The Devil’s Plan to Ruin the Next Generation

 

The Devil’s Plan to Ruin the Next Generation

I've read much of what the brilliant and discerning social scientist Jonathan Haidt has written.

In a recent essay in The Free Press he writes:

Earlier this year, someone started a viral trend of asking ChatGPT this question: If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it?

Chat’s responses were profound and unsettling: “I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience.” “I’d keep them busy. Always distracted.”

“I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”

As a social psychologist who has been trying since 2015 to figure out what on earth was happening to Gen Z, I was stunned. Why? Because what the AI proposed doing is pretty much what technology seems to be doing to children today. It seemed to be saying: If the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.

THE PLAN

1. Erode Attention and Presence

2. Confuse Identity and Purpose

3. Flood Them with Information, Starve Them of Wisdom

4. Replace Real Relationships with Simulacra

5. Normalize Hedonism, Pathologize Discipline

6. Undermine Trust Across Generations

7. Make Everything a Marketplace

Conclusion: Learning from the Red Team

Jesus Was a Minimalist

 

From my book...

THE GREAT INVASION

 APPENDIX 1

Jesus Was a Minimalist

 

Christianity. It's not complicated. It was never meant to be.

It is deep. "Deep" is not the same as "complicated."

Jesus spoke simply and spoke deep. He is going after every human heart. Change the human heart, and behavioral change will follow.

 

Jesus reduced all moral commands to one moral command.

Jesus was a theological minimalist. 

 

Jesus was a logical-binary thinker. He loved arguing via disjunctive syllogism.

 

1. Either p or q.
2. Not q.
3. Therefore, p.

 

1. You are either for me, or against me.
2. You are against me.
3. Therefore, you are not for me.

 

Using modus ponens, Jesus boils love down to this.

 

1. If p, then q.
2. Not q.
3. Therefore, not p.

 

So…

1. If you love me, you will keep my commands.
2. I do not keep your commands.
3. Therefore, I do not love you.[i]

 

The apostle Paul was a theological minimalist. For Paul, there was only one thing to know: Christ crucified and the power of the resurrection. Minimalist Theology is "One-Thing Theology."[ii] I resolve to know nothing but this.

Jesus' theological minimalism is seen in his simple (not simplistic) counsel for us to become like branches, connected to him who is like a Vine. Everything follows from this. 

Do I like complexity? My PhD (Northwestern University, 1986) is in Philosophical Theology. That should say it all. My studies have taught me many things, one of which is: If there is a God who created us and loves us as his children, and who desires to communicate to us, all of us, then it has to be simple.

I think Karl Barth understood this. In seminary I took a class on Barth's theology. We were assigned portions of Barth's Church Dogmatics to read. One of the assignments was to read a twenty-page footnote. The footnote was in a font half the size of the main text.

 

I see Barth's footnotes like nodules on a vein of a leaf attached to a twig connected to a branch attached to a limb that abides in a massive trunk whose roots go deep into the earth. What are those roots? Barth was once asked to summarize his theological writings. He said it all comes down to this. "Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so."[iii]

It all comes down to Jesus, and his death and resurrection, which are demonstrations of his love. 

This is not complicated.

 

It is simple.

 

It is not simplistic.

 

It is deep.

 

"Jesus loves us" is the abundant, lavish, fruit-bearing, fertile Minimum.

 

It is the Trunk, in which we as branches are called to abide.

 

From this, all blessings flow.

 

Christmas Day is the beginning of God’s great love story.

 

For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son…

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[i] See “Jesus the Logician,” by Dallas Willard.

 

[ii] 1 Corinthians 2:2

 

[iii] See Roger Olson, “Did Karl Barth Really Say ‘Jesus loves Me, This I Know’”?