Stringfellow on the Tactics the “Powers” Use to Control Us

From An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land

The Powers main goal is to sustain themselves (survival). And yet, that brute fact is rarely discussed candidly and in the open. Still, the state functions as the preeminent principality and power.

1. The Denial of Truth/lying
2. Doublespeak and Overtalk/euphemism or jargon
3. Secrecy and Boast of Expertise/hiding the truth
4. Surveillance and Harassment/intimidating those who seek truth
5. Exaggeration and Deception/absorbing the truth
6. Cursing and Conjuring/banishing, smearing, locking up dissidents
7. Usurpation and Absorption/co-opting the truth
8. Diversion and Demoralization/diverting, distracting
   

These (assaults on truth) Stringfellow calls Babel. It overwhelms and dumbfounds the faculties of comprehension: conscience and sanity:

Babel means the inversion of language, verbal inflation, libel, rumor, euphemism and coded phrases, rhetorical wantonness, redundancy, hyperbole, such profusion in speech and sound that comprehension is impaired, nonsense, sophistry, jargon, noise, incoherence, a chaos of voices and tongues, falsehood, blasphemy.

The noise of technology he also includes under Babel.

Babel lays the foundation for violence. Stringfellow quotes Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

Let us not forget that violence does not exist by itself and cannot do so; it is necessarily interwoven with lies. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. 

And given that the state sits at the top of the hierarchy of demonic powers, the state is generally named as "the Antichrist" in the biblical witness. Consequently, in her battle against the Antichrist the church exists in a state of resistance in relation to the state:

Those human beings and communities of humans who persevere in fidelity to God and to the gift of their humanity, those who resist death and thus live in Jesus Christ--whether that be a public formality or not--do so under the condemnation of the State in one way or another, be it in ridicule and ostracism, in poverty or imprisonment, as sojourners or fugitives, in clandestine existence, as a confessing movement, or, otherwise, in resistance.