The following quotations from the Bible all address the issues of humility and power in leadership. They are largely unknown and ignored:

³….nothing being done for rivalry or groundless self-esteem, but by humility of mind esteem one another as surpassing yourselves. ⁴Do not look individually to the interests of yourselves, but also to the interests of others.

Philippians 2:3b-4 – The Keys of the Kingdom Holy Bible

⁵In the same way, you younger men, be subject to older men and, all mutually being in subjection, be clothed with humility, for ‘God sets Himself against the proud, but gives merciful goodwill to the lowly in attitude.’

1 Peter 5:5 – The Keys of the Kingdom Holy Bible

²Pride comes, then shame follows; but with the lowly there is wisdom.

Proverbs 11:2 – The Keys of the Kingdom Holy Bible

²⁵But Jesus called them, and he said, ‘You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and the high-ranking stamp down their authority on them. ²⁶It will not, however, be like that among you. Rather whoever wants to be eminent among you will be your servant. ²⁷And whoever wants to be first among you must be your servant, ²⁸just as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a redemption price in the place of many.’

Matthew 20:25-28– The Keys of the Kingdom Holy Bible

⁹but he said to me, ‘My merciful goodwill is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’

2 Corinthians 12:9 – The Keys of the Kingdom Holy Bible

I’m not sure about you, but it seems very hard to believe that the COVID global panic started five years ago. It seems intuitively to be much longer. And I believe that might be because we’ve not yet fully reckoned with the historic changes that have happened in the way that we think about things. Five years ago, the world seemed like a much simpler place. I’ve said before that I think historians in generations to come will struggle to explain how the world went so completely mad over such a short space of time. These years may even come to be known as ‘The Age of Unreason.’

COVID

Some of what was happening five years ago should, if there was any logic left in the world, be viewed as completely mad and totally impossible to explain. Is it really true that five years ago, we lived in a world where people accepted that they had to wear masks to protect themselves against an organism of 60 nanometres in size, if they were standing up in a restaurant, but if they sat down and started eating or drinking, the risk disappeared completely and they could go maskless? Did people really believe that the risk declined if they ate ‘a substantial meal’ rather than just had a drink, in their local pub? Did we really, genuinely, hear people saying to the government: ‘We don’t know what to do, you need to tell us very precisely and lay down all the rules’? Did the government actually convey to us all that it didn’t matter what the cost was to the economy, it wasn’t even worth trying to estimate it, as lockdown was essential, even if it ended up bankrupting us for generations to come’? Did those in our health regulatory authority wave aside every single rule on the testing of new vaccines, not even insisting on toxicology tests, in order to rush through a completely new product, based on previously untried technology? Yes, as hard as it is now to accept, all these things, and literally thousands of other insane examples, did actually happen. I remember hearing over and again the phrase ‘You couldn’t make this stuff up.’ But someone did. Whoever those people were, I bet those details won’t appear on their CVs.

I’ve read several articles in the last few days, trying to explain why such idiocies prevailed. Some have suggested that people in government were paralysed by fear; others suggest that when encouraged to do something, power went to their heads; others still suggest that it wasn’t possible for people in government to say: ‘We genuinely don’t know what to do’ because that would have resulted in the people losing confidence in their government, so every country copied every other, not wanting to be seen to do anything differently.

But the problem is that human beings are creative and imaginative, and the fact that this complete insanity prevailed everywhere in the world, at the same time, has also resulted in some people, I would actually say quite a large and growing number, believing that the only way to explain it all was to suggest that there was a global conspiracy, variously referred to as ‘Agenda 2030’, ‘The Great Reset’ etc. In other words, the madness was planned by ‘The Powers That Be,’ to the smallest detail. A gigantic, world-wide conspiracy, created and implemented by a small number of ‘the governing class.’

I’m probably far from being unique in having lost all confidence in the so-called ‘Mainstream Media’ in the last ten years; the rot set in quite a while before COVID, but I suspect that COVID accelerated the decline in support for our major newspapers, the BBC etc. So many, like me, have abandoned such news outlets and get our news instead from what is called ‘The Alternative Media.’ And before you ask why I trust such outlets, let me say that I’m not at all sure that I do; I’m a natural sceptic, that’s one of the reasons why I’m writing this post. I fear we live in a world now where it’s almost impossible to know who to trust about anything.

Truth, Trust and Conspiracy Theories

Untold damage has been done to public trust in a very short time; the legacy of this will be with us for longer than many of us will live. And the lack of trust is not confined to the legacy media; there has also been an undeniable reduction in trust in our politicians, our parliament, our doctors, our lawyers and many others; you could say a catastrophic loss of trust in our entire ‘Establishment.‘

So you don’t have to venture very far from the legacy media to find increasingly ‘wacky’ conspiracies. Sometimes those who promulgate or support conspiracies, try to vie with each other for who is further down what they call ‘The Rabbit Hole.’ This reminds me of the rabbit hole in ‘Alice in Wonderland.’

So do I not have any belief in any of these theories? Actually, if you ‘follow the money’ or look at some of the astounding coincidences, there are some issues that leave me feeling uncomfortable. I’m not, for example, at all sure what happened on 9/11 (admittedly much more than five years ago, but a good example). I’m not persuaded that a passenger plane which was little more than an aluminium ‘cigar tube’ could have ‘melted’ into a massively-built steel structure, without even the highly fragile wing-tips being sheared off by the steel girders. And I’m doubtful that two of the biggest structures ever built in the world could have ‘dustified’ in such a way that virtually nothing recognisable was picked up afterwards; no steel filing cabinets, no toilets, no fire extinguishers, no safes etc. But do I believe, as some claim, that the Israeli government connived to blow up the buildings? No, the ‘dustification’ does not, according to experts, look like an explosive demolition. Do I believe that a ‘Directed Energy Weapon’ was used deliberately by the US authorities on their own people, when no such weapon has ever been documented before (as suggested, for example, in Dr Judy Wood’s excellent research in her book Where did the Towers go?) ’No, to me, saying that the finger of an angry God brought down the Towers as a punishment for Man’s wickedness holds about as much water as that wacky theory. So, I’m left in a quandary, not believing the official story about 9/11, but not sure what else might have caused what was seen on that fateful day.

So, overall, I’m not totally persuaded by the theories that suggest widespread conspiracy of a global cabal to impoverish the masses, or create a means of murdering millions of people in order to reduce the population of the world. I need to explain why.

Incompetence

I’m sure that if you asked those who do believe in these global conspiracies if Biden, Johnson, Macron, Sholz etc were clever enough to pull off such a massive global feat, the answer would, I’m sure, be total derision. Those of us who are old enough, know that the level of incompetence in our world is little short of staggering. This has got so much worse during my lifetime, that it’s impossible to support those who say that global conspiracies have got much more likely with the passage of time. As a very tiny example, three telegraph poles have had to be replaced in the lane where I live. The story has been like a music hall joke and the third one still hasn’t been installed, as when the gang and all the equipment turned up, the necessary road closure authority had not been obtained, so they had to go away without carrying out the work. On a larger scale, recently it was suggested that the UK should lead a ‘Coalition of the Willing’ by putting troops into the Ukraine. As was pointed out at the time, we can’t stop the small boats crossing the Channel; we can’t run an effective Health Service and we can’t deal with the potholes in our roads. Does that sound like a country that can manage a massive operation involving tens of thousands of troops, more than a thousand miles away? It’s no wonder that people treat such claims as risible.

But, and it’s a big but, not all conspiracy theories are on such a magnitude. On a smaller scale, do I think that Matt Handcock, our UK Health Secretary at the time, connived in the cold-blooded killing of the elderly and frail in our Care Homes and Hospitals, through instructing that a lethal mixture of the Death Row drug Midazolam and Morphine should be administered to the frail in order to ‘clear the decks’ for the anticipated tsunami of disease and death predicted by Professor Ferguson five years ago? Yes, I’m afraid to say that I do. I am, of course, familiar with the old mantra that correlation does not mean causation, but who could not be persuaded by the eerily direct correlation between the use of Midazolam and the known ‘Excess Deaths’ in 2020, shown in the above graph (the statistics, incidentally, originate with the Office for National Statistics)? Do you not find this graph unsettling? And is it not terrifying that no one in government is calling for research into this alarming graph, to prove whether the correlation is real?

This is just one small set of statistics about the events of five years ago that prove, to me at least, that we understand next to nothing about the functioning of the human body. Are we clever enough to manage a conspiracy on a global scale, involving most countries in the world? Incompetence is so widespread that it’s hard to believe that such a trick could be pulled off by those who are idiotic enough to perpetrate other, much smaller-scale disasters.

Power, Humility and Christianity

Over my lifetime, the way in which we’re governed has changed hugely. But there’s one crucial area which hasn’t been subject to even small change: most global governments are still dominated by a single ‘figurehead.’ All decisions flow upwards to the ‘boss;’ pictures of Cabinet meetings show so many people around the table, that it’s hard to believe that these are not ‘briefing’ meetings, at which the ‘boss’ says what his decisions, plans and policies are, and those around the table are, at best, given a chance to nod sagely and agree, and then say how they’re going to meet the new requirements. This is absolutely not a healthy way to run any organisation, and it’s particularly stupid where the organisation is large, complex, and facing multiple problems and challenges that have been unsuccessfully tackled many times over decades.

The results of this are, I believe, twofold, and they are supported by what we’ve witnessed in recent decades. To start with, governments of every colour achieve less and less, to the point where even basic simple tasks are beyond solving; the rubber boat invasion being just one small example. The second major effect, which we have also witnessed, is that those at the top of the pyramid start to believe that they are omniscient and invincible. It’s not for nothing that the two Prime Ministers who showed these traits most strongly were those who were in office for the longest: Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Governments that have been in office the longest tend to leave not only the largest, but also the most intractable problems. Problems become cumulative; national debt rises inexorably (and with it the costs of servicing that debt) incompetence multiplies and it only takes a single major unplanned challenge like COVID, and the country ends up looking, sounding and feeling like one that is teetering on the brink of collapse. That, unfortunately, is how the UK now feels to me. I pray I’m wrong, for the sake of my children and grandchildren.

Christianity has much to offer, as a solution to such problems. This point is very rarely made, but actually the Bible has a huge amount to say about leadership, and all of it is counter-cultural. This point is indisputable if you read the quotations at the head of this post. The starting point is that Christian values run completely contrary to the wielding of arbitrary power by a small number of dominant and arrogant people. Humility is not just a much under-rated value in our world; in fact it’s despised and rejected completely. Those who are at the apex of our national (and international) pyramids should be prepared to acknowledge that to be human is, by definition, to be weak and prone to arrogance and narcissism. Such leadership alienates literally everyone.  Can a case be made for strong leadership? Of course, but those who’ve led organisations will tell you that the strongest leaders are those who are able to recognise their own weaknesses and not only adjust the content of their teams accordingly, but also modify their own leadership style, to be more open to comment and criticism.

One side-effect of this was demonstrated very visibly during COVID and during the last five years. Those who are wedded to writing ‘rules’ are the weakest leaders; those who recognise that rules must have exceptions are the strongest. Weak leaders tend to isolate themselves against the impact of their decisions and insist on compliance; strong leaders consciously subject themselves to criticism, acknowledging that the team is greater than its individual parts.

So, you see, the fact that the UK government five years ago was engaged in arguing whether a Scotch Egg was a ‘substantial meal’ under the ridiculously arbitrary rules that they had imposed on the population, demonstrated convincingly that they were completely unfit to govern. Unless that lesson is learned, and sadly there’s no sign of it yet, we’re condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and again.

It’s a harsh lesson, but it’s one that must be learned, if our nation is to survive and prosper.

Heavenly Father, grant us the humility to see ourselves as weak and human, so that we might, in the true spirit of Christianity, look to you as a role model for our dealings with each other. Amen