...Not Against Flesh and Blood

I saw Russell Brand on the 'net the other day, talking about how the media covers salacious (scandalous, trashy) stories like the death of his friend Peaches Geldoff, and how it keeps people's attention skipping from thing to thing to attention-grabbing thing, but all with that same trashy, sensationalist focus.  (That's not news. to anyone.) But then Brand talked about Who Owns the Media, tossed out the name Rupert Murdoch, and he made a gesture with his arms like Rupert Murdoch is an evil overlord puppetmaster of evil, raining down evilness on us.

   This made me think of every conspiracy nut and his/her view of a government with evil men above/beyond/beside it, in an evil Shadow Government, in secret rooms, making the world evil, harvesting it like a herd of sheep.

   And it made me think of me talking in class about "How do rich people get poor people's money in our town?  Tobacco, cheap booze, lottery tickets, bingo.  Stuff like that."  Like there're rich people sitting in a room asking "How can we get more money out of the poor?" 
(Oh, it happens alright.  But is is possible that it can all be planned and run without anyone ever needing to really make it evil on purpose?  It just gets evil and does evil, and no one did that exactly?  No one with a face?)

   We liberalish people think there's Big Pharma, and Big Tobacco and Big Government, and we want to imagine faces and corporate logos on the evil.  Because that's comforting.  The evil having a name and a face.  Just being some guys who we want to pay taxes properly and follow laws.

   A much scarier thought is that there is evil alright, but that these guys aren't the evil.  The evil has no face.  And it is ingrained in the system.  The kind of sin described in the bible as more about "falling short" than about "going too far."  Regular people doing almost as well as they could, in systems that punish originality, idealism, rocking boats, blowing whistles or generally trying to fix said systems, really in any way. Systems that grind people down to nubs and chew them up and spit them out, and waste them, one would have to say, without paying off in the dividends that would have made it worth it.  I think we all feel wasted.

   I am a teacher, so I work in the education system, just one system among all the ones around us, and I don't really know terribly much about exactly how it all works, floors above my pay grade.  And yet it's very easy to imagine, without benefit of a single fact, people up there being douchebags. Evil men looking to feather their own nests, make themselves look good and all of that, while exploiting the system and being big vampire/parasites as to money and status.  Making big salaries.  Garnering accolades any way they can. Being politicians.  Very easy to imagine that and rail against it and complain.  But...

   A more scary idea is that we're doing, most of us, pretty much the best we can.  And maybe to some degree we're all just drones, plugged into The Systems that we're in, and them feeding off us, like in The Matrix.  Using us up, burning us out.  Because systems are mechanistic and do not have things like pity or conscience, unless people in them make certain to put those in personally, on a daily basis..
   I think, from bottom to top, despite there being a few opportunistic, gloryhound, exploitative, dishonest, cruel, parasitic types here and there, most of the people in these Systems are just folks.  Doing almost as well as they can.  As Alan Moore said, the Nazis didn't come from space.  They were lawyers, dentists, teachers, butchers and postmen.

   But we want good guys and bad guys.  We want villains just as much as we want heroes, despite those both being entirely fictional constructs.  (never spend more than a couple of hours with  someone you think is a "hero") We want evil to have a face. We want black helicopters.  We want a government which is interested enough in our idle ramblings on the phone to have a van with four guys in it parked outside on the street recording our every word.  We want to believe in evil businessmen overtly plotting to exploit the poor.  We want to believe that human beings are so good at keeping secrets that only conspiracy nuts know what's really going on. We want to think that, should regular folk find out what's really going on in the systems, that they'd do something.

   People go on about how the bible and religion "give comfort."  It's never like that for me.  What I do know is that the bible says "we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."  Rulers.  Authorities.  Which aren't flesh and blood.  Evil has a mind, but isn't some corporate guy who loves golf.  It's a force.  It's a system.  An order. A power.  Not just some guys.

   To take the "woo woo" ghost noises out of "spiritual forces of evil" and "cosmic powers," think of it as "poisonous, eroding, good-sapping attitudes" and "the network of power, status and influence over Everything. The conduits down which power is generated, depleted, routed and rerouted."

   So, no guy starts a corporation because he is evil and wants to spread evil, so the corporation is evil too. He just falls short.  He ignores corruption. He doesn't dig deeply into exploitation and unethical stuff he's pretty sure is there, because he doesn't want to.  Maybe he's lazy.  Maybe he's scared. Maybe he doesn't believe he can get through that process and keep his faith/job.
   But even if he ends up causing harm, he's not where the evil is coming from.  It infects and contaminates everything people try to make, to varying degrees.  Everyone's a carrier.    This guy's not the actual source of the bad stuff.  He's just a facilitator.  An enabler.  He just doesn't really have a good, hard look at attitudes and trends and forces that maybe should be addressed. Reaps the benefits of living slightly in la la land.  I think we all do that to some degree. We're all that guy.

   In children's movies and cartoons, people who are delivering or serving evil are all-powerful.  To make the story dramatic.  To make the heroes seem more heroic.  In real life, people who let evil into the room are usually at worst just lazy and unprincipled.  They don't really face things and don't take appropriate steps. They look the other way.  They shut their mouths.  In offices, churches and government.  In front of cameras.  They report and announce things that maybe didn't exactly happen.  Or don't report and notify people of things that maybe did.  Maybe because they don't really know what to do about it all anyway.

  Is the world full of systems that are evil?  I think, even in a country like Canada, where it's pretty darn nice, we are all serving and served by, exploited by, and apt to exploit, systems which fall short of what would be undeniably good.  The systems, and we, oftentimes, are not quite what you could call good.  Not really functioning properly.  We're not even neutral.  We are human, flawed and failing in various ways to do what we are supposed to do.  We fall short of good. Does that make us evil? Not in the conventional sense, of course.  Evil happens, though.  It's out there. It's in here with us.
   I think this makes our groups and our systems form part of what can often be a very deceptive slide into dodgy stuff.  Stuff that serves evil by tiny increments.  "Falling short" evil.  Self-deceiving evil.  "Close enough" evil.  "It's not good, but what else can I do?" evil.  Smug, blind evil.  Not cackling, girl-tied-to-train-tracks or Big Businessman In a Movie evil.

   So much of this is really about "What direction are you moving in?"  If you say you're standing still, it usually just means you're sliding backward at a speed, or in ways, that you aren't aware of.

   The world is broken. Flawed.  Falls short.  People are exploited.  Systems fail people.  People exploit systems.  And there doesn't need to be a guy with a face, who says "Let's exploit black people today."  Or "Let's take more money out of the hand of Welfare Mothers."  But it happens anyway.  How does it happen?  The systems we serve aren't human.  They aren't humane. They aren't bound by empathy.  No one (with a face) is really driving.  Yet they have a lot of the qualities of living creatures. Self-preservation.  Conquest.  Reproduction.  They tend to be parasitic. Tend to leave their waste everywhere they've been.

   One of the sobering things I am starting to learn about, as I maybe start to grow up (slightly), is how unaware most people in any given business or service or office or system or institution even are of what each other even do.  When I worked at Nortel, I was at first uncomfortably aware that everything we did was on camera.  But I quickly realized that no one was taking the time to have any clue about much of anything.  Our bosses had no idea what any of us were or were not doing at the best of times.  And their bosses weren't even in town most of the time.  The whole thing was crashing and burning and no one was really at the wheel.  There was no evil Overlord.  No spider at the centre of the web. There was just a rat's nest of people who were silly sometimes, weak in some ways, lazy from time to time, effing up together, trying to hide it, celebrating success with posters and cakes (shortly before having to lay off most of their staff and get government bailouts), and avoiding looking too directly at each other.

   And yet, the Job got done. The destruction, the waste, the havoc, happened.  Religion doesn't comfort me so much as tell me "Evil is on purpose. It doesn't have a street address, though.  It's all through everything.  And it's every bit as much a lack of good enough stuff as it is a buildup of bad stuff."

   Did the guys in my church who caused the divisions want to cause all the harm?  Of course not.  Not really.  Willing to cause it.  Didn't want to cause it.  They are not, and never were, cackling monsters.  But our church was and is full of weak people. Scared people.  Fallible human beings.  People who tell themselves they're not actually walking by on the other side of the road because they think there's something stirring in the ditch on this side.  Not actually turning their head away at just the perfect time to miss something they don't want to have to deal with.  People who are scared.  People who are angry.  People who are superstitious and blind.  People who lack any hope in the idea that dealing with stuff could ever result in anything but Making Things Worse.

   Because there are those two kinds of idealist: the one which says "Things are pretty sweet. Nothing's perfect, of course, but things are AWESOME!  WE are awesome!  Let's never change!" and the one which says "Things need to be so much better.  This isn't good enough.  Look at who is falling through the cracks and how this is being exploited. Let's stop slacking.  We need some change around here. Let's be the change.  Right now." 

  Idealists go around disrupting everyone and everything. And sometimes that's exactly what needs to happen.  It's certainly not nice, but sometimes, certain tables just really, really need to get kicked over.  Sacred cows just really, really need to get dyed bright orange so people have a harder time denying that there's a sacred cow standing right there with a dumb look on its orange face, have a harder time denying that they keep any sacred cows at all,  That they cultivate and care for anything or anyone they are superstitious about, yet unwilling to discuss.
   How does evil come about in Christian circles?  Increasingly I am seeing how much of it depends upon there being people who say things like "I can't deal with this" and "I don't want to talk about this" and "ANYway..." and "Move on."  Fear.  Weakness.  A refusal to give an accounting for harm that may be ongoing.  A refusal to take responsibility or look to make anything better for anyone.  A lack of belief that reflection and repentance bring good.  A belief that these biblical practices do anything but "cause trouble."

   And that's all I have to say about that.