What’s wrong with society? Part 1.

Let's survey society's problems starting with the root layer. I'll circle back around on the other layers. Share your insights in the comments.

Layer 1. Sin. What is it? How does it work?

For this, I bring up this wonderful video from the Bible Project, which explores the idea of "missing the mark" and "moral failure".

These are the key insights from the video that stuck out to me personally.

“Every human is an image of God, a sacred being who represents the creator and deserving of respect.

Sin is a failure to love God and others and not treating them with the honor they deserve.

Sin against people is a sin against God.

And sin is more than doing bad things, it describes how we easily deceive ourselves and spin illusions to redefine our bad decisions as good ones.”

I'd encourage you to watch the entire ~6-minute video.

What's Wrong With Society?

Part 5B. Assume Positions!

The Left and Right are two sides of the same coin. We see one side doing bad so we fight back failing to see we’re doing the same bad.

We fuel the cycle of retaliation. They hit me, so I hit back. And we spiral into brokenness, blame, and revenge seeking.

Because we’re ideological and not morally grounded, we reactively continue to spin the merry-go-round.

In the third edition prologue of his book, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre describes the two parts of liberalism.

“That conservatism is in too many ways a mirror image of the liberalism that it professedly opposes. Its commitment to a way of life... is a commitment to an individualism as corrosive as that of liberalism. And, where liberalism by permissive legal enactments has tried to use the power of the modern state to transform social relationships, conservatism by prohibitive legal enactments now tries to use that same power for its own coercive purposes.”

What's Wrong With Society?

Part 5C. Assume Positions!

MacIntyre continues, placing this insight into this set of roles that came before it.

“[we have] notable characters in the cultural dramas of modernity: that of the therapist, who has in the last twenty years become bemused by biochemical discoveries; that of the corporate manager, who is now mouthing formulas that she or he learned in a course in business ethics, while still trying to justify her or his pretensions to expertise; and that of the aesthete, who is presently emerging from a devotion to conceptual art. So the conservative moralist has become one more stock character in the scripted conversations of the ruling elites of advanced modernity. But those elites never have the last word.”

We became gears in the machine. We think we’re fighting against the machine, but we’re actually keeping it going.

Learn more about these roles from Alasdair MacIntyre’s book, After Virtue, in the this recap video >>

What's Wrong With Society?

Part 7B. Driving the Machine.

“Why is Trump so popular? Because he said the system the rigged. And he knows the system is rigged because he uses the rigged system.”

Trump called out the system, gave his personal witness, and exposed the hypocrisy of the Democrats who are also using the system, but doing it secretly.

Trump said he’d drain the swamp but he himself is the swamp thing. Trump is doing everything the swamp does, he’s just not hiding it.

“Trump is what I call an honest liar.”

That’s another line from Chapelle.

The explicit corruption of Trump has exposed the corruption of the system.

But it’s also opened Pandora’s box for others to follow in his footsteps.

Bit starts at 8:43 in video clip.