Subtitle: The Death of Responsibility
When I was a child, I loved horror movies about vampires and werewolves. Later, growing up in the 80’s, I watched my share of generic slasher films, but those never appealed to me. My curiosity was always for the stories that blurred the line between the metaphysical world I was raised with in my Catholic faith and the real world that I lived in every day. Even when I was young, I knew both worlds were governed by rules. There were cause-and-effect relationships, moral laws, and you could see the reward systems built into everything. Nothing just “happened.” There was order, even in the frightening things
When I began reading Piers Anthony and Roger Zelazny, I saw that even in the genre of Fantasy there were rules carefully constructed for each story or series. Modern America has forgotten the rule book of their own story. The story of humans, their victories and failures throughout history is a story of repetition. Human nature it seems is constant throughout time and makes for very predictable outcomes in the storyline. If we tell a story about human history we would see patterns emerge and the story of human folly and opportunist evil would resound at the turning of every page.
As I watched vampire movies a child one rule stood out so strongly that it stayed with me for decades and that was: a vampire cannot enter your home without being invited by an occupant. Out of all the strange rules in those movies, that one stuck. I didn’t know why at the time. Later, as I learned more about the faith, I realized why it mattered so much. Even with the Creator Himself, permission is necessary. God does not break down the door to your soul. He doesn’t force Himself on anyone. He waits. Because He doesn’t want robots—He wants friendship. He wants willing hearts, not controlled ones. It follows that any good government would operate in the same way, it would respect your permission and boundaries.
And this is where Fulton Sheen said something that made everything make sense. He said the difference between Christ and a vampire is this: Christ sheds His own blood so that you may have eternal life; the vampire sheds your blood so that it can have eternal life. When I heard that, everything snapped into place. The metaphysical world, the moral world, and the physical world suddenly lined up. Christ gives. Vampires take. Christ respects your will. Vampires depend on you surrendering it.
Oddly enough, this became the foundation for how I understand government today. And it might sound strange, but it really isn’t. My interest in vampires was never about the clothes or the theatrics, or the modern romantic nonsense they’re filled with today. What fascinated me was where they lived and how they lived—the drabness, the loneliness, the dependence, the parasitic nature of it all. There was a lesson in that. Modern movie makers have stripped away every existential warning that used to be attached to these creatures, the same way they’ve stripped away our understanding of evil itself.
For most of American history, people understood that evil wasn’t about bats, monsters, or shadows in the night. Evil was about the abandonment of will. It was about letting someone else take over the responsibilities God gave to you. It was about that slow surrender of your ability to govern yourself. That is the real danger—not the dramatic stuff—but the quiet permission we give away little by little.
Hilaire Belloc saw this coming in 1912. In The Servile State he said, “The future of the modern world is the future of an ever-increasing State control, and an ever-increasing mass of men willing to accept it.” It’s the second part that really matters—people willing to accept it. This matches exactly what I mean by permission. Nobody is breaking into the house. People are opening the door.
And this brings me to what I believe is the greatest evil of all: abandoning self-governance to governance by others. You can see it in politics instantly. People look at the problems around them and assume the answer must be “more government,” as if surrendering even more of their will to someone else will somehow fix what’s broken. Both Republicans and Democrats feed this illusion. They never preach self-governance. They never try to free you from the Federal Reserve or from the systems that drain the life out of you the way a vampire drains its victims. They insist the evils of the modern world can be solved if you just hand them more control.
If we imagine the Federal Reserve and the usurious system we live under as those tubes plugged into Neo in The Matrix, it becomes obvious: Americans have been turned into a food source, kept alive only to be harvested. But we remain in that bondage because we’ve been trained by the Cult of Santa Claus to believe that some external power will swoop in and save us. Our servitude isn’t imposed on us—it is maintained by our own willingness to stay plugged in.
And Chesterton, who was always good at putting things simply, reminded us that a citizen is not defined by how well he can be ruled, but by whether he can rule. Lose that, and you lose everything else downstream.
This is where the modern Cult of Santa Claus comes in, a flying superhero version. The Santa who swoops through the sky like a caped figure, handing out gifts without any effort required from anyone. It’s all reward, no responsibility. Mythology conditions people; it forms the values and beliefs that govern our view of the universe. In the universe we live in, Santa Claus is the great seducer, leading us to the death chamber of vampires.
Santa is used to propagate the myth of a secular savior And when you think about it, he’s the first one children are introduced to. He does everything. He knows everything. He rewards everyone. He requires nothing from you except belief. When you put it that way, it’s not surprising we grow up believing the government should function the same way.
And this is how we end up with the progressive architecture we’re fighting today—town manager systems, municipal associations, planning agencies, LDDs, federal agencies, all of them conditioning towns to rely on federal dollars that come from a usurious system. People believing towns need to grow, need to expand, need to “prosper” in a material sense, and then tie themselves to federal money and federal expectations, is a horror show, yet both the R and D believe it. The idea that towns must always grow is part of a value system crafted to keep us dependent. It serves the usurer’s utopia we now inhabit. Who better to craft the belief that towns must always be growing, that they must chase a fixed percentage of growth each year? Who would design such a value system except a usurious banker?
Chesterton warned that unless a man becomes the master of his own soul, he will become the slave of others. Belloc warned that whoever controls the means of life controls life itself. Men and women suffering from an existential neurosis make the best slaves.
The vampire only enters when you invite him in. Government acts the same way So how about we begin the story of liberty with accountability and self-examination, You are the hero of this story. How are you willing to live in order to shake the chains of slavery? Or do wish to live as a helpless child waiting for Santa Claus to come bring you joy and happiness? If you have not read The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc, you should remember as he reminds us there “Being permanently dispossessed, men become the subjects of those who possess… and the State is invited everywhere to manage their lives.” If you abandon responsibility, the State will happily take it—and you will lose liberty. Say no to Santa Claus, say no to the servile state. Don’t invite the vampires in.
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