Dear Friends,
It seems to me, we behold our science and technology, then stand in awe of our creations. In our awe we have become vain and egoistic, turning away from God and worshiping ourselves as gods in our own right. In that we have become as Adam and Eve. We have turned our backs on God thinking we are his equal. In our hubris we believe everything there is to know… is possible to be known, we foolishly think we can control the universe as our plaything, and we have polluted our very existence with such short sighted, egoistic and inane beliefs. In our idiocy we have destroyed the family, corrupted our governments and taxed our economies to death. The more we flail about in our self absorbed aggrandizement, the more our lot, the lot of mankind itself is diminished, reduced to the point of our self annihilation, fueled by our empty wisdom and inflated egos.
We look at the heavens and in our hubris we believe we can know all there is to know. The advancements of the hard sciences, physics, mathematics and chemistry have made us proud, and that pride tricks us into thinking we are gods. Unlike the hard sciences however, the soft sciences are often nothing but assumptions based on wishful thinking. We have egg heads who make huge gobs of money, pretending to understand complex systems that don’t lend themselves to total understanding. Systems like economics, psychology and governance are not quantifiable, as is the weight of a proton, they are not unchanging like the speed of light and they are inherently mercurial, due to millions of factors that cannot ever truly be known. In our self absorbent hubris we elevate such hucksters to the status of scientist, when in fact they are snake oil salesmen, not just taking our money and health but our very humanity.
Our egos have made us the slaves of our selfishness. When someone stands above the rest of humanity, as in the case of a king, billionaire or legislator, that person looks down on the rest of humanity. Like the child who burns ants with a magnifying glass feels no remorse, the elite believe themselves to be so high and mighty they can use the rest of humanity as mere lab rats, to be run through mazes, used for invasive tests and tossed away like a used diaper… after all, are they not a king, rich or wield temporal power? The rest of us look “up” at the elite and bow our heads to them, after all, he is a king, she is rich, they do wield such sway. It is just that inhuman regard for our fellow man, and indeed ourselves, that allows the elite to feed their egos at cost to humanity itself.
Progressivism, and it’s ultimate goal socialism, is the natural outgrowth of this. Progressives believe they can assemble the complex systems of humanity like a watch maker makes a watch. If only they can get the mechanism right, everyone would be happy in their diminished station, a cog in a mechanism. The world would run like a Rolex keeping time to the tune the elite play. The egoistic belief that they are smart enough to gauge the mass of public opinion as the mass of a neutron, they are able to divine the trajectory of future history as easy as measuring the speed of light, and the hubris to force their ideas on the rest of humanity, is the reason arbitrary rule is so attractive to the elite. In their arrogance, progressives honestly believe they are not God’s equal, but his better. They think they are able to make a world better than the one created by God, a world without poverty, violence and racism, then stand in awe of their fantasies. All that is required is that the rest of us give up our free will and bow to our overlords with the respect and reverence rightfully given to God.
The answer is to recognize we are not gods, we are flawed human beings, each of us a spark in our own right, but only a spark, a tiny portion of truth. To force one’s free will on the rest of humanity, while denying theirs, is to prove unworthy of power and respect. Such thinking has always and always will lead to catastrophe. Our leaders deserve no adulation, to do so is to adulate self-centeredness and arrogance. Science is a powerful tool to understand God’s creation, but a poor substitute for the wisdom to know that we cannot know everything, that there is more to our world than we can see, smell, taste, hear and touch, even with the vastly improved senses that our scientific instruments give us. We are not gods, no matter how powerful our machines make us or how accurately our science measures God’s universe… we are flawed human beings, to know that and yet to love humanity, despite all our flaws… is the first step to real enlightenment.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
