Desert and trust

Pseudo-mysticism and secrecy are the hallmarks of a cunning leadership that keeps its populations confused and in the dark about why whatever is happening to them is happening. Superstition and suspicion are what takes the place of explanation and collaboration as the pathological fills in when the robust processes of a healthy society weaken and decay (or perhaps, in a sort of Gresham's Law action, are driven out). 

For a people to understand why what is happening to them is happening they need desert and trust. They need for things to be earned with respect to themselves and with respect to each other because trust is nothing more than the sense of what some thing or person has earned. 

"And it is this pseudomysticism that is the stamp of bureaucracy when becomes a form of government. Since the people it dominates never really know why something is happening, and a rational interpretation of laws does not exist, there remains only one thing that counts, the brutal naked event itself. What happens to one then becomes subject to an interpretation whose possibilities are endless, unlimited by reason and unhampered by knowledge. Within the framework of such endless interpretative speculation, so characteristic of all branches of Russian pre-revolutionary literature, the whole texture of life and world assume a mysterious secrecy and depth. There is a dangerous charm in this aura because of its seemingly inexhaustible richness; interpretation of suffering has a much larger range than that of action for the former goes on in the inwardness of the soul and releases all the possibilities of human imagination, whereas the latter is constantly checked, and possibly led into absurdity, by outward consequences and controllable experiences." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 245). 

Modern society believes the cure for superstition and secrecy is rationality and an abundance of information. The biblical regime believes the cure is justice-as-deservedness. 

It is naïve to apply the methods of science to the challenges of a people lost in the wilderness. Science might be able to penetrate a beneficent Nature but it hasn’t got a prayer against the slithering cunning of a despot.