"What Does It Mean to Be Ready to Do Right and Always Willing to Do Wrong?"
Our world is in decline, we are in decline. Futility lies at the end of everything we create and do. When sin entered the world the results were futility and breakdown, evil. That means you and I are the worst of sinners, evil runs through us, and our hearts are wicked and depraved. None of us are righteous, not one.
If you look at God’s Holy Word which tells God’s story, the story of Christ - the Son of God and how he became a mediator between us and God the Father and how with every rise of evil in the world Christ was there in and through judgment to show us mercy and grace. And like Israel, mankind keeps rebelling. You and I are rebels, even at our best we are rebels against God.
The world of humans, God’s family became evil and the world was flooded and then people were dispersed as humanity became evil again and built the Tower of Babel. Repeatedly Israel rebelled and all of humanity is in this endless cycle of sin, evil, and death. At the appropriate time, the Son of God was fleshed and became human to defeat death and evil among other things. The Kingdom of God was established as God worked ever so patiently to bring about what he intended from the very beginning.
Today in our culture and our world what little we have left of our democracy is threatened by a surveillance society. The tail is wagging the dog. The dream that began 20 years ago of total information awareness has gone viral and is threatening to burn down our democracy. The surveillance capabilities that have been engineered for the sake of profits have quietly with our help engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic coup with unprecedented levels of knowledge about all of us and the power that comes with such knowledge.
Combine that with the many other sin-generated complexities of society and the world and things look very bleak. Surveillance capabilities for the sake of surveillance profits, have produced new empires that over time engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge. As usual, we are our own worst enemies.
Donald Trump’s attempted political coup is a glaring example of how horrific this disinformation can be. The antisocial media were once thought of as agents of liberation, and still are by many. But now the unexpected has happened as the agents have turned on the liberated. In a culture of many who are Godless and weak-minded, many who need someone to tell them what to think and do they will be rudderless without someone on social media telling them what the truth is and what to do next.
The match that lit the fuse was the Chao’s President. The profit-driven algorithmic megaphone, along with the dissemination of corrupt, false information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation from many areas of society has now come back to bite us all.
The effects of this created reality manipulate all of us as they are felt in the real world, where they deny reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics, and instigate confusion, violence, and death. January 6th, 2020 was a performance of all these things.
It is wrong, morally, and ethically to manipulate people with information good and bad, true, and false for profit and political and societal gain. The peaceful transfer of power in democracies are critical moment in a society’s vulnerability. The principles and laws that guide these transitions are treated with the utmost gravity. Donald Trump and his allies pushed an election fraud disinformation campaign that translated into violence. It attacked our American democracy’s point of maximum institutional vulnerability and its most fundamental core values. As such, it qualifies as terrorism, an extreme expression of chaos. The social media economic machine has made itself an accessory to this assault.
So we are faced with the simple dilemma of what is right and what is wrong. As all of us have contributed to this society and perhaps even profited in some way we acknowledge we are sinners, we are not righteous. Wrong is a sin when we manipulate others for profit (or otherwise) and cause strife violence and death. Wrong is a sin when we put before people who lack discernment and will believe and act on conspiracy(lies) and evil to do wicked acts against others.
All of us know what sin is, we know what evil is and we know what right and wrong is. There never have been any excuses. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” Isaiah 5:20
Solomon was said to be the wisest man on earth and his Book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are deep wells of wisdom. Even James says that if we lack wisdom about something, we can pray to God for it (James 1:5). We can know right from wrong. We simply must be immersed in the Word of God. Get into the Word of God and the Word of God will get into you!
When we lie, believe, and promote lies, we are doing the will of Satan who was the Father of Lies, not God. When we go along with the lies to keep the peace, we are not living out of a place of Truth. How then do we free ourselves of this worldly attachment? Where we always do, we begin with daily prayer, confession of sins, and reading of scripture. Repentance then means we stop the behavior. If you need to get off all social media to start living in truth, then do so. Stop associating with people who are Godless and sinful, stop watching porn, whatever you must do, and find someone from church or even a friend. Never give up. But always seek to do right in the eyes of our Lord.