How Should We Then Live? (Part Three)

And furthermore:
In Chapter Twelve Schaeffer discusses "Manipulation and the New Elite."  He describes various techniques which authorities could use to manipulate the public.  He discusses the problems of exalting determinism over free will and the idea that what is is what should be.  He explores the possibility of an elite creating a set of arbitrary absolutes and imposing them upon others, who being left with no objective foundation for morality, are unable to object.

He closes the chapter with:

"The central message of biblical Christianity is the possibility of men and women approaching God through the work of Christ.  But the message also has secondary results, among them the unusual and wide freedoms which biblical Christianity gave to countries where it supplied the consensus.  When these freedoms are separated from the Christian base, however, they become a force of destruction leading to chaos.  When this happens, as it has today, then, to quote Eric Hoffer (1902--), 'When freedom destroys order, the yearning for order will destroy freedom.'
"At that point the words left or right will make no difference.  They are only two roads to the same end.  There is no difference between an authoritarian government from the right or the left: the results are the same.  An elite, an authoritarianism as such, will gradually force form on society so that it will not go on to chaos.  And most people will accept it--from the desire for personal peace and affluence, from apathy, and from the yearning for order to assure the functioning of some political system, business, and the affairs of daily life.  That is just what Rome did with Caesar Augustus." 

-Abu Tulip