2700 years ago Plato laid out how a tyrant or absolute ruler seizes and maintains power. He does four simple things: In no particular order, he
A) takes over the educational system, so that boys (girls weren’t educated then) are loyal to the State rather than family or civic laws;
B) creates fear of an external enemy on the border;
C) manufactures a depression, so that simply surviving (food, housing) occupies the people’s attention; and
D) sows distrust, neighbor against neighbor, so that no one knows whom to trust. No one can organize resistance.
We saw this with the Soviet Union, beginning a hundred years ago in the 1920s. And with Hitler in the 1930s. We see the plan today under the Trump administration. Immigration becomes the external enemy. (The immigrants are not people, but “other,” like the Jews under Hitler.) Education – which books to ban, which to allow—creates a dumbed-down populace, unable to think independently. (Romeo and Juliet is too sexy for high school; Anne Frank’s diary too sad.) Trump and Musk are now in the midst of driving the best economy in the world into depression, where we can imagine Orwellian proles (us!) trudging bleakly on while the billionaires ride in gold-plate chauffeured cars, lick-spittling to the tyrant. Under these conditions it is hard for people to trust each other: will your neighbor, or your son or daughter, turn you over to the police? Will you be fired or imprisoned? Will the state you govern be punished by withholding federal funds? Will you survive a depression, homelessness, lack of health care?
Until recently, I have written about angels. Today we are called ourselves to be the angels and like the archangel Michael, to raise our swords and fight. We have seen what happens when we cede authority. We see what happened Soviet Union, in Putin’s Russia, in Iran and North Korea and Myanmar and Venezuela and many other places.
Stand with the angels. With prayer and courage, let us pick up our swords of virtue and with the angels to help us, let us FIGHT. We are all in this together. Call on angels, and fight.
Thank you,
Sophy Burnham