A society that is easily swayed

The superfluous men, who could no longer find gainful employment in a mature capitalist economy that had produced an excess it could no longer digest, began to populate the colonized territories that were being moved under imperialist rule. The superfluous men and the imperialist fringe that served as a economic pressure valve (to bleed off the excess the capitalist economy was engendering) were having trouble finding occupations that offered them opportunities for earning self-respect based on desert. Instead, they felt themselves as if "They were nothing of their own making, they were like living symbols of what had happened to them, living abstractions and witnesses of the absurdity of human institutions. They were not individuals like the old adventurers, they were the shadows of events with which they had nothing to do.

"Like Mr. Kurtz in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness,' they were 'hollow to the core,' 'reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity and cruel without courage.' They believed in nothing and 'could get (themselves) to believe anything – anything.' Expelled from a world with accepted social values, they had been thrown back upon themselves and still had nothing to fall back upon except, here and there, a streak of talent which made them as dangerous as Kurtz if they were ever allowed to return to their homelands. For the only talent that could possibly burgeon in their hollow souls was the gift of fascination which makes a 'splendid leader of an extreme party.' ... Thus they brought with them, or they learned quickly, the code of manners which befitted the coming type of murderer to whom the only unforgivable sin was to lose his temper." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 189). 

The weakness of will that allows large populations to be bent to the propaganda campaigns of strongman rulers comes of a prior emptiness of the spirit. If you start by believing in nothing, it is not difficult to get you to come to believe in anything. The processes of a healthy economy need to be able to generate not only material product, they must also generate spiritual fulfillment else the absence of spiritual substance in the people will result in a society that is easily swayed by the techniques and devices of mass persuasion. Such spiritual substance is engendered by the maintenance in the society of justice as deservedness. 

The history of the hundred years from the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th centuries was the history of the triumph of spiritual emptiness and what it could produce. Not only Hitler's and Stalin's genocides but even before, when we reckon in the mass murders, numbering in the millions and the tens of millions, in Africa and Asia under imperialist rule, we are faced with a span of roughly a hundred years where the dysfunctional processes of spiritually hollow political/economies shaped and defined the imperial legacy of Rule Britannia. 

To take responsibility for the entire political/economic process from end to end means to be concerned not only with the positive effects of the system and the incentive structure that leads to productivity but also to be concerned with the negative effects of the system and the engendering of a cultural milieu in which resentment and hatred can breed and flourish. The British Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries witnessed and superintended the collapse of the ancien regime and its replacement with the system of global imperialism. Then, toward the end of that mid-century epoch, the British Empire itself began to come apart. 

The measure of a proper political/economic system is what happens when the power weakens and the cast-offs begin to run the show. What sort of cast-offs is the ruling regime creating? Could they take over the power and preserve what's best in the civilization that's coming apart? 

The story of the Bible is the story of two ancient empires that were in decline. The story of the Children of Israel is the story of how to navigate that decline. It's the story of the other side of the picture, where there is economic affluence but political decline, as opposed to the typical foundation narrative which takes place under economic shortages but under a regime that is politically robust and ideologically clear. 

The God of Israel is the god Who appears after the other ideologies have failed. He is the God Who fills in the void that's left after the collapse of a great civilization where the Children of Israel must raise themselves up out of decades and centuries of subjugation to what has become a decadent cultural and spiritual system.