Many people think the Book of Revelation is a script that predicts the future. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are no predictions in this book, nor is there, in the Christian faith, a fatalist perspective that the future is already written. Rather, the Book of Revelation is an attempt to describe how to live in an empire that persecutes Christians and other groups that were suspected of treason and dissent. Over the upcoming weeks I want to look at the text found in chapter six: the four horsemen of the apocalypse. These four symbolic horsemen reveal the cruelty and injustice that lies at the very core and center of all empires including, and this is my point, our own American empire.
The first horseman rides a white horse and is given a crown, and a weapon to conquer. The white horse is important because both then and now it is a symbol of authority that assumes benevolence. All empires craft the illusion that they exist for our own good. All empires propagate the lie that peace with justice will reign and prosperity will rule if only we submit to the empire's demand of loyalty.
America is no different. The empire both then and now are ruled through tiny elites that have accumulated great wealth and military might. Indeed, in our country of 300 million citizens, well over 90 percent of the wealth is under the control of 1 percent of the population. Since the Reagan revolution, the gap between the top and the bottom has remarkably increased alongside today's gutting of the middle class. The next scene set to play is the pillaging of the commonwealth through draconian cuts in our Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid insurance programs. We are like fish being filleted for consumption by ravenous sharks. In other words, nothing new is emerging in history. We are stuck in the repeating cycle of economic plunder and perpetual war. Without novelty, the inbreaking of creative revolution that redistributes power throughout society, history itself becomes repetitious: a repeating scenario of pillage and slaughter. This is what the Book of Revelation actually reveals. The good news, of course, is that in the end, empire self-destructs, and all the people rejoice. History opens up once again to novelty and possibility.
America is riding the white horse today. We assume that our invasions of the Middle East, our provocations toward China, our threats of war with Iran, our military escalation on the Colombian border, our increasingly global colonization of the planet all arise out of our benevolent motives to bring peace with justice and prosperity for all. The reality is that we are in full death spiral, consumed with our own madness that we are gods, and doomed to destroy those we love the most: ourselves.
What we need is the dissenting treasonous hope of a new socialism.