06 – The future tyranny

No society can stand if it dismisses truth and justice as mere personal opinion. A society cannot be justly governed when it believes right and wrong are merely matters of personal opinion.

Most Westerners decided more than two centuries ago that kings and aristocrats could not be trusted to rule justly. Most working-class people today don’t trust the wealthy elite to secure justice for the common man.

What about democracy? Doesn’t democracy create justice by majority vote? How can democracy produce justice when its laws only reflect the opinions of a majority? Doesn’t majority belief often support the oppression of minorities? Didn’t most Americans once believe slavery was just? Was slavery not wrong until a majority decided otherwise?

Even if the majority opinion in a society actually happens to be just, how long can that last if the ruling worldview says right and wrong are merely matters of personal opinion?

If a society’s standard of justice cannot be proven to be true and morals are reduced to personal or social preferences, then taboos change with the wind. All that is required to turn wrong into right is a good public relations campaign. A savvy mass-media strategy can turn today’s “God-ordained social order” into tomorrow’s “puritanical repression.”

In America and Europe, behavior the majority once considered plainly right and wrong are now seen as matters of personal preference. One culture’s values are considered no more or less legitimate than another’s, even within the same society. One person’s “good” may be another’s “bad,” and we are told no one must force his values on another.

Chaos grows in a society that can’t agree on what is right and wrong. Every man does what is right in his own eyes – or worse, what he thinks he can get away with. When the government can only enforce the consensus of selfish people, justice is replaced by the latest poll results. Social order cannot be maintained by a government hopelessly fragmented over what is right or wrong. If a nation denies anyone can prove what is right or wrong, it cannot lecture another nation about human rights.

When law and order crumbles, anarchy rises to take its place. The strong brazenly rob the weak of what little they have. Innocent women and children are slaughtered in the name of ancient hatreds. By force, a man takes his neighbor’s wife – or her son – for himself. No one is ever safe, anywhere, unless he is unusually well-armed.

Now come the final hours of human civilization. Nation-states dissolve as tribes devour one another. The powerful bleed their victims with no one able to say why they shouldn’t. The smart, wealthy, and violent few live in luxury while the masses groan in suffocating poverty. The powerful struggle for control of the weapons of oblivion.

A world awash in anarchy is primed for tyranny. With no common standard of justice to create a vision of freedom, a society cannot direct itself. The strong prey upon the weak until the weak cry out for a protector, who himself then preys upon the weak. The tyrant offers the last hope for social order – if not a just peace, then at least freedom from unofficial violence.

If there is no provable standard of justice, tyranny is the only way left to establish social order. When people are drowning in anarchy, they will welcome someone strong enough to take charge, even if he is only the strongest of the thugs. The strongman controls the anarchy with a totalitarian government that gives people social order in exchange for their freedom of thought and action.

The idea that the individual decides right and wrong for himself is eroding traditional moral values in every major society in the world. Skepticism infiltrates through popular American music and movies, political ideas like democracy and human rights, and economic dreams of free-market prosperity. If the “liberation” of a society is successful, social and moral chaos grows, and skepticism removes every barrier that would keep the society from sliding into anarchy and tyranny. The traditional society resists the advance of individualism with the only tool at its disposal: the heavy hammer of power wielded by authority.

Though they don’t realize it, traditional authorities and their liberalizing enemies both actually serve the same master. Regardless of who wins the struggle for control, the result is tyranny. And there is one tyrant who eagerly awaits his opportunity to bring worldwide anarchy under control, the one called “Antichrist.”

Who will resist the slide toward tyranny? Can no one prove what is just?

Think about it!
List ways majority opinion has changed for the better. List ways it has changed for the worse. How could majority opinion ever be a reliable guide to truth and justice?

Get involved!
Ask a Muslim friend how American culture erodes moral values.

Next installment
07 – The crucial truth

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