Francis Berger

Bureaucracy is Always Against You

2/15/2026

Government Bureau - George Tooker - 1956

Bureaucracy is a cold, mechanistic, systematic, dehumanizing, and impersonal force that is, by its very nature, anti-personal, meaning openly anti-spiritual in its overarching operations and motives.

Make no mistake, as a cold, grinding, soulless mechanism of power, bureaucracy exists for the sole purpose of suffocating spiritual freedom, creativity, relationships, and orientation toward the Creation and the divine.

The totalitarianism it perpetually seeks—and often succeeds in establishing—is the centralized and dictatorial crushing of the individual spirit and any manifestation of spiritual culture.

Bureaucracy now has the world, and the West in particular, firmly in its cold, calculating grip. Those who regard it as good or necessary and willingly conform to bureaucracy from the depths of their internal spiritual landscapes commit the sin of voluntarily surrendering their freedom, creativity, and spirit to the very thing that candidly promises them with their spiritual destruction.

Those who view bureaucracy as legitimate authority or as something essential and unavoidable, perhaps even beneficial, have lost the plot and are likely irredeemable, spiritually speaking.

Such people have allowed themselves to be conditioned to value rules, laws, mechanisms, procedures, and the implementation of impersonal power over the spiritual nature of all human beings and all other Beings in Creation. They have sacrificed themselves and are more than happy to sacrifice you, given the chance.

Don’t give the bureaucrats or bureaucrat supporters the chance.

Everything in Creation is spiritual. That which we regard as the material is but an aspect or subset of the spiritual. As such, your individual spirit automatically overrules any material force that bureaucracy wields against you. In encounters with bureaucracy, your individual spirit is always the superior authority.

Let me repeat that -- in encounters with bureaucracy, your individual spirit is always the superior authority.

And always means always. No exceptions.

Bureaucracy may succeed in conquering you materially in mortal life; however, that is not what it is after. Above all else, bureaucracy wants your spirit. It wants to conquer you eternally.

Don’t hand your spirit over to bureaucracy.

That is part of your responsibility.

It really is that simple.

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My Wife Went to Saint Peter's Basilica . . .

2/14/2026

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. . . and all I got was this photo of Michelangelo's Pieta.

I have not had the chance to see Michelangelo's Pieta in person, but I was happy to experience it vicariously through my wife's recent trip to Rome.

My wife also attended a General Audience at the Vatican and saw the pope at a distance of less than a meter. Unsurprisingly, Leo is shorter in real life than one would expect.

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Freedom is Neither Random Nor Randumb

2/9/2026

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An excellent series of reflections and observations over at Laeth’s place today. I found the following particularly striking:

i find myself more and more at odds with both classical religion and mainstream attitudes to reality. the first one refuses to accept just how random and chaotic a world of true freedom is. the second refuses to understand it, and own it.

it is precisely because we are free that there is randomness (i act this way, you act that way, someone else acts another way, every single being, not just humans, acting all the time at cross purposes: the result is unexpected; cannot be predicted). and it is precisely in freedom and in freedom only that there is meaning. that's the fun. and the tragedy. can't have one without the other. and why would you want to.

My two cents. Mainstream materialist assumptions about reality are essentially devoid of meaning. Stuff happens, sometimes according to some physical/natural laws, sometimes not. There is no big “why” behind why stuff happens. It simply happens, often quite randomly, perhaps even chaotically.

Classical Christian metaphysics posits an Omni-god as the big “why” without actually providing any meaningful or coherent explanation for the “why.” Thus, randomness or chaos cannot exist in classical Christian metaphysics because it also defines God the big “how,” “what”, “where,” “how,” and “who.” Put another way, classical Christian metaphysics leaves no room for the sort of authentic freedom beyond its rather contradictory doctrine of free will. Thus, what we perceive as randomness or chaos is our limited and obtuse interpretation of Divine Will unfolding.

The assumptions Laeth shares align with mine and offer another way forward. What we perceive as randomness or chaos is the commotion of all the Beings in Creation simultaneously and continuously expressing their uncreated freedom and the subsequent interactions of these expressed forms of freedom. What appears as random is actually expressions of freedom rooted in consciousness/intelligence and driven by motivations, including but not limited to desires, aspirations, commitments, love, and fear.

Laeth concludes:

that's the whole point. we have to participate in making meaning. not 'find' it. we have to make it. God makes it for himself, not for us. what he did is give us an opportunity. why would i want him to pilot the ship for me. it's enough that he gave me a ship. the point is to become more like him, not less.

the other side of the coin is mainstream atheism, which looks upon the often chaotic results of freedom and concludes that there is no meaning. what a stupid and unwarranted conclusion. just another type of cope. to refuse responsibility.

randomness is a product of free beings acting (and acting requires purpose, hence, meaning). now, the result of course is often chaotic. it has to be. but that just means improvisation is one of the skills (perhaps the main skill) we're meant to master here. but most people want a script, i suppose.

Read the rest in the link above.

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Not Having a Career Worked Out Well (For Me)

2/6/2026

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I wanted to be a writer when I was young, so much so that I barely paid any attention to starting or maintaining a career in anything else. Luckily, employment prospects were bleak after I graduated from university in Canada, so I would have struggled to launch a career even if I had had the burning desire to do so.

I worked in restaurants or on construction sites mostly because there wasn’t much else available. I also took on some driving and delivery gigs here and there and had a stint working as a bookstore clerk. I also taught ESL in Europe for a couple of years.

Oddly enough, being “underemployed” didn’t bother me too much. Since I wanted to be a writer, I made that my priority. Instead of a career—which was hard to come by anyway—I settled for “work”—that is, any job that would provide enough to live on and, more importantly, the time and space needed for writing.

That state of affairs proved satisfactory until I began to accept that I would probably never become a successful writer. I must have been about thirty or so when I accepted this. Minor publishing successes aside—the odd published short story here, the occasional snippet of an article there—my work never broke through in any meaningful way. And there I was, a failed, wannabe writer with nothing but joe jobs on his resume.

That having a career might be good didn’t occur to me until I was in my early thirties. It was around then that I entered the education field and became a high school teacher. However, I couldn't regard the job as a career, no matter how hard I tried. After a year in the system, I realized I would never have any ambition to climb the ladder. At best, teaching would be little more than a steadier job. Just work. Something I did to pay the bills.

I spent a little over a decade working in high schools before taking a job as a university instructor. Although I was presented with opportunities for advancement almost immediately at the university, I experienced no desire to work my way up in the organization. To me, it was work. Nothing more. And it has remained that way for the ten years I have logged in my current vocation.

Oddly enough, my aversion to career-building has not been financially detrimental in the long run. Sure, I could have made more money; however, as it stands, I have no debt, own a house and car (paid for in cash), and experience little financial stress. If anything, the lack of a career taught me to be frugal and creative. It has also undoubtedly saved me from many distasteful compromises, (essentially) meaningless attachments, and countless ego traps.

I share the above not to criticize careers per se, only to note that not having one has served me quite well personally.

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Anguish

2/3/2026

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I sometimes include a few snippets of commentary on the paintings I feature here, but I don't think I need to say much about this well-known piece by the otherwise little known painter, August Friedrich Albert Schenck (1828 - 1901).

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Love in a Time of Monsters

1/31/2026

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“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”

The quote above comes from Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), a Marxist philosopher who was also a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party in Italy. I happened to stumble upon it today and started thinking about interregnum periods in history and people like Gramsci, who were vigorously active during such times.

Gramsci’s observation immediately struck me as ironic. I doubt he intended it to be self-referential; however, through a historical lens, it is difficult to ignore that Gramsci was clearly among the monsters of his time, together with the fascists whom he vehemently railed against until his untimely death in a Mussolini prison in 1937.

The old world of Gramsci’s day began dying—or died, take your pick—after the First World War. The struggling-to-be-born new world emerged right after the treaties were signed. It did not take long for the monster to appear.

However, there were plenty of monsters in the waning old world order, too. In particular, the psychopaths who willingly sacrificed an entire generation of young men to gain a few yards of blood-soaked mud. Nevertheless, at least the old world maintained some semblance of deference to spiritual matters. The new world monsters were a different breed. They rejected spirit and embraced the will. Their struggles to establish a new world took destruction to a whole new level, eclipsing anything the old world managed to achieve.

As I pondered the quote some more, I found myself wondering if we were living through an interregnum period of sorts. I suppose we may be; however, I tend to see our current circumstances as more of a no man’s land, devoid of any real or meaningful choice for this-worldly good in the form of politics or culture. In that sense, it definitely fits Gramsci’s description of a “time of monsters.”

Although partisanism still pretends to be alive and well, I get the sense that every global politician is working for the same office, albeit with varying aims and goals. Some desire an ordered, patient form of destruction; others have been given marching orders to foment chaos at every turn. The conflicts and squabbles they display to us are merely office politics—entirely irrelevant because the office itself opposes all that is good.

On the one hand, this challenges our overall attitude to temporal affairs. After all, we all want to be “for” something, which inevitably entails being “against” something else. Most people want to make things better for themselves, their families, and the world at large, at least in their minds. However, if we choose between the options currently being offered, we will only be choosing between monsters and choosing to side with one monster over another. Struggling against a specific monster or all monsters will not save us from becoming monsters ourselves (a hat tip to Nietzsche’s famous and overused abyss quote).

On the other hand, current circumstances should make it far easier for us to focus on spiritual and relational matters based in love at a concrete level, particularly with those close to us, including the Divine, which is where our primary focus should be, regardless of whether we are in an old world order, a new world order, or something in between.

At the end of the day, all else is abstraction. Any other focus lures us into the land of monsters.

As I continued to ponder Gramsci’s quote, I found another block of text attributed to him that connects directly to what I have expressed in the paragraph above. Very illuminating and worth reading (bold added):

“How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one's own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn't this had some effect on my life as a militant--has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?”

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Forget Reaction. Try Problem, Creation, Solution Instead

1/27/2026

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Dr. Charlton has posted some incisive observations on the topic of reaction—more specifically, on the perils of reacting to narrative peddled via the mass media, politics, and such. Bruce concludes (extra bold added):

In a nutshell; when we react to anything we know of, or think we understand, only or mainly via officialdom and the mass media; we absolutely need to bear in mind that there is a vast range of possible realities, and in reacting to one, we are always assuming another.

And the range of possible realities extends from nothing at all having happened (total fakery), through levels such as the event being real but staged or permitted, to the event being factually (more or less) as described - but the interpretation of that event being dishonestly manipulative.

All we can ever know for sure is that (as of 2026) the official story is always false - but we can seldom know in what way false; so our reactions may be being manipulated in ways we do not detect, and may therefore do more harm than good.

I am firmly convinced that the issue of reacting to/being manipulated by topical news events, media narratives, and political incitements is paramount to Christians, spiritually speaking.

To begin with, it is crucial to consider that reaction amounts to little more than obedience to some external stimulus.

Yes, obedience because the actions others—in this case, the System and its mass media—utilize are usually little more than commands, incitements, enticements, and provocations. They demand a response, expect a comeback, and yearn for a backlash, all of which a reactive perspective is more than willing to supply in spades.

The commanded, incited, enticed, and provoked are not genuine actors but reactors. The script they choose to follow is not their own. They speak lines penned by others and move across the stage following directions that are not theirs.

If action is the pressing of a button, then reaction is the pathetic movement of the button returning to its original position after having been pressed.

Every reaction to incitement, enticement, and provocation is obedience to a command. It is the admission that I have allowed my thinking, action, and conduct to depend entirely on the thinking, action, and conduct of another.

A true Christian cannot allow his actions to be mere reactions; nor can he act in a way that serves only to incite, entice, and provoke others into reaction. To do either lowers him to the level of his enemy – to the mundane, average, predictable, and common ways of thinking, acting, and being.

True Christian thoughts and acts are not and cannot be knee-jerk responses or compliant responses to outside forces. True Christian thoughts and actions transcend reaction and all reactive activity. They grow organically from the depths of inner being and turn the incitements, enticements, and provocations on their heads.

Creation is not reaction. As such, it never feels like a reaction because it obeys nothing external and rises above the actions of others – far above the reach of even the worst of incitements, enticements, or provocations.

The System is calibrated to trigger negative spiritual participation, primarily through lies, deceit, and manipulations that aim to provoke a reaction. Reacting to System manipulations may look and feel like positive spiritual action, but it is not.

The actual act remains within the System domain; the re-action is primarily a Pavlovian response. Reaction assures the System of the effectiveness of its conditioning and manipulations. The more we react, the more assured the System becomes.

Jesus instructed us to turn the other cheek. Modern man interprets this as pacifism. A terrible error. Turning the other cheek signifies the transcendence and transfiguration of a reactive state.

The person striking you on the cheek expects a reaction. He anticipates your striking back. He does not anticipate the turned cheek. His “model” of reality shifts. He finds himself in an undiscovered country, suddenly uncertain about what may come next.

Christians talk a lot about transfiguring themselves and reality; however, they cannot transfigure anything in a reactive state. Why? Because reaction is not genuine action.

Reaction is not doing. Reaction is having things done to you.

Reaction defies transformation because it keeps you locked in the faux reality of determinism. The only thing the reaction confirms is how impossible it is for you to have made any other decision or performed any other action.

The System loves that sort of thing.

The urge to do something must motivate Christians to act, genuinely act, rather than merely react.

The root of such motivation is in thinking that aligns with Creation.

David Icke coined the term problem, reaction, solution to describe how the Establishment manipulates people through its System and mass media. The Establishment promotes an urgent problem through its channels, waits for the pre-programmed/pre-conditioned reaction, and then happily provides the “solution” to mollify the reaction.

As far as I have been able to discern, the only viable way to avoid reactive behavior and thinking and the whole problem, reaction, solution paradigm is to align thinking with God and Creation via love.

Thus, instead of reaction, we should focus on creation (which entails creative thinking and being that aligns with God’s creative purposes).

Problem, reaction, solution? Forget that gerbil wheel.

Try this instead.

Problem, CREATION, solution.

Note: The bulk of this post comprises excerpts from previous posts on this topic.

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The Place of the Skull = A Kind of Positivism

1/25/2026

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It strikes me that Silveszter Ördögh’s depiction of Jesus as a mortal man who sought to transform the world through the principle of loving one another as the only solution to the finality of death in mortal life amounts to little more than thinly-veiled positivism.

For all of his anti-religionism, Auguste Comte promulgated love as the driving principle behind his positivist philosophy and much desired “religion of man.” Comte defined love as living for others and regarded it as a duty and moral/ethical imperative that would engender a benevolent society in which everyone prioritizes others over their own self-interest. The man believed in altruism: Hey, he coined the term!

In connection with the above, Silveszter Ördögh portrays Jesus as little more than a positivistic trailblazer. The emphasis on love as a foundational force that can mitigate the suffering of mortal life and help create a better world for oneself and others provides the key.

As attractive as Ördögh’s take on Christ may appear, it is an unmoored representation that extends no further than Comte’s ramblings on the significance of love in a purely material universe.

Love that cannot transcend the material is, at best, a lower form of love. Better than nothing, I suppose; however, in the case of altruism, a dangerous abstraction and certainly not the “do all and end all” that writers like Ördögh and thinkers like Comte promote it as.

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With Your Face in the Dust

1/24/2026

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I would like to share an excerpt from a short Hungarian novel I finished reading a few days ago.

Below is my rough translation of the brief chapter called “With Your Face in the Dust” from Koponyák Hegye (Place of the Skull) by Silveszter Ördögh.

The chapter recounts Christ’s first fall on his way to Calvary is told from Jesus’s narrative point of view. Bear in mind that Ördögh presents Jesus as a fully mortal man who does not believe in the possibility of Resurrected Life or Heaven.

I’ll comment in a future post.

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With Your Face in the Dust

This is where you should have started, down here, at the bottom: in the dust. Not in the temple, not on steps — from the dust.

What a perspective — have you noticed? How large and varied the dust specks are! Who would have thought?

Do you feel them between your teeth? Scraping, grinding, working in your mouth — soon you will have no teeth. The dust will erode them. This fine, warm dust will eat your teeth. How would you have known this? How?

Would you ever have believed that you could still learn, even now? That these lifeless little creations are capable of opposing you? The specks of dust can make you forget your pain and bitter sorrow. They laugh at the silent effort you exude as you heroically carry your cross. They laugh at your attempts to muffle your groans, to hide your trembling muscles, to conceal that your exhausted legs are rebelling against your determined commands.

Can you smell them? Your nose is full of them.

Can you see their colors? Your eyes are full of them.

Can you taste them? They are nourishment for the saliva foaming in your mouth.

Do you see? This is where you should have started; down here, at the bottom: in the dust.

Smile, rejoice, if you can. You are victorious. You have ascended to the dust. Up to this sacred everywhere, up from the depths of the temples, from the vulgar labyrinths, from the precipice of injustice.

Rejoice. Try. Want it. You have discovered the starting point.

You must make this known, you must. The people must know about this to save them from self-deception, to prevent them from deceiving each other. You must make this known. You must go out and preach about it . . .

“Specks of dust, my little brothers and sisters, listen to me. I am one of your dust speck brothers. I just want to say that I now know myself. I know myself because I have met you; because I have recognized you and love you . . . Do you also see yourselves in me?"

Don’t stifle your voice. Don’t let the dust specks irritate your eyes. Ignore the mud that has dried on your tongue. Speak! Shout! Let the world know!

“ . . . specks of dust, my little brothers and sisters, you should know that we are the building blocks of this world. It is out of us that life emerge. It is out of us that truth emerges.

Specks of dust, my little brothers and sisters, we are the way. Let us love one another. Let us work together. We will be the grass and the trees. Let us carve the rock together . . .”

Keep moving! The tears will rinse the dust from your eyes. Spit the caked dust from your mouth.

You have to keep moving . . .

You must stand up. They are tugging at you, lifting you by the arms.

Somehow, you are back on your feet. You’re standing, drained of every ounce of strength you thought you had.

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The Man Died, but His Truth Lives, and That's Better Than Nothing

1/23/2026

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Ördogh's "Place of the Skull" makes the case that this image represents the death of a man and the preservation of an idea.

Szilveszter Ördögh’s Koponyák Hegye (Place of the Skull; i.e., Golgotha) turned out pretty much as I expected it would.

Instead of Resurrection, we get the Preservation—that is, an entirely mortal Jesus dying on the cross in an effort to preserve the “truth” of his teachings, which boils down to love one another in this mortal life because there is nothing on the other side of death. Of course, he doesn't say the latter part out loud but affirms it privately within the narrative.

The only thing that is remotely spiritual in the novel surfaces in the “oneness” feelings Jesus experiences as he stumbles with the cross on his way toward Golgotha. Exhausted and bloodied, Jesus feels an affinity for the dust into which he collapses and is strangely relieved to know that he, too, will soon be at one with the dust.

So, Jesus dies and remains dead, but his teachings live on after being accentuated by supernatural flourishes added by later believers. Voilà! The planting of the seeds of Christianity.

That’s it in a nutshell, thematically at least.

Thematic considerations aside, the novel did contain some unexplained phenomena, chief among them, Jesus’s ability to instantly heal the ear of the soldier Peter wounds in Gethsemane. The miracle is left unexplained. Of course, the miracle is recounted only from Peter’s narrative point of view, leaving open the option that he just hallucinated the miracle.

Overall, a strange little novel, but well-written and worth reading, despite the utter rejection of any assumptions concerning the Resurrection. If anything, it made me reflect upon how people who do not believe in the supernatural might square the life and death of Jesus in their minds.

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