“It was a wicked and wild wind/Blew down the doors to let me in,” goes the Coldplay song “Viva la Vida.” Released in 2008, it includes the reflections of a deposed king as he looks back on his reign, including the time mentioned above, the moment that he took power.
The line always interested me because the phrase “wicked and wild wind” bespeaks of a changing epoch, expressing the idea that, unlike Thomas Carlyle’s doctrine that the man makes the times – “The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” said Carlyle – it’s the time that makes the man, a much more Tolstoian notion. Evidence of this can be seen in the above lyrics, as the referenced wind goes before the king to open the doors of power.
These thoughts came to me again recently with the changing of power in Washington, D.C. For, even as Elon Musk and DOGE set up shop to institute a new era of government reform, so too were the winds of change blowing in the private sector, as evidenced by the leaked audio of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, in which he is heard bemoaning the inefficiencies of working from home, a phenomenon that started during the Covid shutdowns.
“We don’t need all those people,” said Dimon referencing the extra workers the company had to hire because so many people were working from home.
We were putting people in jobs because the people weren’t doing the job they were hired to do in the first place. It simply doesn’t work. I will not be responsible for a company like that, OK, and I’m sorry. Now—you have a choice. You don’t have to work at JPMorgan. So the people of you who don’t want to work at the company, that’s fine with me.
Even at my own lumber business, it seems the winds of change are taking hold. Since the new administration took office, we’ve stopped offering such things as fuel and hydraulic fluid to our loggers on credit, while also ceasing to provide advances to our employees. We explained that we simply weren’t set up to handle all the extra administrative work, and that heretofore, our efforts would be devoted to our own bottom line.
“The times demand it,” we told one guy.
In addition, we’ve set new employee work standards, a decision resulting in a much more disciplined, productive workforce.
“I feel like DOGE has hit our lumbermill,” our office manager said at one point.
“I agree,” I said.
This spirit of change emanating from the broader U.S. government, all the way down through the larger private sector, even into our little lumber mill, suggests a unity in our world that isn’t often discussed. However, the items mentioned above seem to strongly suggest that things are connected in ways that the materialists of our age simply can’t explain.
But what does this mean, exactly?
Once the kind of widespread unity mentioned above is proven – a spirit of motion, complete with desires and notions – we are left to observe a kind of entity that operates much like a person. Once this happens, all that’s left to ask is: What type of entity might this be?
As mentioned above, materialism cannot possibly posit such an entity, for it ultimately believes in nothing beyond matter itself, i.e., it rejects any transcendence associated with the nature that is its central concern. Nor can pantheism explain the feeling of a small lumber business owner who senses that, in his endeavor to improve the efficiency of his business, he is partaking of a much larger movement nationally; for, in pantheism – the idea that everything is God and therefore everything is the same – no such individual as myself exists to have such feeling, since, in that worldview, there is no substantive difference between me or Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Jamie Dimon. Rather, we are all the same thing, and any feeling of individuality is ultimately illusory.
It is my belief that the best explanation for the spirit of renewal emanating from the broadest segments of culture, all the way down to the narrowest parts, is none other than the Triune God of the sacred Scriptures. For, only with an Entity as great as the Universe, who also managed miraculously to make himself small enough to fit in a crib, can the type of top-down, widespread spiritual phenomenon seen recently be explained. As was said above, the immanence of pantheism can explain the unity, but it can’t explain my office manager’s feeling that we ourselves, in our own individual way, were also experiencing a sense of renewal.
It is indeed a “wild wind” bringing about change in our governments, businesses, and lives, but it is more than this, too. “The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” said the writer of Genesis, to which my response is: and so does It still.
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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image Credit: PickPik
