I’ve tried to give my son everything he needs to succeed. But that doesn’t mean I will give him everything he wants. There’s a reality in any pursuit: to be excellent, you’ll need to put in the work or delay gratification to reach your full potential. If a parent gives a child everything they want, there’s no incentive for them to learn and improve.
To a child, everything provided for them is a given, and every task required is an injustice. Why should they have to wash the dishes? The grumbling or attempts to negotiate last longer than the time it would take to finish the chore. And, honestly, the easy route is just to do it ourselves. But that deprives a child of the opportunity to learn all those transferable life skills—at the very least, to get a little practice being helpful rather than entitled.
In the West we already have abundance and the result is atrophied muscles and dull minds.
If we shower children with abundance, they will never appreciate what is given nor ever be satisfied. It seems that no matter what we have, we always want more. If given the moon, we’ll want the other planets and the stars as well—and then we still won’t be happy with that. The greatest satisfaction comes through work and accomplishment. Playing video games all day or scrolling social-media feeds may trip reward centers, but it amounts to empty calories and can’t replace substance.
I’ve watched spontaneous interviews with very wealthy men, and nearly every one of them says that their abundance did not bring happiness. At least one admitted he was suicidal despite millions in assets. Our peak enjoyment in life comes when we invest time, effort, and resources and eventually reap the fruit of our labor. Sure, going to the gym may be difficult, but the endorphins are addicting and the muscles are a reward.
Built for Scarcity—Not Utopia
I watched a video about the problems with utopia, and the framing of capitalism as a system built for scarcity was correct. We would need a radically different way of ordering ourselves if the things we wanted just grew on trees. If you could have whatever you wanted without effort, why would you pay for anything or even care who owns it? My property rights only matter because it costs something to acquire or replace the things I own. If everything we wanted was free and completely abundant, we wouldn’t need to value it at all.
The presenter, who seemed intelligent enough, made a critical flaw while talking about providers of generative AI. He claimed that those charging for the service were creating artificial scarcity “because the code is open-source or whatever.” But this totally ignores the immense computing power that’s required—the powerful microchips, massive amounts of energy, and the staff needed to keep it all running. So no, that isn’t an example of abundance.
I’m used to naïve takes coming from the religious side, but it’s fascinating to see secular thinkers stumble over the very same things. Yet it touches directly on the human condition. We are not wired for abundance. Ultimately, even if we could reduce human labor to zero, our brains were created for scarcity, and when faced with unnatural abundance we don’t actually do very well.
Wall-E is probably the best depiction of a world of abundance that goes well. It could go in many directions, unhealthy ease the better of the many scenarios.
Material wealth, to start with, is never a cure for boredom or lust. If anything, those who have all their physical needs met are often left with a void of purpose. Their abundance never creates fulfillment or a reason to be in the world. And some appetites are basically insatiable: a man can have all the sex he wants and still desire the one he cannot have. It is often the ultra-wealthy—those who have everything we imagine would make us happy—who are also the most perverse and dissatisfied.
It reminds me how young-earth creationist (YEC) types often portray entropy as purely negative when it is as necessary for life as order. Fertile soil, for example, contains organic compounds that come from dead plants and animals. This is part of a cycle—neither good nor bad—like the weather. The same forces that bring a spring shower can also leave behind a swath of destruction. Creativity itself often lives at the edge of order and disorder. You may not enjoy a messy room that needs cleaning, but without it your life would probably feel pointless.
Furthermore, social hierarchy would be the only game left if we completely removed the need for productivity and occupation. If AI replaced all jobs, the result might be material abundance, but not utopia. As the saying goes, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” and some people with nothing to do will create drama. Boredom is good when it provokes us to create something new, but bad when the “new thing” is us causing trouble for others for lack of something else to do. It is better when we need to do something productive to survive, because we’re primed for it.
Consider how an overly sterile environment can trigger autoimmune disorders; similar problems would arise in a world where struggle was fully removed. It wouldn’t solve our environmental or energy problems—there would still have to be limits and rationing to keep from stripping the planet bare. Some people will never be content with the base level of property and possessions. There will still be scarcity even if human labor is no longer a cost. Advantages will still exist. At that point a new hierarchy will form—perhaps one based solely on beauty or charisma—where many have no path to “level up.”
In capitalism, while there’s an advantage to those who go first, there are multiple paths to success. Sure, there is cost-cutting at the expense of quality (see the Campbell’s Soup controversy), but there is also genuine efficiency and a system where nothing need go to waste. Bad actors create opportunities for others. If Enzo Ferrari hadn’t been a pompous jerk, we wouldn’t have Ford’s GT40 legacy or Lamborghini. Ferrari’s rude remarks were the provocation that pushed others to build cars capable of beating his. In a free market there is a profit motive to share rather than hoard. In a post-labor AI world where elites no longer need human workers or customers, would they have any incentive to distribute limited resources?
Abundance, Unearned, Robs Good Character
The video is correct that abundance won’t lead to utopia—yet it misses the deeper reason why. It isn’t just that we’d get bored or turn to status games (true as that is). The real problem is that abundance without cost quietly deletes the only proven mechanism we have for turning a human being into a person worth becoming.
When everything is given for free, nothing is cherished. When nothing is earned, nobody is grateful. When no one is grateful, no one is generous. When no one is generous, society stops being a community and it becomes a zoo with really nice cages: no material need unmet, the trough always full, and yet we are no different from a lion removed from its natural habitat.
That’s why I won’t hand my son the life he thinks he wants. I’ll give him everything he truly needs: enough security to take risks, enough scarcity to make victories sweet, enough resistance to grow muscle around his soul. I’ll let him wash the dishes, wait for the game he saved up to buy, lose the race he didn’t train hard enough for, feel the sting of “not yet” and the glory of “I finally did it”.
That feeling of a hard fought win cannot be artificially produced. In a world where AI leads the way can there be human thriving?
Because the cruelest thing a parent can do isn’t to let a child struggle. The cruelest thing is to raise him in a world so padded, so instantly gratifying, so artificially abundant that he never discovers the one truth every happy adult eventually learns: The joy was never in finally getting the thing. The joy was in finally becoming the kind of person who could get it—and still know it wasn’t the point.
Scarcity isn’t the enemy of human flourishing. It’s the narrow gate we have to squeeze through to find out who we actually are. And I want my son on the other side of that gate—tired, scarred, proud, alive, and deeply, durably grateful—not because he was given the universe, but because he earned his small, yet irreplaceable and fully human corner of it.
If you create a vacuum you don’t always get to decide who fills it. Charlie Kirk was killed while speaking on a college tour to promote a brand of conservativism. Whether you do or do not believe the official narrative about who killed him and why, his death has left a void in the public square. Yes, certainly the Turning Point USA organization has grown as a result and buzz about “the next Charlie Kirk” started right after the assassination—even too soon. But there’s one winner and it is not on the list of approved candidates to be his heir.
The first time I heard the term “Groyperism” was from the mouth of Ben Shapiro. I’m not sure if this was before or after Shapiro and other ‘conservative’ Zio-bots had started to target Tucker Carlson for elimination or not, but it is really weird to see these so-called conservatives run a very coordinated smear campaign to silence critics of Israeli policy with charges of “white nationalism” or “neo-Nazi”—and sounding just like the woke left. What ever happened to the marketplace of ideas, debating bad ideas with better ideas, or carrying on the legacy of Charlie Kirk who would engage in discussion rather than try to deplatform those who disagree?
Whatever the case, Mark Levin and the rest of these Zionist mouthpieces come off as shrill and unhinged. What we’re seeing is a Streisand effect. The more they screech in their protest and try to brand with their labels, as the left does, the more people have begun to question. I have never had a reason to listen to Fuentes before. But much of what he says sounds perfectly reasonable and is at least not as bad as turning a blind eye to the bombing of babies. I mean, let’s just put things into perspective.
To be clear, they are not going after Tucker for his interview with a popular social media personality with an off-color Zoomer sense of humor. No, that’s just the excuse. They are going after him because he questioned Israel First policies and why we should go to war with Iran. They can’t assassinate him, that would be too obvious, but they can try to drive a wedge between him and GOP by claiming he’s gone over the edge. But it isn’t Tucker that’s the problem. He’s not at all neo-nazi or anti-semitic—he is just not one of those taking Bibi’s bribes.
Some of us simply notice the IDF bombing children and sodomizing prisoners and do not want our resources used for this. Some of us have noticed that Trump took millions from Miriam Adelson, a prominent Zionist, and that he is more focused on the national interests of Israel than he is our economic future. We’ve noticed how Charlie Kirk was under extreme pressure to censor certain voices, including Tucker, costing millions in contributions to his Turning Point USA, right before his public execution.
That Washington Post runs an article about the Republican’s “neo-Nazi problem” while not saying a word about Sen Lindsay Graham chortling “We’re killing all the right people, and we’re cutting your taxes.” This at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit. We have yet to see the media mouthpieces of the political regime condemn vile and disgusting Randy Fine, a Representative out of Florida, who advocates for the complete annihilation of two million people—kill every man, woman and child. But extremists are not a threat to the Republican party?
Christianity teaches to turn the other cheek and love your enemies, but the Talmud says the opposite, it says “If someone comes to kill you, kill them first.” And I’ve seen this teaching being applied to Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of NYC, or that he be given this treatment—that he can be preemptively killed for not backing Israel! And then they wonder why many good people are backing away from the Zionist movement? They’re basically giving themselves a license to kill anyone who speaks against the violence they do—calling it defense.
The Real Debate: Debate or Kill
Yesterday I opened up Facebook and there was paid content from a group that is trying to cancel Ms. Rachel over her opposition to killing babies. They basically accused her of being in league with Hamas. A terrorist. The only proof that they offer is her alleged alignment with Motaz Azaiza, a Palestinian activist who is opposed to Hamas and the armed resistance in Gaza. For Zionists any level of disagreement is equivalent to being a Nazi and eventually a death sentence.
Ms. Rachel is Hamas?
The Levin side believes in things like blood guilt and collective punishment, that guilt is in a challengers DNA, whereas Tucker sees all individuals as redeemable (including the likes of Fuentes and Levin) and attempts to employ reason rather than violence as the means to further his ends. Levin can only cancel or kill. He sees himself as being a part of a superior race—a chosen people—which exempts him from needing to talk to the other side. To him anyone who would dare to disagree is less than an animal and shouldn’t be allowed to live. Tucker, on the other hand, literally invited Levin to join him on a far larger platform so they can discuss their differences.
Tucker represents the Christian worldview and articulates it well if given a chance to speak. Levin, by contrast, reminds me of a a man I sat next to on a flight from NYC. He was going to celebrate Passover in Israel, a very crude man (yet very intelligent) and he made for a very interesting conversation. I was immediately taken aback by his initial “I’m a racist” announcement and enjoyed telling him of my German heritage after, in the course of our conversation, he tells me he hates all Germans. It made me think of the difference in religious traditions. There is no “love your enemies” in Judiasm. You kill or conquer.
What Levin and other Zionists truly are is Jewish supremacists. They don’t see the people outside of their group as equals or even necessarily human. You’re like a dog. If you are obedient they’ll let you eat and if you are not they’ll put you down. You don’t have a discussion with lower lifeforms—you don’t need to answer to them or treat them as you would an equal. That’s why Levin is incapable of even understanding the Olive Branch offered to him by Carlson. To him it’s an insult. To him it is an affront to his position as superior.
The entire New Testament is basically an attack on Jewish supremacy. When Jesus highlights the faith of a Roman he’s hitting his audience where it hurts. He tells them point blank that they’re not the children of Abraham, that those who reject the Son do not have the Father and are children of their father the devil:
Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me!
(John 8:42-45 NIV)
Now even quoting this could get someone labeled as anti-Semetic. But Jesus is not talking about blood guilt or their ethnicity, he is confronting their rejection of Him and the Gospel of reconciliation he offered to all who believe. St Peter welcomed Gentiles into the church and even relaxed the rules of Jewish identity for converts. St Paul, like Jesus instructing to lend unto Caeser what is Caeser’s, legitimizes Roman authority as a minister of God:
Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.
(Romans 13:1-7 NIV)
The Jews hated Roman authority and they rebelled against it. But St Paul legitimizes it saying that if they enforce a moral standard then it is good. This goes against right or wrong based on what tribe. Zionists cry if there own are harmed, make an appeal to morality, and yet celebrate when a prisoner is raped on camera by an IDF guard. They have two different standards. Sodomy is okay when it is against someone standing up to their domination. But why resistance to their rule makes you a terrorist. However, St Paul says even Pagans authorities need to be obeyed if they do good. This concept goes directly against those who saw their own as good no matter what they did.
Christianity welcomes all. It tells us “there is neither Jew nor Gentile” (Gal 3:28), and abandons divisive identity to embrace the example of Jesus Christ. Zionism is the exact opposite. It says those who are not part of their chosen race have no rights and can either choose servitude or death. When you make the same claim to rights they will kill you. Israel has just passed a law that it is okay to execute Palestinians—but Jews are completely exempted. And this is not an apartheid state? Really?!?
Two Versions of America First
Carlson and Fuentes, while lumped together by the Zio-bots, are two very different ideas of America First. Carlson is a classic liberal or coexist conservative. He believes in a US where “all men are created equal” and there is no superior or inferior race. Fuentes, is a bit more like an Uno Reverse card and does to them what they do to us.
Fuentes is part of the generation tired of being told white men are the problem and fighting fire of identity politics with the fire of his own brand. Carlson, in contrast, is attempting the Christian approach—applying Romans 12:20-21:
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Whereas the Talmud advises the exact opposite—which is to eliminate perceived threats through preemptive violence—and the firebrand Fuentes answers the Jewish supremacists with his own parody version of them, the Christian response is more of a love bomb. While identity politics can’t overcome identity politics and those who live by the sword will also die by it, this third way option offers potential to break these cycles of tit-for-tat violence and escalation. Had Israel tried the same approach at any point on the past 77 years there may not have ever been a need for the two-state solution. And, while I don’t blame Fuentes for his reactionary identity politics, there is not much of a way forward in his approach.
This is a crisis point for Western civilization, we either allow ourselves to remain vassals of a Jewish supremacist regime, or we find an American identity that mirrors the same attitude of the Zionists, or we pursue a path of peace by putting the words of Jesus into practice. Yes, turnabout is fairplay—and the Fuentes types have as much right to defend themselves as Israel does. But the project of humanity isn’t served by this, we end up as divided warring factions trying to cancel or kill enough of the other side to win—and everyone ends up a loser. Or we act in faith and choose a path of empathy for all rather than selective love and multiple standards based on identity group.
This is what makes the attacks against the Tucker Carlson types so reprehensible. He is trying to talk to and find common ground with all parties in the conflict. The point is to build bridges not burn them. Fuentes, who has trashed Carlson in the past, was willing to sit down and talk. Levin, by contrast, tried to act as if Carlson (who has a social media following that absolutely dwarfs his own) is a weirdo and somehow trying to gain an audience by hosting him—a total inversion of the truth. There is this very clear pattern that every accusation made by the Zio-bots is a confession.
But I digress. Those who case about Israel should stop alienating the moderate voices that aren’t actually a threat to an Israel that is governed morally and doesn’t show clear partiality based on ethnicity or religion. The people who reject the reasonable voices—or accuse all who dare to question them “Nazis” or “anti-Semites”—they’re a threat to everything built in the time since the Old Testament. It is a regressive position, a return to tribalism, and decidedly anti-Christ.
Fool Me Once, Shame On You
We have a choice. We can choose not to see any of this, plug our ears and pretend Judeo-Christian is not an oxymoron—kiss the wall so to speak. Or we choose the way of Fuentes, fighting Jewish supremacy with our own tribal identity based loyalty and go down that eye for an eye path until we’re all blind. Or we take Tucker’s listen to all sides approach and show our loyalty only to the values of our Sovereign. There is no going back. Charlie Kirk is dead. The era that he represents is over. There can be no union of light and darkness, no yoking of believer and unbeliever, we choose Christ or we are fallen away from truth.
The mask has slipped completely from the faces of Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, Randy Fine, and the loudest voices of the Zionist wing of American conservatism—revealing, in the stark words of Isaiah 5:20, those who “call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” For decades this sleeper cell has cloaked themselves in the familiar language of constitutional liberty, and preached free speech absolutism, promoted so-called Judeo-Christian values—decrying campus cancel culture and leftist deplatforming as the death of the republic. Yet the moment a conservative dares question unconditional aid to Israel—the moment Tucker Carlson hosts a dissident voice—the very same men reach for the same weapons that they once swore to destroy: smears, leaks, boycotts, and ritual excommunication.
Mark Levin, who spent years positioning himself as the fiercest defender of open discourse against Big Tech censorship, now leaks private text messages calling Tucker Carlson a “little bastard” and “modern-day David Duke,” then storms his radio show in November 2025 to declare that anyone who interviews Nick Fuentes has “no place in the conservative movement”—this a purity test delivered with all the sanctimonious fury of a 2019 Berkeley sophomore demanding a speaker be banned. The constitutional scholar who once thundered his version of “the answer to bad speech is more speech” now insists the answer to speech that he dislikes is coordinated ostracism.
Ben Shapiro, the man who built an empire mocking trigger warnings and safe spaces, devotes an entire week of shows in November 2025 to branding Carlson an “intellectual coward” and “Nazi normalizer,” tweeting “No to cowards like Tucker Carlson who normalize their trash,” and urging the right to treat him as radioactive. The same Shapiro who once said “facts don’t care about your feelings” now deals exclusively in guilt-by-association and emotional blackmail, demanding that conservatives choose between loyalty to America First and loyalty to a foreign government’s PR narrative—no debate, no nuance, just shunning.
Randy Fine, the Florida legislator lionized by the GOP establishment, goes further still: in early November he labels Carlson “the most dangerous man in America” and “leader of a modern-day Hitler Youth,” not for violence or lawbreaking, but for the crime of hosting an interview Fine dislikes. This from a man whose own rhetoric in his speeches and on social media has included celebrating the starvation of Gaza civilians and declaring that even Palestinian children are terrorists for being born Palestinian.
The mask is not slipping here; it has been hurled to the ground and stomped on.This is the great revelation of 2025: the loudest “anti-cancel culture warriors” on the right were never opposed to cancel culture itself—only to cancel culture directed at them. When the target is a paleoconservative, a Christian nationalist, or simply an America-First voice that refuses to put Tel Aviv’s interests above Washington’s, the old tools of the far left—deplatforming, blacklisting, public shaming—are suddenly presented as holy instruments of righteousness.
Why this incredible reversal?
It’s truly not a reversal.
It is a revelation.
What we are witnessing is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. No, they are wolves in sheep’s skin and this is the final exposure of an Israel-First worldview that is truly in total opposition to conservative in the American grain. Christian conservatism—rooted in the universalism of the Gospel and the natural rights tradition of the Founders, along with a deep suspicion of foreign entanglements—has always held that sin is sin, that mercy is extended even to enemies, and that no man and no nation stands above judgment. The mask that has fallen reveals something older, something tribal: a politics of blood and soil transplanted from the Levant, only dressed for decades in borrowed Reaganite clothing.
The choice cannot be clearer. We cannot remain neutral. We believe that everyone still breathing is redeemable, like the Apostle Paul, or we revert to belief in blood guilt—and that even babies can be branded as terrorists and brutally killed. We can believe that a Jew named Jesus is the seed of Abraham that saves the world or we side with those who say he was a false prophet boiling in feces. We believe in the kingdom that is built on supernatural love or one that which is a product of weapons of war and fights (in various forms of disguise) for the destruction of every Christian value we claim to hold dear.
This is what Zionists celebrate.
It may only be a coincidence that Charlie Kirk was killed shortly after enraging his Israel First donors by refusing to disassociate with Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens. Maybe it did not matter to them that he felt a need to abandon the pro-Israel cause? But I know Kirk wouldn’t join these Zio-bot zealots in their campaign to cancel Carlson for talking to everyone.
A religious fundamentalist might see Nietzsche’s “Madman” parable as an attack on faith. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental decline and tragic end could seem like an obvious consequence. His bold claim that “God is dead” would naturally lead to madness, wouldn’t it?
Recently, I came across the story of Ruth Miller, an Amish woman whose religious convictions led to an unthinkable act. In a state of spiritual delusion, she drove her 4-year-old son, Vincen, to a lake and “gave him to God” by throwing him into the water resulting in his drowning. This awful tragedy following immediately after the accidental drowning of her husband Marcus during a failed attempt to swim to a sandbar in an effort to prove his faith.
Both belief in God or disbelief really does not make a difference as far as our mental health. We can attribute beliefs to actions, like the divisive assumption—of black and white thinkers—that Decarlos Brown Jr. was motivated by racial animus. Or realize that our human psyche is capable of dangerous misfires no matter our skin color category or ideological affiliation. Black, Amish or Atheist, all can have psychological breaks from reality originating from family history or environmental factors.
In the case of Nietzsche, who suffered from a breakdown at the age of 44—while seeing a horse being flogged—the theories of why he declined range from neurosyphilis to the possibility of frontotemporal dementia and a brain tumor. It could be a combination of factors, and maybe the very thing that made him brilliant also part of his downfall?
Nietzsche had a busy and relentless mind, his “will to power” philosophy itself perhaps a way to cope with a world that didn’t align with what his cultural heritage told him. He had to take things to their ends, he was not content with the answers he was given and this tendency of his mind being rooted deep in the composition of his brain—progressive disease and circumstances finally pushing him over the edge into insanity?
Likewise, the Amish mother, a pious woman by appearances, didn’t process her religious teachings the same as others in her church and tradition. For better or for worse, most claim to take the Bible literally would never attempt to do the things that they’ve read in the book. In a modern context a parent who is willing to sacrifice a child to God is rightly considered mad. But for Abraham it was a proof of his righteousness:
By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.
(Hebrews 11:17-19 NIV)
That’s one way to explain away an irrational act of Abraham tying up his child, and then putting him pyre to be a sacrifice to God. It is just plain madness otherwise. Is it really any wonder a delusional mind would follow this pattern in the Holy texts? I mean, truly, the crazier part is how we can read through this in Sunday school class without being a bit disturbed. Only when someone starts to act in this kind of ‘faith’ does anyone notice it is completely unacceptable.
Faith or lunacy?
But then we’re all mad. Half of us claim it is okay to dismember a living human being in the womb because their existence is a big inconvenience for an adult woman. While the other half thinks it is okay dismember a living human being in Gaza because of what Hamas did a couple of years ago. All seem willing to sacrifice little children in the ‘right’ circumstances. We’ll praise those who end the life of the innocent when this aligns with an imagined ideal outcome or future. We’ll all say the other is irrational and evil while justifying our own violence.
But, I digress, we should not blame the blackness of Decarlos Brown Jr. for his evil deed any more than the Amishness of Ruth Miller for what she did. The idea that we should not change our standards based on race should come with the general non-judgment based on race. Mental illness is mental illness, unbound by category. To judge actions without prejudice—based on race, faith, or even agnostic philosophy—requires us to comprehend the universal fragility of the human mind and our own susceptibility to delusion.
The quote in title, an unintentionally honest comment from a pious young woman, will continue to ring in my ears for decades to come. Scripture describes the word of God being “sharper than any two-edged sword,” but her romantic rejection came more like a hammer blow to my Mennonite worldview where spiritual was supposed to outweigh physical gain. I had patterned my life, up to that point, around a sort of practicality over flash and suddenly realized what I thought was an asset was actually liability.
I was reminded of these words again as my wife’s glowing approval of the monstrosity in my driveway, a Ford Explorer ST, still feels out of place for me. I mean, granted, I was not keen on transitioning to family life with a pedestrian option like a minivan or boring SUV. But I didn’t expect my always frugal—cost conscious—female counterpart to go along with it 100%. She was supposed to pump the brakes and did not. I’ve realized, in this, that every woman is happy with the nice things and won’t say no if you provide it for them. We’ve both agreed to blame the baby for our reckless financial decision.
So, back to Milton, a place I’ve since moved on from and to the higher cost town across the river. Up until the words from the mouth of this wholesome girl, I had thought having a little house completely paid off would be worth something—even attractive. After all she claimed to be interested in missionary service and what better place to get a start, right? From what I had believed, there are needs anywhere there are people and where better to start than a deteriorating industrial town? Milton is an example of the rust belt, a place of declining opportunities and costs of outsourcing production.
The phrase “you’re thirty years old living in Milton” was simply accurate conveyance of her underlying priorities. There’s always the difference between what we say we are and the actual truth. Even in the secular culture there’s a romanticization of the love of two impoverished people who stand together in desperate circumstances. And those raised in an environment where Christian mission is supposed to be first, living as one poor as a church mouse amongst common people would seem the ideal.
But it is not. No, this young woman, like the one who had rejected me for not pursuing a title of “missionary” or “pastor” years prior, was clearly after status. They will not say it outright, probably are not even aware, but it is a kind of glamour they seek in service. A call to some exotic location to impress their religious peers. Sure, a Bentley may not be status in a conservative Anabaptist church, but the ability to jet around the world (often on someone else’s dime) is thrilling where it is considered sacrifice. It is currency, a way to gain status in a community of faith or be seen as righteous.
Resources are showered on the ministry or mission. Sure, it comes with stress, my 9-5 does as well, but the payoff is proportional. And not talking about “treasures in heaven” or God’s favor. A pastor has access to the community resources. It is social power as much as it is a position of responsibility and there are always those who want to curry a little favor. Again, it also comes with more scrutiny as well, but most tend to minimize the costs when they set off in a particular direction. Besides that, for the Mennonite woman, this is for the broad shoulders of her husband to bear, right?
The high expectations of my wife have been a little surprising to me. To her credit, she has been putting up with a partly finished remodel of old house since marrying and moving in. But yet, despite coming from the Philippines, her standards are now close to that of an American woman. We comment about our son’s demands for what the other kids have, but often fail the test ourselves. I mean, is it at all coincidence that I decide to finally pull the trigger on a new vehicle after a Mennonite workmate showed up with his new truck? Probably not.
And that’s the bottom line here. We are all after power in different forms. Be it money, be it land, access to resources or just status in our peer group. What I’ve found is that a religiously trained (or ‘spiritual’) person is no different. No, all they do is give a righteous cover to their personal ambition. They live in a delusion. Materialism is bad, they will say, but they are fine with your donation of money so they can buy a bigger missionary compound in Southeast Asia. And, under the fluff of my own pursuit of love was the same sexual motivation of all men.
I hated when a physiatrist summarized my obsession with the impossibility as being a “sexual attraction” and dismissed it initially as a woman who knew nothing of my heart as a man of God. But now I realized this is undoubtedly the correct assessment. Men want sexually attractive women and women want high status men. This is an essential part of our nature—a matter of survival for our genes—a young healthy woman is able to bear children and a wealthy or connected man can give them much more than a thirty year old living in Milton.
I’ve moved on from Milton, but cannot move on from the reality I have encountered head on, we’re sexual creatures living in material reality and can’t escape this by denial. I had been better to learn this decades ago rather than cling to a naive notion of love where it ends like a storybook. But I am now living the best life available to me and hope that my wife is happy with her decision. She’s won my heart asking for the “simple and happy life” and now I want to give her that and everything else wonderful this world offers. The best thing we gained was the child born almost a year ago now…
It’s never too late to live the life that you should—which is more about perspective than what you possess—even if you were denied love for being thirty years old and living in Milton.
Irregular Ideation 