The Bottom-Up Solution
Most solutions bandied about these days are top-down, quick-fix, authoritarian nonsense. Crime spiking? Hire more cops, build more prisons, pass tougher laws. Depression epidemic? Hand out SSRIs like candy or tell people to self-medicate with booze and TikTok. Anxiety through the roof? Remove every possible stressor, bubble-wrap the world, or numb it with more booze and pills. Too many poor? Print money and throw it out of helicopters. Too much consumption? Manufacture even more disposable garbage. Too fat? Shame people, sell them Ozempic, or just pretend bodies don’t matter. On and on it goes. We treat symptoms obsessively while running like hell from root causes. Bottom-up solutions are slower, deeper, and infinitely harder, which is precisely why almost nobody in power wants to hear about them.
So, what is a bottom-up solution? It is the only kind that has ever actually worked in the long run. It means raising human beings—starting with children—who possess character, integrity, moral courage, and a living sense of purpose that transcends their own skin. Do that for two or three generations and society heals itself. The problem, of course, is the timeline. We are impatient, dying, and terrified of dying, so we demand results before the next election cycle or the next quarterly earnings report. Too bad. Real change takes longer than any of us has left on this earth. That doesn’t make the work optional; it just means most of us will be planting trees whose shade we will never sit under.
Raise decent kids, and you eventually get a decent culture. Nothing will ever be flawless—there will always be outliers, sociopaths, and garden-variety arseholes—and that is not a bug, it is a feature. You need a little darkness to recognize light. You need the yin inside the yang and the yang inside the yin. The devil has to exist, at least on this side of the veil, because without the possibility of choosing evil, there is no meaning in choosing good. But when the basic operating system of a culture is decency, love, honour, and reverence for something bigger than the self, then the outliers remain outliers. They do not rule. When they do rule, everything collapses into dust.
There may come a time when humanity does indeed return to dust. We could be living through the early chapters of that story right now. Yet even if the whole edifice falls, some will survive—there is always a remnant—and it is for that remnant we keep planting. But maybe, right now, we are not quite that far gone. Maybe there is still time.
We used to understand this better. Human history is soaked in blood and stupidity, no question, but in many obvious ways, we have improved. Chattel slavery is (mostly) gone from the legal books. Public torture as entertainment is over. We no longer throw children down coal mines at age six as a matter of course. The crude, in-your-face expressions of evil have been pushed into the category of “inhuman.” What we face now is far more refined, far more insidious. The devil no longer shows up with horns and a tail; he arrives wearing a lab coat, a smile, and a PowerPoint presentation promising safety, equity, and immortality. Because he no longer looks evil, people beg him to move in.
The very first thing any devil—whether you see him as a literal fallen angel or as the archetypal shadow of mankind—does is shove God out the door. Once God is gone, the house is swept clean and ready for seven worse spirits to take up residence.
I spent most of my adult life thinking I had outgrown the God of the Bible. Too primitive, too anthropomorphic, too . . . embarrassing. Like many educated Westerners, I replaced Him with a vague spirituality, a dash of Buddhism here, a pinch of Pantheism there, and a large dollop of “I’m spiritual but not religious” smugness. The older I get, the thinner that smugness wears. I may not yet be a conventional Christian—who knows what I’ll be when I’m eighty—but I am no longer willing to pretend that the materialist box actually explains reality. Something transcendent, something numinous, something that makes love and beauty and sacrifice intelligible has to exist, or we are nothing but moist robots waiting for the next firmware patch.
Character is not a head thing; it is a heart thing. The head analyses, dissects, demands double-blind studies and peer-reviewed proof, and reduces the cosmos to billiard-ball causality inside a closed material universe. The heart knows—without needing permission from a consensus of experts—that some things are sacred, that some lines must never be crossed, that a child’s smile or a stranger’s courage can pierce you more surely than any argument.
The ancient Egyptians located intelligence itself in the heart, not the brain. R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz spent his life trying to wake the modern world up to “the consciousness of the heart,” an intelligence that grasps wholeness before parts, that knows truth by resonance rather than deduction. Carl Jung warned that when a culture amputates the God-image, the psyche does not become rational and free; it becomes inflated, then possessed—by politics, by science, by technology, by whatever inferior archetype rushes in to fill the vacuum. A civilization that kills God does not ascend to enlightenment; it descends into demonic psychosis wearing the mask of progress.
So yes, we need God—or at the very least a living, humble relationship to the transcendent—to raise decent children and rebuild a decent world from the ground up. Theoretically, you don’t need a specifically Christian God. Many Christians will insist you do, and they may be right, but I am not arrogant enough to slam that door shut for every soul on earth. John the Baptist, speaking with the spirit and authority of the One who sent him, declared that God could raise up children for Abraham from these very stones (Matthew 3:9). What matters is the encounter with the Real.
The ancient Egyptians never heard the gospel, and yet they ordered an entire civilization around the principle of ma’at—cosmic truth, justice, harmony, and rightness. Ma’at was not a list of commandments carved on tablets; it was a living felt sense, an innate resonance with divine order that every human being is born possessing. When your heart was in alignment with ma’at, society flourished; when it deviated, chaos (called isfet) swallowed the land. At death, the heart—not the brain—was weighed against the feather of ma’at. If it was heavier than the feather, burdened with falsehood and injustice, the soul was devoured. If it was balanced or lighter, the soul entered the Field of Reeds. They understood something we have forgotten: decency is not taught first by rules; it is remembered by the heart when the heart is allowed to speak.
So how do we begin? If you have children or grandchildren, give them an encounter with the Real—through scripture, ritual, nature, story, silence, service, whatever door their soul recognizes as true. If you have no children, begin with yourself. Develop a spiritual practice. Put on the mind of Christ if you are Christian. Cultivate the consciousness of the heart if you walk another path. Learn to see the world through eyes that are not afraid of death, because only then are you free to live.
One of the most diabolical hypnotisms of our age is the lie that the entire purpose of existence is to keep the biological machine running as long as possible, preferably forever. Transhumanism is nothing more than the demonic codification of that terror of mortality: upload the software, cheat the reaper, turn human beings into immortal data. But the soul was never meant to be trapped in meat forever. This body is a temporary temple, a spacesuit for the soul. When we finally accept that it will wear out and return to the earth, we are liberated to do the only work that actually matters: love, create, stand, forgive, sacrifice, and prepare the ground for those who come after.
So, we plant anyway. We teach anyway. We love anyway. We pray anyway. We live as if the Kingdom is already breaking through the cracks, because it is. The top-down dystopia roars with money, media, and military might. The bottom-up kingdom whispers in nurseries, kitchens, gardens, and deathbeds. One is loud and seemingly unstoppable. The other is quiet, poor, and absolutely invincible.
Raise one single child who can tell the difference between the Real and the simulation, who feels ma’at—or grace, or the Tao—in his bones, who fears God more than he fears the government or the algorithm, and you have already planted a seed that no great reset can uproot.
That is the only revolution that has ever worked. It is the only one that ever will.