Do we need a new word?
Here's an old one: boondoggle (pronounced boon -dog-gull):
A boondoggle is a project that is considered a waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy or political motivations.Here's a possible new derivative: boondoogle (pronounced boon-doo-gull):
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boondoggle)
A boondoogle occurs when a corporation or entity that began its existence with a vision of service to humanity and with a mantra such as “Don't Be Evil,”1 BUT, due to the rapid accumulation of wealth and a burgeoning sense of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, loses its way and falls into an inversion of purpose.A recent case in point of a boondoogle, you ask? Just “google” the name Zachary Vorhies,2 (ex-employee of Google) or, better yet, avoid the “hit pieces” and go directly to
[Usage example: The ABC Corp did a boondoogle.]
Should we be surprised at this boondoogle considering the spirit of power3 that seems to overwhelm most institutions and people who come anywhere near the seduction so perfectly described 180 years ago?
● Fmr. Google Employee Alleges Blacklisting of Hundreds of Conservative Websites, Delivers Documentation (CBN News, August 15, 2019 ~Time: 2:25 min.) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hr8dAJBnK4&t=2s ; OR
● Google "Machine Learning Fairness" Whistleblower Goes Public ... (Project Veritas, August 14, 2019 ~ Time 19:34) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1VeElBAeas ; OR
● Google’s Power to Shift Elections—Zachary Vorhies, Greg Coppola and Dr. Robert Epstein (American Thought Leaders, Time 52:03) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buYS1biprSs ; OR
● Red Pill News - Whistleblower Zachary Vorhies Revealed Part 1 (RedPill78: Sept 1, 2019 ~ Time 36:20) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDQ6k9B60So ; OR
● see other Vorhies' interviews conducted as “life insurance.”
● See also other Big Tech offenders at EXPOSED: Political Censorship in Big Tech (Project Veritas, August 2, 2019 ~ Time 6:08) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5NzDLvVBdA
We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men [and institutions], as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.4In the words of Walter Wink:
An institution becomes demonic when it abandons its divine vocation for the pursuit of its own idolatrous goals.5But Wink also says:
Exposing the delusional system is the central ascetical task in our discernment of the Powers. For the Powers are never more powerful than when they can act from concealment. ... to masquerade as the permanent furniture of the universe, to make the highly contingent structures of current oppression appear to be of divine construction—such is the genius of their deceptive art.6
The mighty prefer, therefore, to rule by means of invisible constraints: unseen filaments tied to the public's arms and legs, and imperceptible spiritual brain-implants causing the masses to will to be what has been made of them.7
The Powers are not intrinsically evil; they are only fallen. What sinks can be made to rise again. We are freed, then, from the temptation to satanize the perpetrators of evil. We can love our nation or church or school, [or corporation] not blindly, but critically, recalling it to its own highest self-professed ideals and identities. We can challenge these institutions to live up to the vocation that is theirs by virtue of their sheer createdness. We can oppose their actions while honoring their necessity.8Perhaps this current boondoogle is just one more ironic fulfillment of old Isaiah's words from circa 700 BCE?
The Fall does not mean that everything we do is evil, vain, or hopeless, but merely that it is all ambiguous, tainted with egocentricity, subject to deflection from its divine goal, or capable of being co-opted toward other ends.9
[T]heir works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter's clay: ...10Let us, WE THE PEOPLE, find ways to help turn these boondoogles back to their high vocations and potentials.11
Let us muster the courage to speak of the “spirituality of institutions”:
Any attempt to transform a social system without addressing both its spirituality and its outer forms is doomed to failure. Only by confronting the spirituality of an institution and its concretions can the total entity be transformed, and that requires a kind of spiritual discernment and praxis that the materialistic ethos in which we live knows nothing about. To put the thesis of these three volumes in its simplest form: The Powers are good. The Powers are fallen. The Powers must be redeemed.12---------------------------/
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
2. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Zach_Vorhies
3. https://dejavu-timestwo.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-spirit-of-power.html
4. Doctrine and Covenants | Section 121:39
5. Walter Wink. Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Kindle Locations 1083-1084). Kindle Edition.
6. Ibid. (Kindle Locations 1308-1310).
7. Ibid. (Kindle Locations 1312-1314).
8. Ibid. (Kindle Locations 1010-1012).
9. Ibid, (Kindle Locations 1087-1089).
10. Old Testament | Isaiah 29:15-16 (Bold emphasis added.)
11. ● Almost every major reform can be traced back to a single person or a small group of people who were outraged by wrong. | Walter Wink. Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Kindle Locations 1107-1108). Kindle Edition.
● We have only to remind its managers that it exists to serve values beyond itself (though this "reminding" may require a protracted boycott or strike). Adam Smith himself acknowledged this when he wrote that the ultimate goal of a business is not to make a profit. Profit is just the means. The goal is the general welfare. | Ibid. (Kindle Locations 1016-1018). Bold emphasis added.
12. Ibid. (Kindle Locations 203-206). Yes, we must muster the courage because “The current world-atmosphere has decreed that spirits are not real, nor God, nor miracles, nor spiritual healing. Therefore no respectable intellectual discourse is permitted on these themes.” | Ibid. (Kindle Locations 804-805).
More of Walter Wink:
● In the biblical view [the Powers] are both visible and invisible, earthly and heavenly, spiritual and institutional. The Powers possess an outer, physical manifestation (buildings, portfolios, personnel, trucks, fax machines) and an inner spirituality, or corporate culture, or collective personality. The Powers are the simultaneity of an outer, visible structure and an inner, spiritual reality. The Powers, properly speaking, are not just the spirituality of institutions, but their outer manifestations as well. | Walter Wink. Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Kindle Locations 112-115). Kindle Edition.
● The Domination System is, so to speak, the system of the Powers, in a satanic parody of God, who might be called the System of the systems. The Domination System is thus equivalent to what the Bible so often means by the terms "world," "aeon," and "flesh." The Bible's insight into this system is essential if we are to oppose the Powers and the system that perpetuates them. | Ibid. (Kindle Locations 749-751).
● The Powers are good, fallen, and redeemable all at once; and they were good, they fell, and they will be redeemed in God's domination-free order that is coming. | Ibid. (Kindle Locations 1053-1054).
● Discernment does not entail esoteric knowledge, but rather the gift of seeing reality as it really is. Nothing is more rare, or more truly revolutionary, than an accurate description of reality. | Ibid. (Kindle Locations 1316-1317).
● [I]t is not just the physical universe that was created with Christ as its means, medium, and goal, but quite specifically the Powers. They only have their being because of him; they are upheld, even in their defections, by him. They exist to serve the purpose of the whole creation as it comes to its focus in him. But if the Powers have been created by God in and through and for Christ, then they cannot be wholly demonized. No matter how evil the empire or a monarch or the priesthood or the local magistrate or Satan himself becomes, none of them can be ascribed Manichean or dualistic status. They are still, despite themselves, inseparably bonded to the principle of rationality and cohesiveness in the universe (Col. 1:17). Like a cancer dependent on the host organism for its very destructive energies, evil remains inescapably parasitic of the whole. Try as they will to become autonomous and set up their own interests as the highest good, the Powers must inevitably come to terms with the Power of the Powers. | Walter Wink. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (The Powers : Volume One) (Kindle Locations 720-725). Kindle Edition.
