonesty that characterises society at large and the untruths that blight our own lives. How hard it is for the children of an indolent and hedonistic society, exposed from infancy to ever-multiplying material advantages, to confront the reality of a world in which honesty and self-denial are imperatives for human flourishing. As T S Eliot told us in Choruses from The Rock:
O weariness of men who turn from God
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,
To arts and inventions and daring enterprises,
To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited,
Binding the earth and the water to your service,
Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains,
Dividing the stars into common and preferred,
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,
Engaged in working out a rational morality,
Engaged in printing as many books as possible,
Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,
Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm
For nation or race or what you call humanity;
Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.
