The condemnation of “idolatry” in the Christian religion is really an injunction against giving value to inauthentic things. In this sense, “idols” are the same as what Karl Marx called “commodity fetishism,” what primitive skills teacher Tom Brown, Jr., calls the “false gods of the flesh.”

Spiritually, this is, in essence, a call to recognize the illusory nature of the world, the illusory nature of the spiritual entities of institution we trap ourselves with.

Part of our “fallen” or alienated nature is that we have forgotten our true existence as enlightened beings.

I quote Walter Wink again:

In a legitimate society, people freely give their consent even to rulers they despise, because they approve of the political framework by which those rulers come to power and exercise it. In such a system the citizen is an active, creative, and critical participant who becomes more and more identified with the social system as the social system becomes more acceptable to the participant. The rules by which society functions are backed by sanctions, to be sure (embarrassment, public censure, fines, arrest, incarceration, execution), but their real power depends on trust. When a government or institution must resort to threat or the use of force, its power has already eroded, and the system is in crisis.

An empire is, by its very nature, a system in a permanent crisis of legitimation. It is not a natural system, but an artificial amalgam held together by force. That is why propaganda is so essential to it. People must be made to believe that they benefit from a system that is in fact harmful to them, that no other system is feasible, that God has placed the divine imprimatur on this system and no other.

… What is needed is something that can lash loyalty to the mast where it can ride out the waves of social unrest. Ethnic feeling is not enough. Patriotism is not enough. What is needed is worship of the state. That is what nationalism is and has always been. Nationalism is not, in its essence, a political phenomenon; it is a religious one. Only a transcendent cause can induce young men to risk their lives voluntarily in the absence of any conceivable self-interest.

There’s that quote: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

We are a civilization of people socialized into giving our power away, projecting our own inner authority outward, onto images, figures, and institutions. We create genuine spiritual entities with our outward projections, and then we worship our own creations, not knowing that we are the true masters.

The trick of the Devil is to foster this alienation from the true Self, so that we voluntarily give our power away, to the point where we never knew we had that power in the first place.

Any sort of idealism is exactly this spiritual fetishism, whether it’s nationalism or fundamentalism. We construct safe, simple images that fit our simplistic ideas of what reality should be. In truth, the world and God are ultimately unknowable. Any idea of God is a lie. That is why in the Kabbalah the Ultimate Reality is Ain, or Nothing. Anything that can be expressed falls short of the limitless nature of the inexpressible.

That is why self-knowledge is so profoundly important, for it enables us to see through the illusions that we ourselves generate through our ignorance. It enables us to perceive the Divine truth of what is, rather than the words and images of what people think things should be. Then we are free to act according to a truer, deeper nature, to exist from a paradigm that transcends the Domination System.

On the individual level, this enables us to free ourselves from cycles of abuse and addiction, which are a different but equivalent manifestation of self-alienation — giving one’s power and authority away to person or substance.

And the political consequences?

When anyone steps out of the system and tells the truth, lives the truth, that person enables everyone else to peer behind the curtain too. That person has shown everyone that it is possible to live the truth, despite the consequences. [Czech playwright Vaclav Havel writes that] “Living the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal.” Anyone who steps out of line therefore “denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety … If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth.” That is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else.

Ahh … Unfortunately, inertia is strong. Not simply the inertia of individual habits, but the inertia of a corrupt system invested in the alienation of its own populace. “A sense of powerlessness is always a spiritual disease deliberately induced by the powers to keep us complicit.” This of course takes the form, not only of individual depression and health problems, but of systemic, systematic oppression, neglect, and willful destruction. All in the name of maintaining power, not simply for one person or group of people, but for the system itself, that idol, that Devilish entity that is the Domination System.