On Watching the Mob Ascend
Had an incredible spiritual high and a much needed grounding in the earth yesterday In Cathedral Grove at Muir Woods. Yet only hours later I found it difficult to be present to my family after making the mistake of reading the news of what’s happened in our country while I was in Mexico.
There’s a particular agony that comes with watching evil consolidate power while knowing you cannot stop it—at least not yet, not now, not with the tools currently at hand.
It’s not the arrogance of thinking “if only they’d listen to me, everything would be fine.” That’s just sour grapes dressed up as wisdom. This is something else entirely: the clear-eyed recognition that a mob has ascended to positions of authority, and that resistance requires both patience and preparation for a longer game than any of us wanted to play.
It’s the frustration of Jeremiah watching Jerusalem ignore every warning, or of Churchill watching appeasement policies while knowing exactly where they lead. Not because you think you’re the only one who sees clearly, but because sometimes the trajectory is obvious to anyone willing to look, and the machinery of power seems designed to reward those who refuse to see.
This isn’t hopelessness—hopelessness gives up. This is the particular suffering of those who never doubt that good will ultimately triumph but must watch evil entrench itself in the meantime. It’s the agony of knowing that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice while watching it get yanked in the opposite direction by people who mistake their temporary power for permanent victory.
The temptation is either despair or premature action—either to conclude that darkness has won permanently, or to exhaust yourself in gestures that feel meaningful but change nothing. The harder path is what the prophets knew: bearing witness, preparing the ground, keeping the lamp lit during the long night.
Because mobs, however ascendant, remain mobs. They mistake noise for strength, fear for respect, and temporary power for eternal dominion. They always overreach. They always reveal their true nature. And they always, eventually, face the reckoning they’ve been forestalling through bluster and brutality.
The victory belongs to truth, not because we’re optimistic, but because lies require constant maintenance while truth simply is. Evil must perpetually justify itself; good need only endure.
Our job isn’t to win immediately. Our job is to be ready when the mob’s inevitable contradictions finally bring it down.
The question isn’t whether good will triumph over evil. The question is whether we’ll be prepared to build something better when the current system finally collapses under the weight of its own moral bankruptcy.