Bureaucracy Sunk the Ship with No Captain
Big titled cowards who value protocol and appearances more than freedom and fruitfulness
This article was originally published by New Saint Andrews College here.
Fake Leaders and Their Empathetic Dogma
Not everyone is built to be a leader. Not everyone can bear both the weight of privilege and the pressure to wield it for the good of others. Many desire a crown but lack the competence to wield both the sword and the shovel. They long for victory without the battle, for the city without the grind. Everyone wants to be a leader, but not everyone is capable. Leadership is more than lofty titles and polished appearances—it demands grit, sacrifice, and the substance to shape a culture of virtue and excellence.
‘Leadership development’, now an industrial-scale enterprise, churns out mindless platitudes by the billion, each volume jostling for a slice of a market glutted with “wisdom.” And yet, amid this deluge of instruction, the cultures these same leaders dwell in are synonymous with cowardice, complacency, complicity, and corruption. Ironically, despite their extensive libraries, most leaders lack both the vision to address the challenges before them and the courage to confront the ones that linger beneath the surface.
Much of this leadership literature lacks true substance, often churning out mindless conformists who, at best, become frontline activists for an insidious status quo. These faux leaders are exceptional, not because their ethos is bold or defiant against an entrenched establishment, but because they master the art of pandering to a restless crowd—one hungry for motivation, empathy, and a sense of belonging.
Though these figures can stir emotions and move audiences, they are ultimately subjects of a world order that values managers over true leaders, revolutionaries over reformers, and empaths over virtuous disruptors of folly and vice. They maintain the façade of leadership but remain shackled to a system designed to reward compliance, not conviction nor virtue. They inspire feelings, not principles. They provide sedation, not solutions. Their calling card is winsomeness—measured not by merit but by how many likes, shares, and retweets their polished personas command. And where courage is needed most, they cower beneath the weight of a restless world they are too timid—or too complicit—to confront.
Befriending Mediocrity
We have grown disturbingly accustomed to a world of dysfunction, coddling a stifling bureaucracy that masquerades as governance. Cowardice and incompetence are no longer shunned but normalized, baptized into a secular liturgy of excuses and paralysis.
We allow ourselves to make peace with mediocrity, whispering half-hearted hopes that the thick fog of absurdity might thin slightly instead of dissipating entirely. Emotionally, we are held hostage by perpetual victims: the unhinged heralding every inconvenience as systemic oppression and the embittered draped in the hollow rhetoric of suffrage and entitlement. Paralyzed in our minds and neutered in our wills, we are free to grumble but far too timid to act. Fear of unpopularity—indeed, of loss itself—renders us helpless. And in a cruel twist of irony, we trust the very systems that consistently betray us, seeking salvation in structures designed to ensure a stalemate.
Justice and economics are not dry policies or faceless institutions but deeply moral matters.
When Bureaucracy Wins the Day
Incompetence thrives beneath the stifling cloak of bureaucracy, a smothering blanket designed to obscure ineptitude and mask corruption. For the bureaucrat, the process is both the path and the prize—a means of preserving control while faking the virtues of responsibility and prudence. Bureaucracy loves its facade of complexity. It revels in endless rules and regulations, all under the guise of safety and restraint. But behind this labyrinth lies a deeper agenda: the erosion of liberty and the stifling of human flourishing.
Bureaucrats are risk-averse and allergic to disruption, prizing stagnation over progress. They amplify their own relevance by multiplying layers of rules, rendering decision-making an insufferable theatre of paralysis. While they speak of safeguarding the public, their policies treat those they serve as mere subjects to be taxed, subdued, and stripped of independence. Bureaucracy does not foster flourishing; it creates wards of the state. Like a condescending parent, it infantilizes the public, stripping away their agency while assuring them it’s all for their own good. Worse still, bureaucracy feeds on cowardice. It is the default setting of a world besotted with statism and globalism, a towering edifice of inefficiency masquerading as order. The bureaucrat’s work is a sordid mixture of secrecy, manipulative rhetoric, and aggressive propaganda. Its tools are emotional sabotage and relentless redefinition, all aimed at stifling dissent and normalizing the tyranny of inaction. In such a system, political correctness becomes the enforced lingua franca, a soul-numbing creed that prizes appearances above substance and niceties above truth.
Political correctness is no mere quirk of modern governance; it is an ideological weapon, a dehumanizing flattery that rings loud but hollow. It poisons the well of integrity, corrodes true competence, and undermines genuine care. Beneath its saccharine surface lies a dystopian calculus that breeds mistrust, anxiety, apathy, and death. Bureaucracy thrives on a veneer of order that administers chaos, bringing winter to the world like the chilling curse of Jadis herself.
Yet, while such machinations may rattle nations and cloud the hearts of men, they pose no threat to the sovereignty of the King. Even the dark schemes of the wicked are held within His hand, bent to His ultimate purposes. God raises up rulers—even godless ones—to serve His ends, while His people are called to ready their arms in the spiritual warfare that underlies the visible skirmishes of politics and governance.
For those with eyes to see, justice and economics are not dry policies or faceless institutions but deeply moral matters. The wheels of tyranny turn only so long as the righteous fail to act, shirk responsibility, and surrender to the siren song of security. Bureaucrats breed compliance, but Christians are to kindle rebellion against their darkness, providing the firepower that will bring a winter thaw and usher in the inevitable victory of truth.
A Religion of Fighting and Building
Make no mistake: it is the church that has discipled the nations into this chaos—not by bold proclamations of truth, but through its silence, cowardice, complicity, and apathy.
We created our own labyrinths of bureaucracy, extinguishing our ability to offend, confront, and challenge. We abandoned the hard virtues of action for the hollow comfort of saying the “right” things, all while doing little. We embraced the doctrine of niceness, winsomeness, and passivity, dressing them up as wisdom and holiness. In doing so, we forfeited our strength and traded it for red tape and impotent respectability.
Do Christians not carry an ethos and pathos that far surpasses the hollow slogans of godless conservatives? Do they not possess an undying heritage that forged the very foundations of the developed world? Is it not the Christian tradition that has spread freedom and prosperity “as far as the curse is found”? Are Christians not the stewards of the highest order of political, economic, and social thought—a framework unparalleled in its wisdom and power? And do Christians not fight and build under the banner of the King of kings, whose dominion extends over the entire cosmos?
Many Christians idly wait for permission to authoritatively proclaim and impose their religion on a world drowning in chaos. They cling to the fantasy that their mediocrity, cushioned by “good intentions,” is enough to change the world. They have mastered thought but left their backbone, teeth, and resolve at the door.
The lie entrances many that passivity, effeminacy, and politeness will somehow win the day. They hold themselves above the fierce religion of Moses the lawgiver, Samson the strong, David the warrior, or Elijah the fire-wielder—mistaking softness for civility and cowardice for wisdom.
While their doctrine remains undefeated, they are starved for bold, convicted, and wise leaders who know how to fight and build—leaders of ambition, grit, and vision—leaders with an unshakable work ethic who are lions—unafraid of persecution, slander, indictment, or the cost of standing firm.
Where are the leaders ready to wield the axe of Saint Boniface and strike at the immorality rotting our culture? Christian leaders with guns loaded, gavels swinging, borders high and strong, wives fruitful, children free, churches doctrinally sound and culturally potent, communities thriving, and economies flourishing?
Secularized and pagan minds cannot realize the reconstruction of great Western nations. Christians built it, and only Christians hold the tools necessary to rebuild, preserve, and make them greater than ever before.
Reformation is not merely a possibility where reformers dwell; it is inevitable.
The Serrated Edge of the Reformation
Christian institutions must reject the lure of mediocrity in cultivating leaders who will shape culture. Their ambition should be nothing less than world-conquering—an exercise of dominion over every sphere of life for the glory of Christ the King. Adherents who are subject to Christian tutelage must emerge as cultural saboteurs to the godless and living nightmares to purveyors of evil.
Such institutions should anticipate disciples who will draw the right kind of trouble—men and women willing to endure suffering and press through pain to win. These will shape political policy, establish fruitful economies, and establish culture-shaping institutions. It is not enough for leaders to wear the polished respectability that a longstanding tradition often affords; more is demanded. They must possess a grit, firmness, and competence that transcends academic brilliance, equipping them to engage directly and decisively in cultural warfare.
The need is great for Christian institutions that do not aspire to produce affluent bureaucrats but rather to shape true leaders who understand that cultural transformation is neither polite nor clean. Such institutions must wield the serrated edge of reformation, cutting through decay and shaping the world with precision and purpose.
Reformation demands boldness, tenacity, and unflinching resolve from leaders. Reformation is not merely a possibility where reformers dwell; it is inevitable.