Universal slavery

Scraps of conversation:

They are all corrupt, and everyone knows it. But you are appointed by the person above you to a good position, but the person above you is cheating, so you must cheat because he expects to receive some extra money from you, so it is a whole chain of corruption.

Before, everyone respected Chairman Mao: everyone loved him. Everyone read his book: you saw everyone with his book - even if you went to be married, you had to read his speech from the red book before you were married.

- Like a religion.

Yes, like a religion. Before, we worshipped Chairman Mao. Now we worship money.

We are only not free to disagree with the government - we are free to do anything else, and that is enough freedom. We are free to become rich.

- That isn't freedom: you worship money, but you have described it like a trap you can't escape from.

Perhaps.

2 Peter 2:19 - '...whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved'.

I think he's desparately trying to convince himself that 'we are free to do whatever we like (apart from disagree with the government), and that is enough freedom'. The deeper problem and unease that surfaces is that although they are free to follow their desires, their desires have sold them into slavery to money, which is just as tyranical as any political regime. This is only more obvious in ex-Communist countries than in the West (in relation to slavery to money) because they do not have the benefits of the remnants of Christian social conscience to fill the moral void while they take in Western materialism.

Ultimately, everyone in the world is a slave, but it boils down to 2 masters: "Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?"

But how do we escape from the slavery of sin to which we've sold ourselves?
How does this liberation happen?

"For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." [Rom 8]

"But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness." [Rom 6]

Praying for this for the author of these snippets of conversation.