Education Triangle: Parents, teachers, and the best interests of every child

Photo credit: Brad West on Unsplash.com

In the shadow of the University of Wyoming, the Wyoming Pastors Network gathered for a conference that brought together speakers David Gibbs, Bob Schaffer, and Wyoming’s own Superintendent of Public Instruction, Brian Schroeder. Its theme: Stand for Parents and Children.

Two members of Wyoming’s legislature were in attendance, and we were honored to have Megan Degenfelder, Republican candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction, with us as well. It was a joy to meet so many distinguished educators. Above all, it was extremely encouraging to see a unanimous commitment to Wyoming’s parents, teachers, and children.

David Gibbs III, President and General Counsel of the National Center for Life and Liberty, started the day with an informative survey of the constitutional rights that children, parents, teachers and citizens have at school. He helped the conferees understand how we can all come alongside teachers, administrators, and school boards in a way that is helpful, hopeful, and constructive.

Next, Bob Schaffer, headmaster of Liberty Common School (k-12) in Fort Collins, Colorado, told his story. While he served as a Colorado state senator for nine years, and a United States representative for six, the most inspiring part of his story was how an ordinary father of kindergarten-aged twins became involved in his local school and rose to the head of the most successful k-12 system in Colorado.

Bob Schaffer

By his telling, the key to successful schools is choice. When education becomes a marketplace, rather than a monopoly, every child benefits. At the same time, the rancor and bitterness of debates about public education are diminished. One of Schaffer’s most brilliant insights was the observation that when two parents disagree on how to raise their children, it is never necessary to pit them against one another. Rather, school choice accommodates both.

Take, for instance, the vitriolic opinions exchanged on this page about critical race theory. Why waste so much time and energy on forcing those who support it to submit to those who don’t? Obviously, there are people who want their children to be schooled in CRT. So, let them have a school that will meet their needs. And, let those who do not want their children to be indoctrinated with CRT have a school that meets their needs. Problem solved.

All education is religious education—even if many religions do not consider themselves religions. For instance, both sides agree that progressive Christianity is incompatible with orthodox Christianity. This, in itself, does not poison our public discourse. Rather, the use of government power and money to coerce one side to accept the religion of the other is the problem.

When we focus on the needs of parents and children, rather than the need for conformity, we are being true to American ideals.

Outgoing superintendent, Brian Schroeder, ended the day by sharing his optimistic vision for Wyoming. “According to the vision of our founding fathers,” Schroeder said, “the community schoolhouse was uniquely positioned to be an extension of and a support for the home, as well as an incubator for, and a bridge to, society.” He continued, “Wyoming, I believe, is one of the few places in our nation that still, for the most part, operates that way instinctively.” This, he believes, positions us to lead the nation in education.

Brian Schroeder

Of first priority is the triangular relationship of parents, teachers, and children. “The educational enterprise…only works well when all three work well together.”

Parents are the foundation because they are the ultimate customer of the education system. Education is always about what’s best for the child. And what’s best for one child may not be best for another. “But ultimately the parents know their kids best,” he observed, “so it goes without saying that the decision should rest with them, the parents.”

Teachers form the second side. Those who care about the proper education of children have one of “the most difficult job[s] on earth.” Therefore, we must, “thank them, honor them, care for them, support them, equip them, empower them, and pay them well.”

Children, the third leg, is what education is all about. “If this is really about our kids,” the Superintendent said, “then territorialism has no place in this equation. This is not—and never should be about public schools vs. private schools vs. parochial schools vs. home schools vs. charter schools vs. virtual schools vs. private tutoring. It is all of the above because it’s always about …what’s best for the child.”

Although duty took Megan Degenfelder away before we could invite her to our panel, we greatly appreciated her time with us. To be sure, Wyoming faces many challenges. But by working together we are very hopeful that Wyoming can lead the nation in serving the best interest of every child.

The Australian ballot comes to Wyoming

In recent months, dozens of Wyoming citizens from across the state have been denied access to public records. Many of these denials have included a reference to Article 6, Section 11 of the Wyoming Constitution. Such widespread public interest merits a closer look.

Section 11 begins, “All elections shall be by ballot.” Perhaps surprisingly, when this language was ratified in 1889, ballot elections were a recent innovation. As late as 1892, citizens in West Virginia rejected new ballot requirements and demanded a return to the voice vote.

Paper ballots, in fact, were at the heart of election reforms across the globe. In 1856, Australia first enacted the so-called secret ballot. As similar laws were enacted from London to Cheyenne they were known as “the Australian ballot.” These reforms were designed to counteract the widespread practice of voter intimidation. 

Robber barons, bosses, and corrupt politicians had learned to game the system. It was common to demand that employees or tenants vote a certain way, under threat of being fired or evicted. Observers at the polling place would enforce this intimidation either by eavesdropping on their voice vote or by observing which ballot was cast into the box.

At that time, ballots were printed by political parties and given to voters in advance of election day. They were easily identifiable by shape and color. So, it was nearly impossible to vote free of external pressures. The Australian ballot countered this with four specific reforms. 

• First, every ballot listed all candidates running for office, and not only one party’s slate.
• Second, instead of each special interest printing its own ballot, the Australian ballot was standardized and printed at public expense. 
• Third, ballots could not be distributed outside of the polling place, or before voting day. Thus, fraudsters could not pressure voters to mark ballots before coming to vote. 
• Fourth, polling places supplied a privacy booth to prevent fraudsters from observing how voters marked the ballot.

After the presidential election of 1884, all American states rapidly adopted the Australian ballot. Kentucky was the last to implement it in 1891. Wyoming’s constitution was ratified during this time and Article 6, Section 11 enumerated all four elements of the Australian ballot.

It says, (1) “all candidates… shall be printed on the same ballot,” (2) “at public expense,” (3) “and on election day [the ballot shall] be delivered to the voters within the polling place,” and (4) “All voters shall be guaranteed absolute privacy in the preparation of their ballots.”

Provisions one and two are relatively non-controversial. But early voting conflicts with our third provision. And the fourth provision recently has been stretched beyond recognition. 

“Preparation” is what happens before the ballot is cast. That is where privacy is guaranteed. But public record requests to look at ballots after they have been cast are being denied based on this sentence: “All voters shall be guaranteed absolute privacy in the preparation of their ballots, and the secrecy of the ballot shall be made compulsory.” 

The secrecy guaranteed here is in the voter’s preparation and in the ballot itself. It is a guarantee that anyone who looks at the ballot will not be able to identify the voter. Secrecy is secured not by hiding ballots from some while allowing others to inspect them. Rather, it is secured by preventing anyone who looks at them from being able to identify a voter. 

Monique Meese

So, who is saying otherwise? The former communications director for the secretary of state, Monique Meese, testified before the Corporations Committee (August 25, 2022): “I should read this sentence as broadly as I can because I want to protect my office from someone who is upset or might have a claim of action against my office for giving out information that’s constitutionally protected.” 

Two things should be said about this claim. First, the job of the Secretary of State’s office is faithfully to interpret the constitution. It is not to protect his office by stretching the words of the constitution “as broadly as I can.”

Second, the constitution demands that the ballot itself be made secret. If the Secretary’s office has not ensured that the ballot is secret so that anyone—from the county clerk to the janitor—might be able to identify the voter, the secretary has failed in his constitutional duty. But if the secretary meets his constitutional obligation, no one can be identified. And so, no one can be “upset or …have a claim of action.”

For the entire history of Wyoming millions of ballots have been inspected by clerks, election judges, and election observers. Every single one of them is a direct refutation of Meese’s novel interpretation. After 133 years of constitutional precedent, even statutory enactment of this interpretation would be hard-pressed to survive a constitutional challenge. Much less should it survive as a bureaucratic dictum.

Post Script:

• The Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press has done a state-by-state analysis of which election records are publicly available. Colorado, Georgia, Texas, Vermont, and West Virginia explicitly permit public inspection of ballots. Many other states have not addressed the issue. The report concludes: "All election records of a county [in Wyoming] are public unless specifically exempted."
• Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, issued an August 17, 2022 opinion stipulating that both legislators and the general public have the right to inspect secret ballots.
• To varying degrees, states and counties throughout the United States have already set precedents by treating paper ballots, ballot images, and cast vote records as public records. In one example, Maricopa County, Arizona made 2.1 million available for public inspection in 2021.

The establishment clause should be rightly understood

Many who watch political discourse have noticed an alarming trend. Increasingly, pundits and policymakers paint an opposing position as “religious” and then dismiss that position out of hand—as though the position itself violated the so-called “separation of church and state.”

This attitude stifles public discourse. Not only is the “separation of church and state” an extra-constitutional dogma. It misinterprets the legitimate and necessary distinction between church and state. Worse, it disrespects fellow citizens at the very core of their being—their deepest identity.  

This trend was on full display last March when the “trigger bill” (HB 92) was being debated on the floor of the senate. It also appears regularly in anti-religious screeds on the opinion page—often, but not always, in connection with abortion. There are three things seriously wrong with such arguments. 

First, the claim that a child in the womb is a living human being, protected under Article I, Section 2 of the Wyoming Constitution, is not a religious claim. It is a medical claim. You can test it by checking to see if the DNA is human. You can test it by looking for signs of life—like a heartbeat. You can test it by seeing if a separate and unique individual exists.

None of these medical markers requires an act of faith. What requires an act of faith is to believe that a living human being does not merit full protection in law. Usually, this claim is connected to “personhood theory.” This dogma holds that not every human life is equal, but that there is an unseen and uncertain quality that some people have that makes them full persons under the law. 

The Supreme Court recently pointed out, in Dobbs v. Jackson, that it is unacceptable to “impose on the people a particular theory about when the rights of personhood begin” (p. 38). This—and not the demand for equal protection under the law—is tantamount to the establishment of religion.

Second, the U.S. Constitution was written precisely to allow people of all religions to participate in public discourse and to hold public office without discrimination. Since ancient times, governance and religion were joined at the hip. Only adherents of the dominant religion could have any say. Before Constantine, governing privilege required public adherence to the Roman gods. 

After Constantine, sometimes the Christians were in power and sometimes their pagan counterparts. Eventually, governance stabilized around Christendom until the Reformation of the 16th century. That made some governments Catholic, others Reformed, and others Lutheran. 

But America’s founders changed course entirely. They explicitly invited every person to use the power of persuasion to convince fellow citizens of the rightness of their beliefs. Quaker, Episcopalian, Catholic, or Jew—every citizen could enter public office without first passing a religious test (U.S. Constitution, Art. VI).

The assumption was that each citizen would fully represent his or her religion in the public square and build consensus on the basis of commonality. Nobody thought that religious people had to hide their deepest and most meaningful thoughts to be taken seriously in policy debates. The ideology of “Secularism” was not even invented until George Holyoke introduced the term in 1851. 

Third, religious neutrality is a lie. Every assertion is, ultimately, a religious statement. It rests on unspoken assumptions about the nature of the universe. Even the statement, “two plus two is four,” assumes that “is” means “equals,” and not merely “similar.” It assumes immutability—that it will always equal the same amount. It assumes that language has actual, objective meaning. These assumptions are unapologetically religious.

All public discourse is religious. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise. Secularist claims should not be privileged over Christian claims. The only privilege any claim merits is the power of persuasion. 

That was the foundational idea of America. People are not excluded from the debate because they refuse to expunge God from their vocabulary. Claims about the nature of life, marriage, family and citizenship can, and should be, debated in the public square. We owe that courtesy to our fellow citizens.

It is legitimate to question beliefs and challenge fellow citizens to defend their beliefs in the court of public opinion. Faith, after all, is adherence to the truth. It does no one good to outlaw the testing of truth claims. But it is a disservice to public discourse to disallow an otherwise true argument just because it has religious adherents. Let’s talk.

Ballots, or ballot images? Which is it?

Photo credit: Brett Jordan on unplash.com

Last week’s meeting of the legislature’s Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivision committee crackled with controversy. 

Observers were troubled by the ranked-choice voting scheme proposed to strip our political parties of the power to put their own candidates on the general ballot. 

Committee members pushed back against the secretary of state’s novel, and overly broad interpretation of Wyoming’s Constitutional provision for “secrecy of the ballot” (Art. 6, Sec. 11). 

Senator Nethercott’s motion to draft a bill that codifies federal guidelines for certification of election equipment raised concerns that Wyoming election law would dance to the constantly changing tune of the Election Assistance Commission.

Committee Chair, Dan Zwonitzer’s, motion to remove election oversight from the secretary of state’s office seemed to thumb a nose at 76,000 voters who resonated with Chuck Gray’s calls for increased election integrity. 

All of these issues merit the careful attention of Wyoming citizens. Each, in its own way, has the potential to erode further the power of our vote to express the consent of the governed. 

But the part of the meeting that most piqued my interest happened in the opening ten minutes. State election director, Kai Schon, gave a brief report on the August 16 primary election. Generally speaking, things went very smoothly. For that, we thank him for his good work.

Kai Schon, Director of Elections

He ended his report by touting a post-primary audit that went above and beyond the requirements of state law. He explained, “We want to look at the ballots that are actually being voted and see how our tabulators are adjudicating ballots.” In that sentence, he captured the mood of a strong majority of Wyoming voters.

Schon described reaching out to professor, Ken Gerow, director of UW’s statistics program, to help determine a statistically significant sample for the audit. He then reported triumphantly that the roughly 3,000 ballots of this random sample, distributed across 23 counties, matched exactly with the Cast Vote Records (CVRs).

If this report were exactly true as worded, voters around the state would have good reason to, in his words, “put to bed,” concerns about the trustworthiness of Wyoming’s ES&S voting machines. But Schon’s description was different from the Uinta County clerk’s description of the event. According to that website, they were comparing “ballot images and cast vote records.”

Audit observers in Uinta, and several other counties, did not carry out the stated intent of the director of elections to “look at the ballots that are actually being voted.” Instead, they looked only at the “ballot images.” There is a significant difference between the actual ballots and their “ballot images.”

Ballot images are photos that the machine takes of the ballot. They are produced by the machine, not by the voter. So, the audit conducted in Uinta County only compared one product of the machine (the ballot image) with another product of the same machine (the CVR, or cast vote record.) Nobody in Uinta County has looked at the actual ballots. 

Sheridan and Natrona counties both promised a “Post-Election Ballot Audit…in accordance with and as required by the Wyoming secretary of state policy (dated June 29, 2022).” Was this different than Uinta county’s audit? Or did all of Wyoming’s counties look only at the ballot images? Did the secretary of state’s June 29 policy require a look at the ballots, or only at the ballot images? (Public Records Request, pending).

Lawmakers should ask Mr. Schon these questions. Either Uinta County defied the SOS’s requirements, or Mr. Schon’s language before the Elections Committee was sloppy and misleading to the Wyoming people.

Some might scoff at this question as the mere splitting of hairs. But in this day of computer wizardry, it is a matter of night and day. Images can be altered in the blink of an eye. Paper ballots cannot. The smartphone you have in your pocket has the capability of instantly editing any photograph. It can automatically erase unwanted pixels, like red-eye, and insert new pixels, like stars and dog noses. More sophisticated programming can do even more.

Computer experts that examined the CVRs and ballot images of the machines in Mesa County Colorado raised precisely this possibility. They demonstrated on-screen how the hand-blackened ballot oval in front of one candidate could be cut out and replaced by an empty oval, and how that hand-blackened oval could be pasted in front of a different candidate—altering the ballot image to contradict the actual ballot. (See [s]election.code at the 48:00 mark)

Nobody is alleging that such fraud happened in Wyoming. But the director of Wyoming’s elections should recognize that words matter. If the ballot audit actually audited the ballots, Wyoming voters should know it. But if the ballot audits only audited ballot images—as happened in Uinta County—public testimony that omits that detail degrades voter confidence.

Join the resistance composed of happy warriors.

Photo credit: Michael DeMarco on Unsplash.com

Last week, this column showed how government is grounded in eternal truths of right and wrong. It went on to outline various levels of evil that require different responses from good citizens. Space prevented any discussion of what those responses might be. 

Today we need to remedy that. Otherwise, anxious minds might jump to false conclusions. Unhinged actions only put society in danger. Worse, it leaves our most powerful weapons against evil unused.

When government goes awry, those who truly believe it to be an institution of God will turn to prayer as the first resort. “Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (Psalm 127:1 ESV). When impassable roadblocks threatened the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin moved that it begin with prayer.

Prayer against evil should be more than private and personal. Churches should make them public and corporate. Prayers must not be silenced just because someone objects that it is “political.” The Church must become fully competent to distinguish between mere differences of opinion and matters of good and evil.

While human opinion should not intrude into the corporate prayers, they must include divine judgments of good and evil. Congregations that neglect praying about these matters, are robbing their neighbors of a solemn duty. The First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause along with the Free Assembly Clause exist for this purpose.

Citizens that pray publicly against public evils will naturally talk about them. This is the second kind of resistance to tyrannical government. Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor wrote, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

Tyranny suppresses any speech that would name it or call out its evil. To speak is to resist. Naming evil drags it out of the shadows and into the daylight—which is a powerful disinfectant. One calm, rational voice will break through the timidity of others, and swell into a chorus. Only through such public discussion can communities coordinate an effective response.

This is why tyrants cannot tolerate open discussion of evil. It is also why the calm and rational naming of evil is among the most powerful kinds of resistance. The pen is, indeed, mightier than the sword. The First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause is the second-most powerful weapon against tyranny.

Speech that is not backed up by action is hollow. That’s why the third defense against tyranny is action. But the cancel culture is a dangerous and costly place to act. Tyrants deliberately make action costly to suppress it. They jeopardize friendships, family relationships, and a good name. They threaten employment, reputation, and even government fines. 

Elie Wiesel

For all these reasons many good people go along to get along. They do things under pressure that they would not normally do. Sometimes they even do things against the best interest of those in their charge, contrary to conscience. They may excuse themselves that they are “only following orders,” but when innocent people are harmed, this excuse does not pass muster.

When supervisors, educators, pastors, doctors, or government officials do things against their better judgment to preserve themselves, they are participating in the evil. It may work for a while, but it only strengthens the evil and leads to ever more costly compromises.

Many good people feel like they have no choice. They feel like their duty to provide for the family prevents them from risking employment or future promotion. This objection is rooted in a misunderstanding. Contrary to popular opinion, God does not make it our duty to “bring home the bacon.” 

Rather, God requires that we faithfully and diligently serve our neighbor in our various jobs. He keeps for Himself the responsibility of feeding our families. He specifically forbids us to worry. “Do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:31-33).

This promise, and not the force of arms, fully equips us for the resistance. Teachers should teach the truth no matter what the union or some globalist might say. Government officials are elected to do the right thing—not to cower before illegitimate regulations. Doctors have a duty to “do no harm,” not to follow corporate protocols.

Each time you do your duty to others without fear of how tyrants might punish you, you are firing a bullet at the forces of evil. When entire communities, offices, industries, and officials do this simultaneously, the forces of evil are swept off the field. 

This is our first line of defense. God grant us many happy warriors.

The Magdeburg Confession is a document for our time

In 1550, the city of Magdeburg, Germany was under siege. It faced a crisis of government because the army encircling the city was not a foreign army, but a domestic one. 

The citizens of Magdeburg were subjects of the very Emperor whose armies encircled the city. He was there to enforce a law that they considered both ungodly and unjust. The city council faced an impossible decision. Should it obey the emperor, and allow the slaughter of innocent men under its protection? Or should it protect and defend Magdeburg’s citizens by taking up arms against its own emperor?

Either way, it seemed, would be a sin. The problem was both political and theological. The Magdeburgers were not so naïve as to think that Church and State could be separated. The very notion of obedience to lawful authority requires a belief that God Himself institutes legitimate governments. Without this foundation, there can be no notion of lawful and peaceful obedience. There is only the lex talionis—might makes right.

But if God puts rulers in place, then every ruler is “under God.” He is ultimately answerable to God Himself. This is not only true of the emperor, but it is also true of every lesser government official—from the head of a household to the mayor, to a faceless federal bureaucrat. 

In short, all the candidates on Tuesday’s ballot are running for a divine appointment. They seek an office that is ultimately answerable to God. And God requires that those whom He elects to execute the office justly.

When any office holder defies the principles of right and wrong—whether they are written into statute, or only imprinted on the human heart—he is acting illegitimately. Citizens need not be constitutional scholars to judge illegitimate government actions. Right and wrong exist prior to Constitution, U.S. Code, state statutes, or bureaucratic rules.

That is why so many citizens today are troubled. Unjust actions are taking place at every level of government. They see abuse of office in the unequal treatment of citizens under the law. They see the huge disparity between the Department of Justice’s treatment of J-6 prisoners and the same department’s treatment of 2020’s rioters. They see last Monday’s raid on Mar-a-Lago in contrast to James Comey’s refusal to prosecute the public crimes of Hillary Clinton.

These two examples are only the tip of the iceberg, but they are enough to make the point. Openly unjust governance defies the very God who set the government in place. This is the natural and logical consequence of denying the existence of God. Those who do not acknowledge God at the foundation of government, are left with nothing more than Nietzsche’s “will to power.” This can never end well.

But how should godly citizens and officeholders respond to openly unjust rulers? The pastors of Magdeburg addressed this question head-on in a document called “The Magdeburg Confession.” The city council did not have the authority that God gave the emperor, but it did have its own God-given authority. The Magdeburg Confession explained the duties that these “lesser magistrates” had towards God and towards the emperor. 

This document can also help us today. Injustice and tyrannical actions can goad people to overreact. That is both wrong and counterproductive. Not all tyranny is of the same type. Some can be borne without injury to the republic. Other types must be vigorously resisted. Thoughtful and godly citizens must know the difference. 

The first level of tyranny is when the office holder’s personal vices harm others. Here, we should urge the official to a better way of life but otherwise bear the injustice. Tyranny rises to a second level when an official unjustly uses government power against a citizen or a lower office holder. In that case, God does not compel a person to obey an unlawful order, but He does permit him to bear with the injustice so long as it does not compel him to participate in the evil.

When an unlawful command requires someone to sin, it has reached the third level of tyranny. At that level, a person is not only permitted, but required to disobey the unlawful order. “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29 ESV).

The fourth, and highest, level of tyranny moves from the persecution of certain persons to the persecution of the very rights and principles themselves. The Magdeburg Confession sees this as a persecution of God Himself, who is the author of all rights.

We would do well to dust off this centuries-old document and study it anew. As “one nation under God,” there is much that we can learn from it. Faithful and well-informed citizens will want neither to overreact nor to underreact in a time of crisis.

How to counter the psychology of totalitarianism

The Psychology of Totalitarianism is a book for our time. It should be high on the reading list of anyone who wants to understand our cultural moment, and to make an informed and effective response.

Mattias Desmet teaches at Ghent University in Belgium—in the Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting. According to the book’s introduction, he noticed in 2017 that the “grip of governments on private life was growing tremendously fast.” When this phenomenon went into overdrive in the early months of 2020, he was driven to complete the project.

Desmet begins by asking a simple question: Why is it that totalitarian governments never arose at any time in history until the 20th century? He answers, “totalitarianism is not a historical coincidence… It is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.” 

With the term “mechanistic thinking,” Desmet means the myth that man can be “reduced to a biological organism.” This reduction explains every human action as a mere biochemical reaction that is strictly determined by external factors. In other words, human will and purpose are non-existent. Human behavior can be controlled totally by anyone able to manipulate the world.

When enough people adopt this false, mechanistic worldview it is inevitable that they will begin to pull levers and push buttons in an attempt to act on their beliefs. That, and not some grand conspiracy, is what we are seeing in our cultural moment.

This mechanistic thinking is sometimes called “Atheistic Materialism,” sometimes, “Epicureanism,” or simply, “Science” with a capital “S.” However one names it, we should recognize it as a religion in its own right—one that is in direct conflict with Christianity. 

Christianity sees will and purpose at the core of the universe. God has perfect free will. When He creates man in His own image, God passes that will down to the human race as human agency limited only toward its creator. Therefore, it should be no surprise that the mechanistic thinking that dominates our world sees any vestige of Christianity as unacceptable blasphemy.

Mattias Desmet
Click for a video overview.

Desmet’s book is divided into three parts. The first section is valuable as a concise history of science. It traces how scientific advances can create the illusion that the entire universe is nothing but an elaborate machine. But once this illusion is mistaken for reality, it takes on a life of its own.

Scientific evidence that disproves the mechanistic assumption must be discounted, ignored, or denied. Fraud required to preserve the illusion creates a feedback loop of ever-increasing fraud. Eventually, the fraudulent science becomes impossible to hide and society reaches a tipping point.

The second section is the most riveting. It details how societies in the grip of a mechanistic worldview can fall into a type of mass hypnosis. It always begins with four widespread societal conditions.

The first two are the loneliness of social isolation coupled with a feeling of meaninglessness. From these the next two conditions arise: free-floating anxiety and free-floating aggression. By “free-floating,” Desmet means that these feelings are not connected with any particular threat or enemy. Such disconnected anxiety and aggression can easily be connected to something concrete. When that happens, we are in the early stages of totalitarianism.

In Nazi Germany, Jews were named as the cause of anxiety and the target of aggression. In Bolshevik Russia, it was the aristocracy—the “haves” became the targets of the “have nots.” In Communist China, it was those who stood against the Great Leap Forward.

In America today, the four conditions of totalitarianism are again present. Broken families and social media create widespread social disconnect. Notions that the universe, and life itself, arose from random chance feed a sense of meaninglessness. People feel anxiety without knowing why. The op-ed page daily demonstrates festering anger and aggression.

What will it take to prevent America’s falling into the same abyss as Germany, Russia and China? That is where Desmet’s book shines, and the reason it is a must-read. 

The path to reversing course begins with a sense of the transcendent and sublime. Science is not the end-all and be-all of the universe. Humans are more than biochemical machines. We really do have free will that can consider options and act on them. This reflects the will of a sovereign God guiding the universe.

Totalitarianism seeks to stamp out this truth. Don’t let it. Do not be intimidated into parroting the latest lie designed to squelch this truth. Speak the truth. Stand on principle. Swim upstream—especially when you are in the minority. 

Through each of these small acts of defiance, you assert your true humanity. In so doing, you reflect the God who created you. You become a beachhead of life that no mechanistic power can crush.