Can’t Do Better Than God! The Illusion That Society Falls For Is It Thinks It Can…

Word-Of-The-Day: ‘(3) For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. (4) They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.’ (2 Timothy 4:3-4)

I usually go through the mornings looking through both news sites and some blogs of various topics ranging from the political to the educational, and on one of those I came across a quote that is simplistic yet profound in its absolute truthfulness about society, especially our secular society today.  The quote is from a French psychologist of the late 1800s, Dr. Gustave Le Bon, M.D., from his book that is considered the preeminent writing of crowd or mob psychology even today, entitled The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.

The quote is, “The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”  I have not read Dr. Le Bon’s book at all (it’s the first time I heard of it), so I cannot say this in proper context in his own documented mindset, but the quote alone, after some thought, matches human events from the Garden of Genesis 3 through the Communist resurgence in US politics and society today.

The ‘masses’ in Genesis 3 was 50% of all humans on Earth (Eve) who knew the Truth (God said don’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge), but succumbed to the ‘illusion’ of the serpent, Satan (it’s OK to eat from the Tree of Knowledge).  It is not said in Genesis 3, but the other half of the masses (Adam), may have tried, perhaps without too much effort, to tell her ‘Don’t do it’ to ‘destroy her illusion’ but then he also succumbs to her, and becoming her ‘victim’, also eats the forbidden fruit.

The quote is found true at the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11), or with the Israelites making the Golden Calf during the Exodus (Exodus 32), and even with the Jewish mob that yearned for Jesus to be crucified and for the murderer/terrorist Barabas to be released.  The Truth didn’t matter to the masses (a physical tower could never reach Heaven, God was physically with Israelites, and Jesus, the physical and Godly manifestation of Truth, was there right in front of the mob that wanted Him dead).

In each of these Biblical examples, the illusion that overcame the truth in each situation is that ‘we know better than God’.   The people of Shinar (a territory that was a precursor to Babylon) had the illusion that the tower would consolidate humans together and make them more powerful than God.   The people clamored for Aaron to make the Golden Calf despite seeing the fire and hearing God’s voice on Mount Sinai with Moses on the mountain with Him.  The mob in Jerusalem welcomed Jesus as Hosanna and Messiah just a week prior to His arrest.  Each instance was the mob turning from Truth and the common sense in front of them for the illusion that they could do better.

The victim in each example can be perhaps pointed to a person.  Adam in the Garden, Moses coming down from the mountain, or Jesus becoming the villain and Barabas becoming the hero to the subjugated Hebrews.  But the real victim in each case is God and His Truth.  The mob mentality that Dr. Le Bon studied, examined, and wrote about falls to the same illusion, that man knows more than God does, and the Word of God becomes vilified, disdained, and pushed aside for the mob’s rules.

We can see those parallels in today’s popular secular society; a sizeable number of all people, perhaps 50% or more, have fallen toward the woke agenda, the Socialist/Communist promises of ‘utopia’, and that God is either ‘dead’ or He exists in ‘their own image’, to do their bidding.  The secular society hates Faithful Christians because both groups attempt to deflate their illusions their false ‘truth’ and have them see the real Truth, thus making us, and more importantly Jesus, the victim of their disdain.

The masses don’t thirst for the Truth because for many they never tasted it, only being fed the illusion of truth through mass media, gossip, and hearsay.  There are examples when the convenient and easier-to-swallow lie substitutes for the inconvenient and harder-to-take Truth, as the masses want their ears tickled and scratched (2 Timothy 4:3) instead of actual, meaningful and lasting solutions. 

We all prefer the easy and painless way to get to what we believe will gain us the most; the lottery ticket or stock option that promises millions in a very short period, a physical relationship that brings immediate bliss, a credit card that provides instant satiation of desired goods.  But the Truth is most of those promises that come from the ‘easy way’ only provide greater destitution and brokenness.  True financial freedom comes, for the vast majority, through hard work and savings; and delayed gratification by avoiding debt.  A Spiritual, all-encompassing, and Godly lifetime relationship based on His Love avoids repeated heartaches and the break-up of parents with their children involved.

The illusion that we can do better than God, or to do better without God than with Him, is a false premise that societies and cultures have fallen for, again since the Garden of Eden when the serpent convinced Eve she could ‘be better and do better’ than what God could ever provide her.  The sad part is, she and Adam had it all, except for that one fruit off that one tree.  It is the same story today for the secular world, except they (we) have many more ‘false fruits’ that they (we) can pick from. 

The importance for us as Believers is to be open and available to those people to show them there is a path, narrow and hard as it is, to gain the best blessings, and the best reward available, the Salvation that only comes through Jesus, the same Jesus that was rejected by the mob in Jerusalem, the same God who was ignored in the wilderness below Mount Sinai, the same Spirit that is pushed away for instant gratification.  Gustave Le Bon’s quote is unfortunately true, but it can be made moot through providing the Gospel to the masses, through our continued efforts of evangelism to share the Word.