Why Do We Keep Demanding a King?

The Paradox of Centralized Power

Let us begin with an obvious observation: the political outrage machine is running at maximum capacity. Every election cycle, and practically every news cycle, gets framed as an existential crisis. Headlines feel like battle cries. Partisans on all sides are genuinely convinced that if the other team wins, society as we know it will collapse into utter ruin.

We live in a culture obsessed with capturing political power. We’ve been fed a lie that the only way to protect what is good, fix what is broken, and stop what is evil is to grab hold of the state’s steering wheel.

I am admittedly no historian, but every time I step back from the outrage du jour and dig into a history book, documentary, or podcast, the exact same paradox emerges. It is a blind spot that both Christians and secular thinkers keep stumbling over, yet almost nobody wants to talk about out loud.

The Fundamental Contradiction

My baseline for understanding human behavior is pretty straightforward: human beings are profoundly flawed. The prophet Jeremiah summed it up well:

“The human mind is more deceitful than anything else. It is incurably bad. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9, NET)

You don’t have to be a Christian to see this, either. Cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists reach the exact same conclusion using different language. They talk about “confirmation bias” and “cognitive dissonance” to explain how our brains are wired. We naturally protect our own interests and excuse our own missteps.

So here is the question that keeps bothering me: If we all agree that individual human beings are inherently biased, self-interested, and easily corrupted, why do we believe that putting a group of these exact same humans inside a fancy marble building and hand-delivering them a monopoly on physical force will magically result in justice?

Please make it make sense! Slapping a title on someone and seating them at a mahogany desk doesn’t cure their flawed nature. It just arms their personal flaws with an unchallengeable weapon.

The Warning We Keep Ignoring

This isn’t a new problem. History is essentially one long story of humanity falling for the exact same trap over and over again. Three thousand years ago, Israel decided they were tired of being a decentralized, voluntary network of tribes. They wanted to be like the “cool kids” among the surrounding nations. They wanted a central ruler.

God told the prophet Samuel to give them a reality check about what a centralized ruler would actually do:

“He will conscript your sons and put them in his chariot forces and in his cavalry… He will take your daughters to be ointment makers, cooks, and bakers. He will take your best fields… He will demand a tenth… and you yourselves will be his servants.” (1 Samuel 8:11-17, NET)

God wasn’t warning them about some uniquely evil foreign tyrant. He was warning them about themselves and what they would become if they went this route. He was telling them that the very structure of centralized, coercive power naturally scales, oppresses, and expands. No matter how noble the ruler’s initial intentions might be.

Lord Acton famously put it this way: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Secular thinkers like Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin saw the exact same problem: “If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.”

Whether you read ancient Hebrew scriptures, 19th-century historians, or modern political history, the takeaway is identical. Giving any group of human beings an exclusive monopoly on force does not solve the problem of human self-interest. It simply exempts them from accountability.

The Spectrum of Governance

So where does that leave us? Are we trapped into choosing between a tyrannical state on one side or chaotic, Mad Max lawlessness on the other?

That is a false choice the outrage machine wants us to buy into. But governance isn’t a binary light switch. It’s a continuum. On one side, you have total state coercion. Totalitarianism. The government claims ownership over life, property, and conscience. Moving down the line, thinkers have made noble attempts to build fences around the State through classical liberalism or minarchism.

At the other end of that spectrum sits polycentric voluntaryism: a society built on voluntary agreements, peer accountability, mutual aid, and non-coercive dispute resolution. While Scripture doesn’t prescribe a specific blueprint, voluntary systems align far better with what God teaches us about human dignity, agency, and stewardship.

Laying Down the Sword