Towards a Theory of the Christian Deed

Fundamentally, politics—or, at the very least, the victory of politics—comes in the imposition of a particular way of life onto a given population. In the technological age that we have emerged into, the nature of this victory is often totalising and everpresent: first, as an institution which imposes rule onto a given population; second, as a dictator of propaganda, providing the bounds for what constitutes a respectable opinion; and, thirdly, as a violent arm that enforces its will when people step outside of these provided bounds.

As a part of this, this also involves the creation and management of the counter-crowd as well—developing respectable avenues for protest that give malcontents ways to engage with the state in a way which absolves them of considered thought on their own part and, instead, can pick up the pre-approved notions that allow for suitably respectable protest.

Of course, whilst we occupy the balcony, my reader, it would be appropriate to note that these malcontents, malcontent in their malcontented ways-of-life, are defined by their inability to “fit into” society and the role that it allows for them—in some way, as a product of some particular meeting of the ideal and the material, they have found that they exist outside of the social order1 and compelled by the conditions of their existence to take up arms against it. Indeed, a great many political debates have circulated around what constitutes the acceptable bounds of the “in-group” and the acceptable “out-groups” which sit at the bounds—or, as we begin in leisurely descent onto the Road, the development of the shape of the crowd and the signifying of both the “anti-crowd” and “the favoured oppressed”2. NaTo illustrate, my reader, think about the kind people who sit at the periphery of “friend” and “enemy”, often in a warring situation: the Russian forced conscript, the Ukrainian Nazi; the reluctant IDF enrollee, the Palestinian Islamist extremist. Hopefully, my reader, at least one of these examples has raised your hackles in realisation of some “other” that sits outside of the acceptable narratives we are handed by the psychopolitical structures of our lives. If you should ever want to quickly bring a party to an end, playing your own version of this little game is usually an excellent first step on how to lose friends and alienate people. Without this presumption of a friend who wields the ...