Beware of Sheep in Wolves Cloth

 Beware of Sheep in Wolves Cloth

You may be a Kiwi down there in New Zealand, shepherding thousands and thousands of sheep grazing across the rolling hills.

OR you may be a part of a political leader's cordon sanitaire. OR you may even be the closest confidant of the Pope in Vatican. OR you may be one of the well-meaning members of a flock attending the enthralling weekly preaching of an articulate neighborhood pastor.

Regardless, beware when leaders trumpet that they are burning the midnight oil to manage the country's state of affairs,

Beware as well when that smooth-talking pastor starts to pass on the bowl for 'another well-meaning pastoral idea'.

Beware as well when the Vatican claims it has cleaned up its own house because very likely, it has NOT.

Are we to accept hook, line and sinker everything we hear from our leaders, from the government, to the church down to our villages?  Especially when they [deceitfully] claim that given a choice, they don't want to be sitting incumbents in their office!  That they would rather retire but again it's their commitment to their constituencies which constrains them to hang on for the poeple, of the people and because of the people.  

Not to be cynical, we can rattle off recent histories that doesn't shield even the power and mighty from culpability.  No less than the late Pope John Paul II [who's now St John Paul II] was advised by the late New York Cardinal John O'Connor NOT to appoint American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick because of his history of sexually abusing teenage boys and even adult seminarians.  It was not until in 2019 when Pope Francis finally defrocked Theodore McCarrick.  But the bigger question to society was how to give justice to the numerous victims when, because of the American laws on status of limitations where the period to lapse a judicial action against an accused lapses.

Let me quote this from Carl Jung.  It's a mouthful but it blurts out everything I want to spew out anyways: 'The MANIPULATOR is not a psychotic; he knows his story is not consistent with reality.  The MANIPULATOR is not simply a liar; he produces axioms and dogma.  The MANIPULATOR short-circuits normal information processing in his victims; with his calm, placating voice, he draws them into his fallacious construct, making them believe, preventing them from fact, reality and likeliness checking'.  

Doesn't that ring a bell?  Leaders who seem to hold you in a trance once he speaks in a cool [but cold and calculating manner]?  

To be forewarned is to be forearmed.