How to Spot a Simulation
The smartest way to take over the world is to replace it with a fake one. The smartest way to replace it with a fake one is little by little.
Part 2
Part 1 can be found HERE.
Dirt or gold
Another difference between God’s “virtual” items and those of the devil is their actual worth.
God hated the false measures and balances that merchants used in order to cheat their own Israelite brothers.
You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measurement of weight, or capacity. (Leviticus 19:35)
A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight. (Proverbs 11:1)
A just balance and scales belong to the Lord; all the weights of the bag are His concern. (Proverbs 16:11)
Based on His obvious integrity, we can safely assume that every sacrificial substitute was equal in some way to that which it was reckoned for—even if in purely symbolic terms. Men are worth more than beasts, but animal sacrifices were “skin for skin,” a life for a life. The difference in actual value would explain why Israel’s sacrifices were continual rather than once-for-all.
The Bible’s most famous example of rigged scales is the claim of Belshazzar to the throne of Babylon. He drank from the gold and silver vessels from Solomon’s Temple, and this invoked the God of Israel. The light of the golden lampstand revealed what was about to happen. The king had been weighed in God’s balances and found wanting. In other words, he was a lightweight.
The Hebrew word for glory is related to the word for heavy, which is one reason why gold was considered to be the most glorious metal. Unlike gold, Belshazzar lacked gravitas. He was not a serious king.
This highlights the imagery of God’s maturation of man from “Adamic” dirt to precious metal. The statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream worked from gold at the top, via silver and bronze, to iron and clay at the bottom. Basically, Belshazzar was another dirt bag pretending to be a “head of gold.”
The first scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark is a perfect illustration. Indiana Jones attempts to swap out the gold Chachapoyan fertility idol for a bag of sand. He has guessed its weight, and for a few seconds it seems to pass the test. But the device beneath the idol detects that the substitute is not measure-for-measure, and the trap set for thieves is sprung.
God promised fertility to Adam —fruitfulness in land and womb. Satan offered a shortcut by painting a false picture with words, a virtual future that evaded submission to heaven as the requirement for dominion on earth. The trap was sprung, and Adam had sold everything for a handful of dust and ashes.
Keeping up appearances
As a reversal of the failure in Eden, Solomon’s initial faith resulted in fertility and wealth. What Adam attempted to steal, God gave to Solomon as a gift.
But a decrease in quality also affected Solomon’s kingdom, where gold was so plentiful that silver was as common as stones.
At the height of his wisdom and glory, he ordered that 500 gold shields be made for him (1 Kings 10:14-17). After his unwise son, Rehoboam, inherited the kingdom, the shields were plundered by the soldiers of Shishak (1 Kings 14:25-26). Rehoboam ordered bronze replacements that gave the appearance of the gold ones. But these were lightweights.
Simulacra (symbols) and simulations are useful and instructive when their virtual nature maintains the virtue (or value) of the original. That value can be spiritual (teachings), intellectual (such as data, or a flight simulator, or even the reputation of a university), cultural (clothing and holidays), official (flags, uniforms, awards), and economic (paper or digital currency). In each case, one thing stands for another thing and signifies an actual value, measure-for-measure, in an agreed and understood way.
But a gradual diminishing of the value of the original might not be reflected in its symbol. When this happens, the original itself becomes only a symbol of what it once was, or sometimes even the opposite of what it was. This degradation, if carried out deliberately, is another means of “murdering the real.”
In his book Simulacra and Simulation, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard discusses the crisis of modern materialism as a process of replication where each item is a copy of the previous copy and the quality of the original is gradually lost.
The problem is not with the actual materials but with the consistency of the information that is being handed down in the process. Without a standard system of values, the ability to mass produce something changes it, and inevitably cheapens it.
We can put up with cheap goods, but an unfaithful “replication” of knowledge misrepresents the actual world. This is especially true when it comes to history.
We all know that “history is written by the victors.” While such misrepresentations are deliberate, Baudrillard illustrates how this can happen in a more subtle way. As time passes, the reporting of an event—such as a documentary on the Holocaust— even if it contains film footage and eye-witness accounts—eventually replaces the actual event in the public mind.
Imperfections and omissions in the reporting change what is remembered, so the danger is that the reality might be lost or even destroyed in the process of “replication.” The symbol becomes the reality, and only the representation remains.
The only way to avoid a loss is to return to the ‘gold standard.’”
This explains why churches that neglect a commitment to study and obey the Word of God end up replacing it with the words and traditions of men. The Jewish rabbis invented the Oral Law and burdened their people with oppressive rules. The Roman Catholic Church styled itself as an authority over the Bible and blatantly contradicts it on many important subjects.
Many Protestants have now fallen into the same old trap, but in a new way. Faced with the modern “sexual ethic,” their facsimile of Jesus is like the bottom line in a lazy student’s handwriting practice copybook —He looks nothing like the original at the top. Each line simply replicates and adds to the errors of the one immediately above it. Step by step, they have created a man in their own image. And He is crooked.
God promised a return to glory for Israel after the Babylonian exile. Although this would be a spiritual glory, through a new faithfulness to His Word, He described it with the symbols of natural wealth.
Instead of bronze I will bring gold, and instead of iron I will bring silver; instead of wood, bronze, instead of stones, iron. (Isaiah 60:17)
The New Testament reprises this imagery. Paul says that God’s refining fire comes to reveal what our spiritual work is actually made of: gold, silver, and precious stones, or wood, hay, and straw (1 Corinthians 3:10-15).
The only way to avoid a loss when Jesus gets out His scales is a constant return to the original “gold standard.” Otherwise our lives, and our churches, will have only the appearance of godliness without the actual power of God (2 Timothy 3:5).
Make it till you fake it
When Man refuses to be God’s image, he becomes a sign that points only to itself. Without any direction, he has no future but personal and cultural oblivion.
Despite its serious foibles, flaws, and excesses, the civilization founded upon the principles of the Bible has been the greatest, wealthiest, and longest-surviving in history. Its strength has often been abused, but the spiritual source of its glory is Jesus Christ.
This heritage that has blessed the entire world is now being stolen and replaced with a counterfeit. The reason this was not noticed is because it was not done in a single grab, but little by little, and in secret, that is, from the inside.
At first, the symbols represent reality, in the way that a map faithfully describes a territory. But then, the distinction between reality and symbol becomes blurred. The symbols mask the reality, then mask the absence of the reality. Finally, they replace the reality altogether. Instead of interacting with reality, we live within a “hyperreality,” a copy that no longer has an original.
Like Noah’s ark, this man-made realm is a simulation of what existed before, serving as a bridge to the new world order while the old is pillaged behind closed doors. Sloths and thieves are pandered to and rewarded, while those who are productive are demonized and robbed. Men who were created to claim God’s promises of the fruit of the land and the womb are cowed into a Disney World of video games and pornography.
In order to hijack his destiny, Man’s origins are also rewritten. This began with the theory of evolution, a belief that is maintained despite abundant evidence to the contrary. But our cultural origins are also being rewritten. Statues are torn down, books are banned or burned, and the door to our actual history is closed. Milan Kundera wrote:
The first step in liquidating a people … is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.
The West still has the outward appearance of the old culture, but it has been hollowed out. Instead of signifying the actual values, strengths, and wealth of the culture, the flags, the institutions, and the calculated use of familiar language are merely a veneer of the old reality. And this “skin” serves as a cover for the worst kinds of sin. As George Orwell wrote:
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
However, even the veneer of the old morality has now worn thin. Our culture is so corrupt that sins which carried the death penalty under Moses are defended, legalized, and even promoted in sanctimonious “moral crusades.” And many so-called Christians are going along with this demonic charade.
This process of deception is, of course, also a self-deception. Like Adam in Eden, we are being lied to, but we are being told what we want to believe. Goebbels’ famous law of propaganda—“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”—is not, in fact, true at all. The deception is willingly received because it frees people from the laws of God. This mutiny is culture-wide. If everyone is doing as he pleases, then nobody can be condemned. Acceptance of the lie becomes the new social contract. However, this hyperreality is fragile because it can only be maintained by a total consensus. A single dissenting voice, like that of the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, is a pin that can pop the bubble. Anyone who questions the golden calf that magically made itself risks ruining Utopia for everybody.
In this cesspit of tolerance, truth is the one thing that cannot be tolerated, so dissenters are scapegoated and “canceled.”
Since truth is now decided by a vote, if everyone says that evil is the new good, then it is so. Value signifying has, of necessity, been replaced with virtue signaling. This is the modern equivalent of a Pharisee praying on a street corner, an elite who despises the common people, yet whose moral superiority is a sham.
Strangely, the educated are far more susceptible to falling for a hyperreality. In C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, a character called Miss Hardcastle explains:
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
She describes how party politics is a mere distraction (being a simulation of the old democracy) for “thinking” people while the real power brokers, the unelected “experts,” get on with taking over the world for its own good.
In spiritual as well as economic terms, the gold standard has been replaced wih a fiat currency, something miraculously created out of nothing by decree. The phrase fiat lux is the Latin for “Let there be light.”
“God is weighing our hollow kingdom in His balances.”
Reality bites
Claiming to create abundance out of nothing, the leaders of our culture have fallen into the old Adamic sin of “being like God” without qualifying for the office. As a result, God is now weighing our hollow kingdom, and its hollow rulers, in His balances.
The elites hoodwink the educated, God hoodwinks the elites. Since these hollow men are so enamored with their own wisdom, He sends them a strong delusion so that they themselves believe a lie. He did this to King Saul to hasten his self-destruction, and He did it to the rulers of Jerusalem who believed that Abraham’s God was on their side against the Romans (2 Thessalonians 2:11).
In both cases, the rulers tried to maintain their power by murdering the real heirs. But in both cases, God used their tyranny to train His people in discernment and wisdom until they were “heavy” enough to inherit the tyrants’ thrones.
After gaslighting us for decades, the narcissistic “expert” class is itself now patently delusional. This is a sign that their end is nigh, so we must be rehearsing our true past as preserved for us in God’s Word. And we must be training ourselves for the future with the “flight simulator” that God has given us—the traditional Christian liturgy that follows the pattern of the Creation and dominion of the world.
In this way, week by week, little by little, one bite at a time, our Jacob comes like a thief to steal the inheritance back for the people of God.
This is an article from Theo Magazine No. 5.
Michael Bull is a graphic designer in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney in Australia, and author, most recently, of A Lodge for Owls: Raw Theological Twitter. He blogs at Bible Matrix.