Ziklag T4.30 - Convinced Stupid

Why Do the Mighty Fall? with Broken: Counterfeit Christianity

SOS Discipline - Daily Proverb and Red Letter Reader

You cannot convince stupid. cf Pr. 29:9

The obvious is not hidden. cf Mt. 7:12

That which you see is normal. That which you do not see is extraordinary. cf Sun Tzu 5.3

From Today’s Stack

Why Do the Mighty Fall?

from my That’s All It Takes, as yet to be released elsewhere

Reality is counter-intuitive.

A good job is not “doing what you are told.” Great things are not achieved by fiat. The world grows when good people by good conviction act against the norms and for the better. Chain of command is valuable, but only when the best, most creative, innovative, self-competent people make up every link of the chain.

Sometimes, telling a superstar to stay in his lane shackles the flow. Sometimes, explaining a poem gets the letter but misses the spirit. Sometimes, paying the scientists to look has them looking in all the wrong places, or even gaming the system.

Gravity is Consistent

When the First Temple of Jerusalem fell in 587 B.C., the prophet Micah attributed its collapse as God’s wrath against the natural results of:

1. Ambivalence toward Evil (Mic 1:5-7)

2. Fiat Currency Manipulations (2:1-2)

3. Lawlessness among the Lawyers (3:5-7)

4. Trust in Tricks (5:10-15)

Institutional Decay

The decline of enterprise among any group is like a pollutant. At first, it is not easy to detect, and the body can heal. By the time the mercury from the fish in the river are causing your children immunodeficiencies, the clean up will take more labor. No matter what it may look like on the outside, the sick on the inside rarely shows up in the commonplaces until it is already too late.

Every human institution, whether “the king as supreme, or the governor as his servant,” is vulnerable. Alexander died. The Antigonids dissipated, the Seleucids overreached, and all that the masses remember is Cleopatra.

Her end was no prettier than most.

Anyone can fall, and most of us eventually do. But not everyone has to die of food poisoning. Group enterprise illness is hard to spot early, but not impossible. Repentance is not just about priestcraft.

Anna Karenina

“All happy families are alike: each unhappy family is unhappy in it’s own way.”

“There are more ways to fall than to become great,” Jim Collins writes. And, “All models are wrong. [But] Some models are useful.”

His model for Why the Mighty Fall consists of five stages, in order from hard to detect, tough to cure to easy to detect, nigh-impossible to cure.

1. Hubris is born of success.

2. Confusing success with the undisciplined pursuit of more.

3. Denial of peril by insiders shielded from risk.

4. Panicky, wishful, get-rich-quick thinking scatters focus.

5. Capitulation to looting normalizes. a

Pride comes of victory. Failure to learn from loss leads to greater risk. Final collapse comes as total surrender.

Group Decline Self-Inflicts

Once upon a time there was a successful group. A pack.

Somewhere, somehow, some way, a story comes along that says, “You’re such a great pack, you should change and be more like that pack.” This is rarely a direct assault. It is an innuendo, a slow normalization, a seed.

Now, with a bold new story, the new (old) pack heads out to be something else than what it was. This is often a vigorous time, filled with energy, and it may feel very productive. But when being a new pack does not make the group into a better pack, the loss of creative energy expended into disappointment slaughters hope.

Suggestion that we just be the old group again, that the pack remember the old ways, are more easily accepted among a close crowd of peers than a wild lobby of unionists on the other side of the table. But truth scales. If the fleet is losing its momentum, the solution is to remember its moorings.

Not all packs deserve to survive, but all herds do take culling. Group existence into perpetuity is nowhere promised in a survival of the fittest observable world, much less in the hands of an angry God. But if the fit will survive, the fitness of man is deciding to do so.

The decision to survive is the most important first action in any crisis. But the point of survival is not just to endure. It is to build, to impact, to grow.

Growth can be excruciating. Slow collapse is antagonizing. But urgency clarifies many things. Every crisis is a catalyst. Reversing course breaks a cycle.

Turbulence is the time when true principles shine. Don’t let the weather threaten you. It is the ability to learn from setbacks that distinguishes the righteous from the wicked. Conviction is honor married to good sense. Kill your dreams. Raise your standard.

“It is one thing to suffer a staggering defeat,” finishes Jim Collins. “and entirely another to give up on the values and aspirations that make the protracted struggle worthwhile. Failure is not so much a physical state as a state of mind….”

From the Archives

from Broken

According to Jesus’ parable of the sower there’s more going on than meets the eye. Not only do the cares and trials of this life present a real threat to Christianity, but there is also the role that the devil plays in undermining the Christian life. Long before the roots of faith dry up under persecution or the dangers of American culture choke faith to death like a weed, the devil has first achieved victory with his primary strategy—his most essential tactic. Like a dirty crow he has swept in from above and stolen away the source of faith. The devil’s primary goal is to make the Christian forget about the Sower’s seed.

Martin Luther once wrote that the old serpent, the devil, first converted Adam and Eve to unbelief by making them “enthusiasts.” By “enthusiasts,” he meant that the devil convinced them that the real source of goodness was not in God’s Word. It was in themselves. They should be enthusiastic about their own abilities to discern good and evil, to learn of it, and to rule by it. “The old devil . . . led them from God’s outward Word to spiritualizing and self-pride. And yet, he did this through other outward words . . .” (Smalcald Articles III VIII 9–13).

This means that long before the devil ever breaks the faith of well-meaning Christians with his lies, he first must teach them “enthusiasm” as if it were genuine Christianity. Long before a missionary for atheism deceives you with plausible arguments based on merely human thinking, the devil first teaches you to try growing your faith on something other than God’s pure Word. He teaches you that the Holy Scriptures are not the real place to find the Holy Spirit, that the human words in the Bible are flawed, that the Church is full of errors and confusion. He teaches you a counterfeit Christianity.