Waking and Breaking

We live in a broken culture. Not breaking. Broken. They did not see fit to acknowledge God, and God has given them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

In Romans, that manifests in heartlessness and ruthlessness, dishonesty and disobedience, among a litany of other bad things. In reality, a debased mind manifests in all these ways at the expense of others, but it is also unbelievably self-destructive and internally contradictory.

Debased thinking is fundamentally unfit to accomplish anything. But debased people make the best pawns imaginable.

Unfit for Use

The word translated “debased” or “reprobate” in Romans is adokimos, properly used of metals and coins unfit for use, and which one throws away. Quality control would not allow adokimos coins in circulation. The mint would reject them. Likewise, nobody would deliberately build an adokimos bridge. You’d end up sinking in the bay instead of driving into San Francisco in style.

But try applying this principle to the human mind. That’s a scary thought. Not just one useless bridge, but a whole generation of adokimos engineers who just keep replicating the same failing structures because all the schools in which they learned their craft were equally adokimos. Not just a single adokimos coin to be kept out of circulation, oh no. The entire mint is worthless, and the basis for a functional economy no longer exists.

That is where we are today. Our culture is broken, not just in little ways but in every way. By broken, I mean that institutions no longer effectively serve their most basic intended functions. In their devotion to woke ideology, none of them do the things they were designed to do any longer.

Problems without Solutions

Colleges exist to educate, but Canadian colleges serve as clearing houses for mass immigration. Some are literally student-free. The gender imbalance in American universities is 2-1 in favor of women. The labor markets are broken, rewarding the ability to get a degree over long-term reliability on the job. Hotels in Ontario are turning into long-term residences for refugees. I guess it’s better than having asylum-seekers lying on street corners in winter, but it doesn’t address the basic problem with a welfare state stressed to the point of unsustainability. Furthermore, housing the homeless is not what hotels were designed to do. None of this is coincidental. Someone is trying to break the system.

American judges have no idea what a woman is, or haven’t the courage to say so if they do. The incapacity to deal with reality is no minor problem for those to whom we commit the interpretation of the law. An entire New York state Supreme Court bench is composed of black women. Nothing wrong with black women, except that they make up only 1.5% of lawyers, which means the composition of this state Supreme Court is entirely artificial, reflecting not the best, brightest and most accomplished, but the most politically correct, angry New York leftists. It’s hardly surprising, then, to find Attorney Generals engaging in lawfare rather than law. They are convinced social justice trumps getting to the truth. They did not get there by accident. Somebody is trying to break the system.

Everything is Broken

The responses generated by Google’s AI, the hope for the great technological convergence or singularity in which man is fused with machine, sound like the ramblings of the insane. This is not because it’s “a work in progress”, but because Gemini is programmed to spew woke lunacy. Even Bing’s AI image generator is so laden down with deliberate limitations that six out of ten attempts to have it draw anything for you are short-circuited by its politics. Why image generators need to have built-in political biases has yet to be addressed, and it will never be, because there are people for whom breaking the system is not a bug, but the main feature of their agenda.

Our eco-friendly energy sources do more damage to the environment than traditional energy, are brutally inefficient, and the hidden costs of subsidizing them are staggering. Doctors and nurses in Canada killed patients at a record rate last year. The Hippocratic Oath (“First do no harm”) needs a serious rewrite when those taking it are being trained to do the ultimate harm. If they weren’t debased when they started helping people end their lives, they are certainly debased now. Not all the forces pushing for the changes to the Canadian legal system that allowed such degradation to flourish did so out of malice, but they were acting at the behest of those who are trying to break the system.

Deliberate Mismanagement

The war in the Ukraine instigated by NATO was appallingly mismanaged from the get-go. Its effect has been to strengthen the economic ties between Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, effectively moving us towards a new world order in which the West is no longer a prominent player and Israel is increasingly isolated. (Hmm. Why would anyone want that?) The thirteen rounds of sanctions imposed by NATO countries on Russia have been a complete failure, but nobody responsible says, “Hmm, this isn’t working and needs to stop.” That’s because the purpose of the war was to break the system, and it’s succeeding admirably.

You may be surprised to find I am not pointing a finger for all of this deliberate self-destruction at George Soros, Klaus Schwab, Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden or the various leaders in Europe. All are pawns at one level or another, including those at the top who think they know what’s really going on. We are witnessing the end game of not decades but centuries of hard work on the part of the cosmic powers over this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Their objective is to break the world as we know it. When the system no longer functions: when men and women cannot eat, or work, or travel, or buy or sell, or find places to live or any firm place on which to plant their feet, and when all hope of order and peace have been lost, the principalities and powers will bring forth their “lawless one”. He will receive unprecedented authority over every tribe, people, language and nation, and our broken world will happily embrace him as the answer to all our problems.

But in order to present the world with an answer that is not Christ, we first need problems for him to pretend to solve. That is what all the waking and breaking is about right now. We must become the problem so that he may be presented as the solution.

T.S. Eliot was Wrong

You may think I find this discouraging. Not at all. It is exactly what the apostles of Christ and the Jewish prophets foretold thousands of years ago. This is the way the world ends: not with either a bang or a whimper, but with the glorious return of the rejected Messiah whom God has exalted to his right hand and given the name above every name, in order that he may claim what belongs to him and make every last one of his enemies his footstool.

Everything about the present chaos affirms every word of scripture. Now, if we could all just start paying a little more careful attention …