“Look up to the organization / With the proper awe and fear. / Bow down to your earthly betters / And safeguard your career” (DC Dave, “Post-Christian Man”).
Politics are complicated. Once you dig under the surface, there are unintended consequences to almost every issue. The problem is, our lives are busy, and most of us don’t have time for such research and deliberation. And so we tend to outsource our comprehension to the “experts”, just like we might to a plumber if we’re having leaky pipes, or to an electrician if we’re having trouble with our lights or power. The problem is, if the experts conflict in their opinions, which ones should we follow? Often when someone tells you to “trust the experts,” what they really mean is “trust the state-sanctioned experts.” And this is not necessarily always the wrong approach, because again, we only know what we know. But what if the specific state institution is flawed, or at least comprised of a few flawed individuals at the top who tarnish and mold the whole system in the shape of their own mediocrity?
I’ve always considered greed and careerism to be primary culprits in the corruption of the state, but there’s more to it than that. Self-preservation is a natural human instinct, and there is a fine line between it and careerism. Nobody wants to lose their gig, and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with being ambitious and wanting to advance. Some people might just be comfortable where they are and want to keep their head down and not go against the grain or ruffle any feathers. In a way, this is still careerism, albeit a more passive one – we’ll call this group B. But the problem is with the few who have extreme ambition where a self-serving agenda takes priority, to the point where mistakes are doubled down on to protect themselves, and ideology over results is sold to their colleagues. In other words, they are not succeeding based on merit, they are just failing upwards. We’ll call this group A. When group A rises to the top, they are bolstered by group B, and the whole institution becomes flawed or corrupt, despite the good intentions of the majority.
This is the most plausible explanation for why neoconservative ideologues like Victoria Nuland or John Bolton, have not only remained relevant but have risen through the ranks throughout the years, despite bringing us counterproductive endless wars for the last 20 years. The answer to our debacle of invading Iraq was not to admit they were wrong, but to double down with yet more interventions, in Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc. But the ills of neoconservatism, an ideology born of leftist Trotskyite roots, is a whole other topic beyond the scope of this article.
While criticism of the 3-letter agencies of the unelected permanent government, i.e., “Deep State,” should necessarily include the intelligence agencies of the military-industrial-complex and their neoconservative think tank counterparts, it should also include the regulatory agencies and bureaucracy of the medical industrial complex, which are revolving doors for former Big Pharma executives and investors.
For an example, one need not look any further than Anthony Fauci, who, despite multiple failures during the AIDS epidemic, somehow had the force of personality to convince people he was the right person for COVID czardom. Of course, the whole brutal history of drug and vaccine development is marred with ethical mediocrity, to put it lightly, from the Tuskegee and Guatemala experiments, to the experimentation on orphans, the mentally ill, the disabled, and babies of mothers in prison, as admitted in deposition by Stanley Plotkin himself, the “Godfather of vaccines.”
As an aside, skepticism of both the war machine and Big Pharma are things you might have counted on from liberals 20 years ago. But interestingly, Fauci and Bolton share a common trait…they both were actually lionized by the mainstream left, merely because at one point or another they contradicted and stood at odds with President Trump. Challenge Trump, and instantly have your reputation rehabilitated! This is a sad commentary on the downslide of not just liberalism (Republicans do it too), but the binary and divisive nature of our current political landscape. Enter corporate legacy media…
“If any media group, whether newspaper or video or news agency, if they try to tweak anything that anyone says, or tweak any kind of news to fit a narrative, they’re not news… they’re not there to inform you, they’re there for propaganda.” – Josh Gerber
Last month I had an insightful interview with Josh Gerber, former candidate for the State House 98th district, for the debut of my podcast, Lanc Cast, which concluded with the above quote. We had a robust discussion about the concept of “big government.” Gerber defined it not as our heavy-overhead legislative system nor our elected officials, but as the aforementioned Deep State. And he had some ideas for who and how the “drain the Swamp” idea could come to fruition, but in the end concluded: “I don’t think any mayor, any president…anyone politically is going to save this country. What’s going to save this country is fathers and mothers over generations teaching their kids that the establishment is not the answer.”
But what really surprised me about this interview was when the discussion turned towards the topic of churches. I had brought up another historic action which I had perceived as “big government”, that of LBJ’s policies and their effect on the nuclear family, and had expected more criticism of statism. But instead, the conversation shifted towards Gerber’s criticism of churches: “When the government decides that we’re going to help people, that really just tells the churches that they can lax off.”
He continued with lamentation about the conflicts between churches, but also about their diminished role in society in favor of self-serving agendas, which he attributed largely to their being “scared to lose their 501c’s”.
It hadn’t occurred to me before, but could the mediocrity of the state (both the elected and the “Deep”), and the corrupt careerism that drives it, be a direct symptom of an increasingly post-Christian culture? If the self-preservative instincts of mankind clash with the self-sacrificial virtues Christianity aims to instill, could there therefore be a direct correlation between ambition and post-Christianity? Culture critic Theodore Dalrymple writes:
“Nietzsche disdained the multitudes and thought that it was superior persons who should seek power, admittedly not in the political field. What happened, however, was that huge numbers of people sought power as the only transcendent good; and given the normal distribution of most human qualities such as talent, it was inevitable that most people who sought (and achieved) power were mediocrities. In other words, the decline of religion, far from conducing to an age of personal and artistic superiority, as Nietzsche hoped, conduced to the very opposite, the flowering (if I may be allowed what seems like an oxymoron) of mediocrity.”
If Dalrymple is correct, it would suggest that Gerber’s approach makes sense…that more focus should be placed on fixing our culture locally, at home and in our churches. In a recent episode of The Lancaster Patriot Podcast (Parallel economies, the Amish, and Statism) the panel shared some of Gerber’s same criticism of faith leaders. It was suggested that a corrupt state might merely be replaced by corrupt religious leaders under a more theonomic model. And interesting questions arose when the idea of setting up Amish-style parallel economies as an antidote to statism was put forth: “Can this parallel economy idea work if you have statism in the nation?” “Can the parallel economy work if you don’t try to change the culture around you?”
But what exactly is statism? In another episode of The Lancaster Patriot Podcast (Colson Center Attempts to Unmask Christian Nationalism) a definition is pulled from the internet: “a political system in which the state has substantial centralized control over social and economic affairs.”
My takeaway from all these podcast episodes is that if we fix our culture, perhaps it will naturally lead to a decline of statism. In that sense, perhaps a theoretical measure of the Christian quality of our society would be inversely proportional to the amount of statism.
But circling back to Gerber’s quote about media, how do we fix culture if the state enmeshes itself in it via propaganda? Or put differently, corporate legacy media, both local and national, are at the front lines of guarding establishment narratives and protecting the state…so how do we break past this first line?
I spent a whole episode of Lanc Cast talking about the propaganda of Lancaster County’s heavily Associated Press-reliant newspaper, LNP. One of the techniques they employ to mold opinions is via the frequent repetition of pejorative terms, like the way they use “Christian nationalist.” I doubt most of LNP’s readers would be able to define this term knowledgeably nor consistently. The panelists on The Lancaster Patriot Podcast make clear that a top-down change, where government comes in to impose and enforce Christian beliefs on American citizens, is absolutely not what they’re arguing for. I submit that the aspects of Christian nationalism, and to some extent Christian culture itself, that people are being made to fear, are really aspects of statism. The good news is, opposing statism might be an accessible starting point for people to find common political ground – Christians and non-Christians alike. Because everybody would benefit from less statism.
And thus, while a bottom-up cultural approach is important, providing a counterbalance to local establishment media via alternative methods like local podcasts should be considered as part of this. If we can’t combat propaganda right here at home, what chance do we have against the globalists, corporatists, big-statists, and war profiteers?
“With sovereignty unchecked
By any Higher Power,
The purposeful collective
Displays its finest flower.
“That purpose is whatever
Our vulgar fancy wills
When no one’s eyes are lifted
Unto the Psalmist’s hills” (DC Dave, from “Post-Christian Man”).
Daniel Martin is an IT Specialist, musician, podcaster, and freelance writer from Lancaster, PA. His articles have appeared in The American Conservative, The Libertarian Institute, Catholic Digest, Counterpunch, and elsewhere. Follow him on X: @martysinvasion.
