Hannah Arendt – Forging Ploughshares

When Means Devour Ends: Three Parallel Collapses

This is a guest blog by M. James Johnson

It was one of those groggy predawn hours, the kind where the world feels like it’s still half-dreamt. My 10:30 pm routine—listening to audiobooks as I drift off—had worked like a charm, lulling me into sleep night after night. But as Hannah Arendt narrated her Between Past and Future, her voice cool and insistent, pierced my sleepy haze around 4 a.m., she started describing how “all ends turn and are degraded into means.” That sentence jolted me awake. I can’t explain why—but it lodged there like a half-remembered dream. Not quite words, more like an echo: “…ends… means… degraded.” It lingered as I rolled out of bed, grabbed my walking gear, and stepped into the icy rain.

After breakfast, with coffee finally cutting through the fog, that half-heard whisper wouldn’t let go. It turned into a quiet itch of curiosity, the kind that scratches at you until you give in. So I did—typing into a Grok search, “What does Hannah Arendt have to say about means and ends, or ends and means?” Grok fired back: “In Between Past and Future, in Chapter 8…” and continued several pages with too much information for 6:30 in the AM. But my “Withdrawn from Junior College District of St. Louis County Library, St. Louis, Missouri” 1961 edition of Between Past and Future, retrieved from the shelf mid-sip, only had 6 sections, not even chapters. The mismatch landed like a splash of cold water… right on the nose. Disorientation, sure—but the fitting kind, the sort that mirrors our whole unraveling moment. I’d caught a glimpse of something about Arendt’s means to an end that was raw and true, even if I couldn’t nail it down yet: a pattern of collapse thrumming just under the skin, more a bone-deep hunch than tidy footnote.

What I sensed was this: innocently installed ‘means’ create diffusion, dilution, and detachment from intended goals. But there’s a fourth stage I didn’t see at first—capture. The means don’t just replace the ends; they imprison us. We become unable to imagine alternatives because we’re trapped inside the logic of the means themselves.

And here’s the tragic irony that compounds the problem: when meaning drains away, we don’t stop and reconsider. We intensify the means. More infrastructure, more force, more optimization. The acceleration itself becomes evidence that we’ve lost the plot entirely.

Three cases prove this isn’t isolated to one domain—it’s a structural pattern in how instrumental reason consumes itself, even capturing those who claim the name of Christ ?

Arendt: When Political Action Becomes Fabrication

Hannah Arendt diagnosed the collapse of genuine political action when we adopt “homo faber’s” ( man the maker/craftsman) logic— treating politics like fabrication, like building things. In The Human Condition, she traces how this destroys what makes politics political: “natality” (the capacity for new beginnings), “plurality” (the irreducible “who” of each person), and the space of appearance where freedom is enacted.

The mechanism is subtle. We begin with a genuine end: freedom, justice, human flourishing in the public realm. We adopt seemingly practical means: laws, institutions, processes. But fabrication’s logic is instrumental—everything becomes a means to an end, which itself becomes a means to another end, endlessly. The original “for the sake of what” dissolves.

– Diffusion: Energy scatters across competing instrumental priorities.

– Dilution: The original vision of freedom becomes vague, rhetorical.

– Detachment : Finally, complete disconnect. We’re building systems to maintain systems, writing policies to manage policies—what Arendt called “curious ultimate meaninglessness.”

The compounding trap: when politics feels meaningless, we install more bureaucracy, more procedures, more technical solutions. This intensification proves we’ve already lost genuine political action, which would have been freedom enacted now, not achieved later through instrumental means.

AI: When Human Flourishing Becomes Synonymous with Computational Power

The pattern repeats in our AI moment with startling precision—and it’s a sobering warning for the church. Once again, evangelicals and others chase technological dominion under the banner of stewardship, echoing the Cold-War logic that framed nuclear superiority as responsible dominion over creation. The stated end remains noble: AI for human flourishing—breakthroughs in health, climate solutions, creativity unlocked. But we adopt the same innocent-sounding means: build ever-larger computer infrastructure, concentrate ever-greater power, all to “stay ahead” of rivals and maintain technological leadership.

By December 2025, the drift is complete. The end (human flourishing) has degraded into a means (technological supremacy), which becomes its own end (not losing to China), which justifies any means whatsoever. Open AI’s Stargate project—a $500 billion juggernaut with partners like Oracle and SoftBank, now under construction at sites in Texas and Michigan—exemplifies this: fortified campuses drawing gigawatts, razor-wired against intrusion, nuclear-adjacent like Amazon’s expanded Talen Energy deal for 1,920 megawatts.

Once again: Diffusion: Resources scatter toward infrastructure arms race rather than applications.

– Dilution: “Human flourishing” becomes a marketing ploy; the real measure is teraflops and training runs.

– Detachment: We’re building data centers to justify building bigger data centers. The U.S. now hosts over 5,000 such centers, consuming about 4% of national electricity. For what? To stay ahead. Of what? Other builders.

The compounding intensifies: when anyone asks “why?”—when the original purpose becomes unclear—we double down. Build bigger. Build faster. Pour copper and rare earths into monuments to means without ends. The question “for the sake of what?” becomes unanswerable, even embarrassing. And in Christian circles, this frenzy echoes the old temptation: dominion through mastery, as if God’s image-bearers are perfected by silicon, not the cross.

Coda: The Pattern Captures Us Now—and the Church with It

This isn’t just theoretical or technological—it is happening across every domain in December 2025, and we are captured by our means. Worse, the backwash of Christian nationalism drags diverse Christian persuasions into the same vortex: ends like “biblical justice” or “kingdom values” diluted into metrics of power and exclusion, all while claiming divine mandate.

Consider the pattern laid bare:

In each case, the same mechanism: original ends that were hard to measure (security, democracy, coherence) get replaced by means that are easy to count (deportations, strikes, exclusions). The metrics replace the meaning. Immigration’s end was border security, national coherence, perhaps even compassion through order. The means—ICE raids, mass deportations, family separations—have become the performance itself, with over 527,000 removals year-to-date. We measure success by numbers removed, not by any coherent vision of what we’re securing for. The deportation machine generates its own necessity. We’re captured—and too many pulpits bless it as “God’s border.”

Military intervention: The end was democracy, stability, stopping drug trafficking. The means—strikes on smuggling boats, escalating control and now threats of incursion into Venezuela—become self-justifying. Intervention creates instability requiring more intervention. The logic is closed. We’re captured, with Christian nationalists framing it as a holy war against “godless regimes.”

Religious exclusion: The end was security, perhaps community coherence. The means—surveillance, denial of services in foster care to LGBTQ+ families, exclusionary policies under new Trump orders echoing Project 2025’s “biblical principles”—become the definition of who “we” are. The exclusion itself captures us, narrows us, makes us unrecognizable to our stated values—yet it’s preached as fidelity to Christ.

When the hollowness becomes unbearable, we don’t stop—we compound: more raids, more strikes, more exclusions. The acceleration itself is the symptom of advanced capture, and the church, in its nationalist streams, leads the charge.

The Kingdom: The Only Way Out

Stanley Hauerwas’s reading of the Gospel offers something more radical than “use better means” or “clarify your ends.” The Kingdom of God, he argues, cannot be made, organized, built, or achieved. It cannot be earned by religious effort, imposed by political struggle, or projected in calculations. “We cannot plan for it, organize it, make it, or build it… It is given. We can only inherit it.”

This isn’t passivity—it’s a complete refusal to play the means-ends game, a direct rebuke to the fabrication that Arendt decried and the compute crusades that now seduce the faithful.

The reason the Kingdom resists instrumentalization is that “scripture refuses to separate the Kingdom from the one who is the proclaimer of the Kingdom. Jesus is Himself the established Kingdom of God.” The Kingdom isn’t a future achievement requiring proper means; it is present in Jesus’s life and cross, requiring only recognition and participation.

This is why, as Rauschenbusch wrote, “Jesus deliberately rejected force and chose truth… Whenever Christianity shows an inclination to use constraint in its own defense or support, it thereby furnishes presumptive evidence that it has become a thing of this world, for it finds the means of this world adapted to its end.”

The cross wasn’t a means to the Kingdom, not even the way to the Kingdom—it is the kingdom come. Because the cross reveals the social character of Jesus’s mission: a new possibility of human relationships based not on power and fear, but on trust made possible by truth.

Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi captures the pattern we’ve traced: he names Jesus as Messiah but assumes this means worldly power to restore Israel’s preeminence. Jesus rebukes him: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of men.” Peter had learned the name but not the story that determines its meaning. He had innocently installed the means of empire to achieve the ends of the Kingdom—but those means would have transformed the end into its opposite.

The pattern is everywhere: Arendt’s political action is consumed by fabrication’s logic. AI’s flourishing is devoured by compute supremacy. Contemporary America—and its captured churches—is ensnared by enforcement, intervention, and exclusion. In each case, the remedy seems to be more—more systems, more infrastructure, more force—accelerating the very meaninglessness we’re trying to escape, all while waving crosses at the chaos.

The Kingdom offers the only exit: stop trying to achieve it. It’s already present, requiring a different posture entirely—not building or forcing or optimizing, but participating in a reality already given. A community based not on the fear that generates moats and raids and escalations, but on trust made possible when “our existence is bounded by the truth.”

That truth, as Rauschenbusch saw, “is robed only in love, her weighty limbs unfettered by needless weight, calm-browed, her eyes terrible with beholding God.” It asks no odds. It needs no spears or clubs or data centers to prop it up. It simply is—and invites us, the church adrift in nationalist backwash, to stop running the race we’re already losing, to step out of capture, and to inherit what was never ours to make in the first place.

Love, Power and Violence in Hannah Arendt and Paul

Hannah Arendt arrives at a Christian insight that many Christians might find more believable or even recognizable from a political scientist and social theorist. A central teaching of the Bible, that the greatest power is the power of community, of communication, or of love, is easily passed over as a religious pablum which has to be acknowledged but without any real consequence. We all “know” that those who have the most weapons or the most material resources, are the real power brokers in society. Afterall, what is power except power over other people, the power of exploitation, the power of the master over his employees or slaves.

“Power,” said Voltaire, “consists in making others act as I choose.” According to Max Weber, power is present wherever I have the chance “to assert my own will against the resistance” of others. He defines the power of war as “an act of violence to compel the opponent to do as we wish.” Robert Strausz-Hupe claims bluntly, power signifies “the power of man over man.” C. Wright Mills equates violence, politics and power: “All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.” Mao Tse-tung maintained, “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Marx noted that power is “the organization of violence.” Bertrand de Jouvenel claims that the power of death or the power to make war is the very essence of the power of the state: “To him who contemplates the unfolding of the ages war presents itself as an activity of States which pertains to their essence.” As he describes it, “a man feels himself more of a man when he is imposing himself and making others the instruments of his will,” and this gives him “incomparable pleasure.” Elsewhere he says, “To command and to be obeyed: without that, there is no Power – with it no other attribute is needed for it to be …. The thing without which it cannot be: that essence is command.” Arendt concludes, that if the essence of power is the effectiveness of command, then there is no greater power than that which grows out of the barrel of a gun, and it would be difficult to say in “which way the order given by a policeman is different from that given by a gunman.”[1]

In short, power is the power of death and the one who controls and can mete out coercion and violent death, in this understanding, is the one with power. War and the capacity to make war is a primary ordering structure such that “war itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire,” such that “economic systems, political philosophies, and corpora juris serve and extend the war system, not vice versa.” In this understanding, it is not just diplomacy and politics that are war by other means, but peace itself is war by other means.[2] The peace of the cold war reckons with the reality that deterrence, larger and more powerful weapons of war ensure the peace, such that mutually assured destruction, or the constant threat of total war and annihilation is the only realistic peace.

It is not just the violence of war which ensures peace, but at a personal level there is a similar sort of subjection to the inevitable nature of struggle, chaos, and coercion. Humans seem to be born with an instinct of domination and aggressiveness. According to John Stuart Mill, there are two competing forces in the individual, “the desire to exercise power over others” and the “disinclination to have power exercised over themselves.” As Arendt, points out though, the will to power and the will to submission seem to be interconnected.[3] The security of slavery in Egypt is a very real temptation, certainly present in my experience in Japan, but present to some degree in every society. But perhaps the lengths to which the tyrant will go to maintain rule is the clearest marker of the limits of violence.

The Stalinist regime demonstrated that total domination based on terror cannot afford support, as the supporters and friends of totalitarianism threaten through the most subtle form of power; namely support and friendship. In the end it was the friends and supporters of Stalin who he saw as posing the greatest threat. “The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday’s executioner becomes today’s victim. And this is also the moment when power disappears entirely.”[4] Thus Arendt reaches her conclusion:

To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance. This implies that it is not correct to think of the opposite of violence as nonviolence; to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.[5]

Nonviolence or the capacity for peace as means and end, is the very definition of power. The power of community, the power of communion, the power of consensus, the power of love, the power of democracy, all stand over and against the notion that violence is power. Violence contains no possibility of communion, other than the communion of the scapegoat, or the contradictory notion that the common enemy is the means of cohesion. Rene Girard’s depiction of the lie surrounding the scapegoat, or Peter Berger’s depiction of the social construction of reality, illustrates Arendt’s and the biblical point, that the deception surrounding death is the universal lie. The fear of death, or the imagined capacity to manipulate and control death is the singular lie exposed by Christ.

Paul names this lie directly, and counters it with the truth of community: “Therefore, shedding the lie, let each one of you speak the truth to his neighbor, because we are one another’s corporal members” (Eph. 4:25, DBH). Dispelling the lie with the truth gets at the prime reality that we are “corporal members” of one another. This is the missing fact in the notion of equating power and violence. True power builds on the reality of mutual interdependence. Violence may gain a certain control but at the cost of this prime reality. The lie here is singular and seemingly universal in its import so that all of the darkness and deception may be tied to this singular deception. Paul ties it to the hostility or enmity unleashed by the Jewish law as expressed, first in Jewish and Gentile hostility, but then in a “futility” of mind which he equates with a hardened heart and darkened understanding (Eph. 4:17-19).

As a result of the Gospel, “we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ” (Eph 4:14–15). The cure points to the heart of the problem: “speaking the truth in love” displaces the lie (the deceitful scheming and the trickery of men) which serves dis-communion, hostility, and enmity. Paul continually links deception and alienation while also linking truth and love: “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another” (Eph. 4:25). Being members of another is a truth, that by definition should result in the putting away of violent falsehood.

Another way of getting at this same truth is in Girard’s and Paul’s deployment of mimesis. Girard inadvertently displaces the primacy of mutual membership in one another (mimetic desire), and pictures it first of all as built upon a necessary violence and rivalry. If one person imitates another person’s desire, then their desire for the same thing results in rivalry and violence. Girard comes to his theory of the scapegoat beginning with violence, rivalry and sacrifice, and it is only later that he realizes in Christ there is a positive mimesis, and even in the development of his theory he explains mimesis in the context of rivalry and violence. Much like political theorists or social scientists who begin with the presumption of an original chaos and violence, here too the presumption on an individual level is that rivalry and violence are originary. But what if we were to reverse engineer what Girard is doing and put mimesis front and center not simply as a negative force, but as the shaping force in our lives.

Paul has his own theory of imitation and community which locates reality, not in violent rivalry but in the necessity of relationship and love. “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma” (Eph. 5:1-2). To the rivalry prone lovers of hierarchy and false power in Corinth, Paul has a singular recommendation and resolution: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (I Cor. 11:1). The passage in full reads: “Give no offense [do not become a scandal] to Jews or to Greeks or to the Church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, so that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ (1 Cor. 10:31-11:1). Paul understands the scandal and violence of mimetic rivalry, but this mechanism is undone in his recommendation: “I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage.” Domination and coercion are set aside and with it the violence producing rivalry that is damnation itself. To be saved, is to imitate and commune in love.

Paul warns against a “whoring acquisitiveness” (5:3) and likens the acquisitive man to an idolater (5:5), as one who has been deceived by “empty words” (5:5) and who lives in darkness (5:8). These things that are “hidden” are exposed by the light of Christ and now life reigns in place of death (5:14).

The conclusion of the chapter is a displacement of the mystery of sins alienating violence through a mutual submission to one another in one body: “’Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (5:31-32). This communion and participation in a singular body is the power of peace that counters the lie of violence as power.

[1] Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1969) 35-37.

[2] Arendt, 9.

[3] Arendt, 39-40.

[4] Arendt, 55.

[5] Arendt, 56.

Mindhunter and Theology: Serial Killers, Mass Murderers, and the Death of Christ

The Netflix series Mindhunter dramatizes the beginnings of FBI profiling necessitated by, what would come to be called, “serial killers.” Based largely on the work of John E. Douglas, who recognized that seemingly random murders often follow a pattern traceable to particular “psychological types,” the series illustrates Douglas’ application of psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis to crime. Douglas brings psychology, and specifically the Freudian theory of masochism and sadism (death drive), to bear upon criminality so as to both identify the psychological make-up and experience of the killer and to predict future behavior. In the broadest terms, psychoanalysis is built upon the presupposition that the human disease (Freud was a medical doctor) is subject to prognosis because it follows regular patterns with identifiable causes and effects. The more the disease – neurosis or psychosis – has a grip on an individual the more their behavior, thought, and personality, will follow a predictable (almost mechanical) pattern (the more the disease will “present” itself). In terms of destructive behavior and murder, the more the individual is given over to compulsion the more destructive and thus the more predictable their behavior. In this sense, a serial killer presents the perfect object of study as they have relinquished control (in their own description and as the series abundantly illustrates) to compulsions which are totally destructive. Those who are most “out of control” better demonstrate the nature of the cause and effect power which animates their actions. The perfect presentation of the disease is to be found in pure death drive and destruction. Continue reading “Mindhunter and Theology: Serial Killers, Mass Murderers, and the Death of Christ”