Exhortation

Demand of conscience to Men employed by the State.

You have worked hard.

As an individual you have invested and endured many years, even decades, in your roles within the official organizations and institutions of the State.

You have subordinated yourself to duty, to adherence and fidelity towards a system of governance which holds back the raw and ugly anarchy of human existence.

It is not merely employment, but also a calling. It imbues your daily work with the significance of societal perpetuation; and while the masses of people who see only the outside of your role and responsibilities take bureaucracy for granted and lambast it with their common curses, they nonetheless are blind to, and do not fully appreciate, the vast machinery with which you must contend.

Nor do they truly know your ever-present frustrations with the gears of the government monolith, slow to move and often stupid, issuing internal regulations and policies and practice that the public never sees but that deaden and stricture and hamper you in service.

Yet you have persevered, have you not?

A year, a decade, a career passes.

Rather than succumbing completely to disillusionment, you have found the way to strike the necessary yet exhausting balance between service to your people, acceptance of often ill-guided mandates in your work, and compliance with the machinery of bureaucracy which is a weight to your people but a constant beating of half-dead, half functioning drums of policy upon you that deadens the spirit.

It delivers the necessary continuity of operations, you have told yourself.

And you are not wrong. For the civil service and government bureaucrats outlast their political regimes and masters, a lesson that history inevitably teaches with countless examples from every corner upon the earth.

And so you have struck this balance, and endured, and persevered. You have found a working balance between official position and family, between the State power you wield and the gentleness your loved ones deserve, between your elevation above the common man and yet your cruel duty of service and protection, sworn with full intent.

This is difficult, and painful, and you have made mistakes. Just as all men make mistakes and work to move past and beyond them, you have found at last a stable orbit between the two dichotomous realities, and accepted the role you have sought.

You have also become, inevitably, a faceless component in the great Machine that the State demands and relies upon as the bedrock of its delivery of good or evil, oppression or victory, upholding of values or perpetuation of corruption.

You have become subordinated to it; and your labor for it makes you responsible.

When the State has become criminal, you have become criminal with it.

When the State has become deranged, you necessarily inflict humiliation for it.

When the State turns against hierarchy, order, and beauty through influence, graft, and vice you tell yourself that it happens in all places, and in all generations, and your work continues. You tell yourself that you are different, that you must make a difference, and that your presence in the heart of malfeasance makes it less of an evil.

Thus you turn away from what your heart tells you; angry perhaps, certainly disgusted, but nonetheless still turning your face from those evidences of official abuse as a part of the machine that guards itself and its implements.

And you are right, of course. For Men on Earth under Heaven commit their crimes as fallen animals, subject to greed and lust and other venial and mortal sins. In your official capacity you have seen them all, and you know that men in your position will always see these things, and it makes no sense to draw a purity line for every instance you will encounter, and say no more at great cost to yourself.

Thus and therefore you slip further from your People.

It cannot be helped, can it?

After all, what can one man do against the bland and faceless behemoth of the State in all its ten thousand aspects, its laws and officials and file drawers that yield incessant poundage of documents to serve the droning interests of the next better-placed official with a stronger selfish interest, one rung above?

It would be a career liability, and you’d have less ability to do the good work with real purpose you believe in and have sworn to do, and things would simply get worse.

And you are right, of course. Good men should remain in place, where they can attenuate the overbearing grind of the monolith, serving still both their people and the vision and values they had to bring a little more light forward.

Thus and therefore you become what God despises.

You have learned to stifle your conscience.

You have trained to suppress indignation.

You have practiced acceptance of evil by the State, until the State relied upon you to perpetuate and advance it. And today we are where we are, in this foul place where senile, oblivious men craft the collapse they will never have to answer for.

You will answer for them, because you are accountable to both Heaven and to Men.

You have become a servant who is grossly accustomed to separation from the people he swore to serve.

You are this day a man who accepts and overlooks and passes by in silence the dishonesty and malfeasance and grave derelictions of the machine itself; and you are equally complicit in its outcomes upon your people. In full partnership with those who blunted your service and invited you to accept muzzle of your conscience.

This is terrible, and I know that your heart aches with commingled pain and shame at each small step, bit by bit, that you removed yourself from dignity and became the instrument of an unthinking Leviathan that never had the common weal as lodestar.

Open evil now stands proud and lascivious, lashing your people with whips of insanity and genocide and global war for feral parliaments and obsequious, hidden oligarchs.

You are their instrument of murder.

You are the enforcer that crushes hope.

You are the man who has betrayed his conscience, step by miniscule step, until you are desensitized to the sorrow of Heaven and the depths of abrogated oath you have descended into by correct observation twisted into justification of accepted crime.

You have become the enemy of the People, the eater of their substance, the brute who unfeelingly does the will of tyrants, simply because that is what he does.

Perhaps you drink, and contemplate this with dulled and private fury.

Perhaps you believe ambition to rise in office will enable you to effect pivotal change, and somehow bring hierarchy, order, and beauty back to the rightful and honest effort of the State to serve the people over which it exercises power.

Perhaps you believe turning away from your career, leaving the behemoth and the People to their own devices, is the only answer you can find that keeps you from going mad at the soft whisper inside you of betrayal, betrayal, betrayal that you never thought you’d hear on that day you stood and swore an oath to serve forever.

Perhaps you rage, and do the minimum your office requires, and lose yourself in pastimes or interests or a second job that provides an outlet for the angry aggression that would otherwise explode on the loved ones who don’t understand.

None of these things will bring you peace, nor still and silence the quiet voice of Heaven inside you that tells you, don’t lie.

Perhaps you should listen to that conscience.

Perhaps that is a pain and sorrow and shame you must step into, and accept as real.

Perhaps you cannot turn the State, now in this late hour where it is past truth; past service; and long past the ugly hour where the Mandate of Heaven fell from its head and no longer conceals the malignancy of its countenance.

The Age is turning. Men who listen to their conscience will be free.

They will find dignity again, and real work and service and sacred purpose may be achieved once more, in ranks of brotherhood and fealty and love for your people.

You must let go of contempt, both for them and for yourself.

You must let go of your shame, and no longer silence that best part of you.

You must let go of your fear, for the State is only what People make of it.

And you bear duty of the State.

You have sworn to it.

Do not be afraid.

You were innocent when you swore; you had not yet been within the belly of the Leviathan, nor witnessed what now you have seen. You were not ready to see; the awful reality of the human condition had not been fully revealed.

Now you are a Man, and you have seen, and you have ears to hear.

I am Ivan Throne.

I tell you this day that you must cease any false dream that you are not equally accountable for the outcomes of the State as you are responsible for execution of your duty of it. And there is no escape from this, just as you will never escape your conscience, even should you live for generations more.

The Third World War is here. Your States are in process of collapse. Those rotted States will seek to expend you without pity to perpetuate one more day of power, regardless of the atrocities and wholesale murder of your people that it costs.

Your restoral to that early pure heart of sacred purpose and redemption of determination to duty is open!

You must simply get up and walk, my brother.

You must exorcise dead loyalty to rotted States.

Cease your crimes against God!

Cease the self-absolution that inevitably fails, but draws you closer to despair.

That spiral is by design, for evil cannot create, but only convert.

You are a Man on Earth under Heaven, and it is time for you to fulfill this.

And I will tell you how:

Read the Age of Militants and consider it well.

Were you not our certain kind of man, you would never have sworn yourself to service.

To clean the heart of the State, you must first clean yourself.

And with that new day, bring yourself to the vanguard with fresh and awakened conscience that cries with gladness at last in recognition.

Join the Movement, and stand with firm footing of dignity once more.

We work this very day, and your arrival is past due.

Take our hands and move forward.

Grand rising!