Chapter 10 — Joining the Dots
After nine chapters of close reading, William Haines spent twenty-seven days standing back. The Joining the Dots fortnight of summer 2020 and the umbrella Reading Life Through the Principle series that autumn were his attempt to draw the whole arc as a single line. What follows is the synthesis: recurring patterns, parallels across the ages, and the claim William placed at the end about what this providential project has so far accomplished.
The long arc seen as one story
William liked to begin with the obvious thing forgotten: human beings are story-shaped before they are reason-shaped, and the West is in trouble because it has forgotten which story it lives inside.
MacIntyre suggests that we enter human society with certain roles assigned to us, such as being the oldest or youngest sibling. We do not choose these roles, but we must learn to navigate them. Understanding our roles helps us comprehend how others perceive us and how we respond to them... Stories help us understand these roles and the expectations that come with them. Fairy tales often illustrate these dynamics, such as the story of Snow White and her wicked stepmother. These narratives convey important lessons about relationships and identity, teaching children about the complexities of familial and societal roles. Depriving children of stories leaves them anxious and unscripted in their actions and words.
Stripped of narrative, the modern person is also stripped of orientation. The stories that linger are not neutral; some do political work whether their hearers know it or not — most plainly the karmic myth of the Hindu caste system, which teaches the untouchable that the way things are is exactly the way things are supposed to be. If myths can keep people in place, changing the world is a literary problem before a political one. Ivan Illich had said as much, and William adopted the formulation without reservation.
Ivan Illich, an Austrian priest, educator, and anarchist, stated that neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society. We have seen revolutions and reformations, but often all that changes are the people in control. Instead, we must tell a new and powerful tale—one so persuasive that it sweeps away old myths and becomes a preferred story. This new narrative should be inclusive, gathering all aspects of our past and present into a coherent whole, shining light into the future. If we want to change society, we need to tell an alternative story.
The Divine Principle, on William's reading, is precisely that alternative story. It is not first a theology, certainly not a doctrine; it is a counter-narrative to the karmic one — a story in which time is linear, the future is open, and the way things are is not the way they have to be. The decisive shift happens not at Sinai but at Ur, with Abraham, and it is a temporal shift before it is a moral one.
In a new concept was born of a future substantially different from the past. From the time of Abraham, there is a restless attempt to reckon with the feeling that the way things are is not the way things have to be. We saw looking at the Hindu myth that the way things are is the way things are supposed to be. It's fair and just that there should be a caste system. From the time of Abraham, there's a strong sense that the way things are is not the way things have to be. In fact, the way things are is not the way things are supposed to be; things are supposed to be better, and the world is supposed to be based upon justice and upon fairness. This is where all the revolutionary movements to change the world and make the world a better place start from this point: recognizing that time is linear and the future can be different from the past.
Linear time is the engine of every subsequent reform, and it was Abraham's gift. But linear time makes reform thinkable only if evil is contingent rather than constitutive. The Genesis story keeps that door open in a way Greek tragedy, the karmic wheel, and the Manichaean cosmologies all close.
In the biblical account, God grants Adam and Eve free will, allowing them to make choices. They could choose to eat from any tree in the garden except for one. This notion of free will and responsibility is fundamentally different from the deterministic views found in Greek mythology. The consequences of their choice led to a fall, resulting in dysfunction and corruption in their relationships. This narrative teaches that evil is a mistake, not an inherent part of the universe. If evil is a mistake, then it is possible to restore goodness and change the world.
(from Joining The Dots - Day 3)
These two propositions — that time is linear and that evil is a mistake — are the load-bearing beams of the providential arc. Without them, restoration is unintelligible; with them, it is the only sane thing to attempt.
The recurring patterns
If the arc is one story, it is one with a small repertoire of plots. Joining the Dots was largely an exercise in noticing how often the same situation comes round in fresh clothing. The most central recurrence William called restoration — a word the movement had inherited from its founder and badly misused. Restoration was not suffering for its own sake, nor magical book-keeping with God's ledger; it was the patient business of finding oneself back in a position analogous to one of the founding mistakes and choosing differently.
Restoration occurs when you find yourself in a similar position to Adam, Eve, the Archangel, Cain, Abel, or your mum or dad, or one of your grandparents or your great-great-grandparents. You find yourself in a similar position to one of these people in history, either one of these archetypal biblical figures or one of your direct ancestors, and then you have to face the same temptation or a similar temptation to make the same mistake that they did. Of course, when you make the same mistake that they did, you continue the pattern of fallen history... But you choose not to do so, and instead of acting out of your fallen nature, you act according to your original nature and you follow your conscience. That's what restoration is: you break the cycle of abuse and the pattern of fallen history.
Multiply the gesture across a family and you have begun the work Jacob and his sons completed in two generations; multiply it across a nation and you have the slow purification providence was after.
I brought up a quote a few times regarding Abraham, where he asked, 'Where is the change of blood lineage done?' It's when people go through a life-and-death situation for the sake of God and the future dignity of man. You can see these individuals facing a challenge, either to follow their original mind and conscience or to give in to their fallen nature and repeat the pattern of fall in history. Each time they go through this, they eliminate various evil elements from their character and personality, which means their descendants are born with less fallen nature than they were. This gradual, incremental purification of lineage starts within the individual and then spreads to a family, from a family to a tribe, from a tribe to a nation, and from a nation to a worldwide level.
The pattern that recurs most often is the Cain-Abel encounter, and here William offered one of his most pointed correctives. In its decadent form, the doctrine had been used to demand the submission of subordinates to superiors — Cain obeys Abel, full stop. Father had taught no such thing. He had taught that the unloved older brother is owed a debt, and that the burden of repair lies on the one in the favoured position.
Father said that since God accepted only Abel's offering, Abel thought this was because he was better and that God only liked him. Thus, he must have bragged to his older brother... Father said Abel should not have bragged about being happy because he received the blessing from God... It's not enough to be anointed, appointed, and crowned; you have to win your older brother's blessing. When you get anointed and crowned by Father to be his heir, you have to go to your older brother and say, 'I'm really sorry. I have no idea why Father appointed me to be his heir. I'm so completely unqualified. You're so much better than me, so much wiser than me, and have done so many more things than me. Unless you support and help me, I'm going to tell Mum and Dad that I don't want the position.'
Read this way, Cain-Abel is a school for humility in the favoured, not a licence for arrogance. Arrogance in religious leadership is itself the mark of Cain.
Inner spiritual power leads individuals to rely on external factors such as titles, positions, or reputations to exert influence. They often resort to coercive methods to enforce obedience rather than convincing people to cooperate voluntarily. Such methods tend to breed resentment, ultimately causing leaders to be despised rather than respected. This misunderstanding of the Cain and Abel relationship has persisted from very early on. Father spoke about this, emphasising that those who raise their heads high and order others around are like Cain, while those who strive to fulfil their responsibilities, even in difficult circumstances, embody Abel's spirit.
The Jacob-Esau reconciliation, generations later, is the first time the pattern is solved rather than repeated. Esau is wronged; Jacob takes the risk of going to meet him; the seven bows are not theatre but the enacted return of the stolen blessing; only then does unity become possible. William used the episode to retire a lazy churchly formula.
If Cain is to love Abel, Abel must be lovable. If Cain is to respect Abel, Abel must be worthy of respect. If Cain is to be guided by Abel, Abel must provide good guidance. Only then can they unite in love. Unity is not the starting point; it is the result of a process involving love, respect, and guidance. Jacob, as I mentioned, overcame his fallen nature and restored the mistake he made. Esau did not make any mistakes; he realised he was not a good younger brother. Jacob took the risk of his life to return the blessing he had stolen.
The Jacob story also supplies the image for what the believer is to do with suffering — not escape it, not deny it, but, as William liked to put it via Jonathan Sacks, wrestle the crisis until it yields up its concealed blessing. By Joseph's generation, the pattern produces the first recorded act of true forgiveness — not the suppression of grievance but the reframing of the past, so that years of injustice become legible as providence in retrospect. Even in his Egyptian prison, Joseph eventually came to see his slavery and betrayal as God working through his life rather than against it.
And yet — here William parted company with the natural reading — Joseph was not the messianic lineage. Judah was. The brother who had sold Joseph to the slavers, who failed Tamar at her widowhood and only owned the failure when she shamed him into it, who finally stepped forward in Egypt to exchange his life for Benjamin's, became the carrier of the line because he had undergone a deeper transformation than the brother who had only been wronged. The messianic gene is the gene of accepted accountability.
Parallels across the ages
Step back further and the same plot keeps reappearing in different costume. The pattern William seemed unable to leave alone is what he called the Pythagorean inheritance — the European habit of slicing the world into two opposing essences and locating moral worth in which side of the line you stand on.
There is a way of making sense of the nature of reality that goes all the way back to the Greeks, particularly Pythagoras, which has permeated the whole of the European cultural tradition. This way of understanding the world is often unconscious for many people. If we look at modern discourse, we can see that many divide the world into two classes: the oppressed and the oppressor, the poor and the rich, black and white, female and male.
(from Joining The Dots - Day 11)
The identity politics solidifying around William in 2020 was, on this reading, not a fresh moral vision but the latest dress of an ancient binary metaphysics — essentialist, fated, worth determined by category rather than character. Marxism was the previous iteration; National Socialism the one before; Pythagoras's table of opposites the original.
Plato gave this binary metaphysics political shape. The dream of philosopher-kings transmitting a single truth to a conformed populace runs in an unbroken line from the Republic through Augustine, the Holy Roman Empire, Hobbes, Rousseau, Lenin, Hitler, and — quieter but lineally legitimate — the technocratic dream of the European Union. Every Western totalitarianism is a footnote to Plato.
Hayek had pointed out the most painful version: the great atrocities of the twentieth century were committed not by mediaeval theocrats or mad kings but by enthusiastic, popular, electorally legitimated movements. The mob with a programme is more dangerous than the tyrant with a sword. Most politicians, William noted, are sincere people trying to do the right thing — and that is precisely the point: decent people, in good faith and with popular mandate, have repeatedly built the cages. The cancel-culture impulse rising around him was the same impulse and deserved the same wariness.
The alternative tradition — the one that resists Plato's command society — William named without embarrassment the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and located its modern theorist in Hayek.
Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom' is a concise and powerful exposition of political philosophy that was shocking when published. In 'Road to Serfdom', Hayek discusses the freedom to order our own conduct in circumstances that force choices upon us. He emphasises the responsibility for arranging our lives according to our own conscience, which is essential for moral values to grow. This resonates with the language and philosophy of the Divine Principle, highlighting the interconnectedness of freedom and responsibility, the rule of law, and moral life. Hayek's humanistic understanding aligns with the Three Blessings, and he urges people to embrace the challenge of building a free society as an intellectual adventure.
(from Joining The Dots - Day 14)
Ordered liberty — freedom within abstract law, governed by conscience rather than command — is for William the political form proper to a fallen but redeemable humanity. The shape of the resulting society is bottom-up, emergent, almost ecological.
In a great society, most people do not know each other beyond a tribal level, yet they treat one another with respect, expecting the same in return. Although many pass by strangers in the street without knowing them, there is an underlying respect that governs these interactions. As societies interact, they form nations, and nations interact to create a world. The principal view is fundamentally bottom-up, guided by a universal prime force driving us towards greater complexity. This process occurs spontaneously and naturally, reflecting the way the world operates.
(from Joining The Dots - Day 14)
The deep inheritance that makes such a society possible is linguistic before it is institutional. We do not so much choose our framework as receive it embedded in the language we are born into, and that language carries the family structures and political assumptions of the people who shaped it.
Without a connection to God, certain family structures can devolve into pathological forms. The communitarian family with authoritarian fathers produces ideologies of equality plus authority (communism). The stem family with one favoured heir produces acceptance of inequality (fascism). The absolute nuclear family (English Anglo-Saxon) produces individualism and freedom but also social disintegration in modernity. As Hayek noted, the knowledge of earlier generations is communicated through language, and the structure of language itself implies certain views about the nature of the world. By learning a particular language, we acquire a specific framework for thinking, often without realising it.
The Anglo-Saxon inheritance was uniquely fortunate because it married linguistic freedom-orientation with the Hebraic conscience tradition Christianity smuggled in. Continental Europe inherited the Platonic command instinct without the counterweight, and pays for it whenever restraints loosen.
The Hebraic counterweight begins, almost philologically, in the word the West has botched: obey. It began life meaning "to listen", was corrupted under the Norman occupation into "to prostrate oneself", and survives as the verb of feudal compliance. The Hebrew has no equivalent. It has only shama — hear, internalise, respond. The figure God seeks is not the cowed servant but the upright walker.
When God met Abraham, He said, 'I am God Almighty. Walk before me and be blameless.' This statement intrigued me because it suggests that God was following Abraham, not the other way around. To be blameless means to live according to one's conscience, following the original mind and heart. By doing so, Abraham would know where to go, as God dwelled in his heart. God seeks people who take the initiative, listen to their conscience, and follow the impulses of their original nature. He desires individuals who take responsibility, moving from a state of obedience like servants to the attitude of an owner.
(from Joining The Dots - Day 4)
Father said exactly the same thing... The core of the biblical tradition is not obedience; it's about love—loving God with all your soul, all your heart, and all your mind. It's about listening, listening to the voice of God, listening to your conscience. Of course, it's very hard to listen to one's conscience. There are all kinds of distractions and noise going on. That's why developing a spiritual life is important. People like Moses and Jesus went to the desert. In the desert, there is absolute silence. At that point, you can begin to hear your conscience, your soul, and the voice of God. I recommend it. I once went to the Dead Sea, and I heard the silence. It's extraordinary; go there if you can.
And the model of this listening is not the silent kneeler but the arguer. Abraham, the founder of the line, is the man who talked back.
Abraham confronted God. 'Are you serious?' Imagine speaking to God like that. 'Are you planning to get rid of the good people right along with the bad? That's not fair. What if there are 50 decent people left in the city? Will you lump the good with the bad and get rid of the lot?... Doesn't the Judge of all the earth judge with justice?' Imagine Abraham speaking to God, the owner of the world, the Creator of the world, the Judge of the world, and saying to God, 'Aren't you going to judge with justice? Isn't what you're going to do unfair?' Can you imagine speaking to God like that? There's no other conversation in the whole of religious literature like this. For most people, this is blasphemy.
A faith that begins in argument cannot end in prostration. The Western tradition of dissent — the prophet against the king — descends from this conversation at Mamre. William read the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, as the inverse moment that completed it: the historical end of child sacrifice, and the founding declaration that human beings belong to God rather than to their parents. Eve had named her firstborn Cain from the Hebrew keniti, "I have acquired"; she regarded the child as her possession, and a possessive mother produces in her child either crushed compliance or rebellion, and Cain rebelled. The line from keniti to Abraham's release of Isaac on Moriah is the line on which Western individualism is built. The child is not the parent's property. From that single jurisprudential premise descend habeas corpus, the abolition of slavery, the prohibition of forced marriage, and the modern conviction that the human person is his own.
Why a Second Advent
Across these pages William was assembling the case for why providence required a second decisive intervention. The first Advent had inaugurated a synthesis the institutions of Christendom had failed to carry. Plato had eaten Paul. The shepherd peoples had been turned into peasants of the imperial church. The Anglo-Saxon inheritance had thinned into a libertarianism without spiritual ballast, and the Hebraic conscience tradition had been outsourced to a single ethnic people who carried it at cost while the Christian nations forgot what it was for.
What was required was neither a return to pre-modern certainty — no longer available, as Berger had shown, to most modern people — nor capitulation to secular modernity. It was a third path, which the Principle was structurally fitted to be.
Peter Berger argues that neo-orthodoxy cannot persuade people to return to the pre-modern age, where they memorise everything off by heart. For some, that might be acceptable, but for many people in the world today, it simply does not work. Another possibility he suggested was to accommodate modernity. They no longer believe in miracles or the supernatural, essentially accepting the desacralisation of society. We no longer try to bring God into our conversations or politics; we accept, as Nietzsche said, that God is dead. An alternative approach that I advocate is service as an existentialist approach, starting from human experience. The first line of the Divine Principle states that every human is struggling to attain happiness and avoid misfortune. Starting from human experience, we can build towards everything else, including God.
(from Joining The Dots - Day 1)
This is the chapter's deepest claim about the Divine Principle. Not a return to fundamentalism; not a polite accommodation to materialism. A third path: it begins with experience, with the structures of human longing, and reasons outward to the metaphysical commitments those structures require. It asks only the attention of anyone who has noticed that they want to be happy and finds themselves obstructed.
William refused to read the failure of materialism as proof that modern people were stupid. Darwin, not Paley, was where he wanted twenty-first-century apologetics to begin: not in the design of the watch but in Darwin's own chastened admission that randomness alone is not, in the end, a sufficient explanation of the immense universe. The Principle's dual-characteristic ontology, applied to a chaotic-emergent reading of the natural world, fits the data better than the materialist alternative and better than the older theism it displaced.
Some of the most baroque solutions in the European tradition look, from this vantage, like workarounds for problems the Principle does not have. Leibniz's pre-established harmony — mind and body programmed in parallel to produce only the illusion of causal interaction — is a monument to the contortions Greek dualism forced upon Christian philosophers. The Principle never inherited that dualism. Mind and body are dual aspects of one created reality, whose integration is the precondition of barak, the kneeling blessing without which no life acquires unity.
And the reason the secular West cannot see this is not that the evidence is hidden but that it is too obvious. Wittgenstein had named the problem: the most important things are concealed by their simplicity and familiarity. God is not absent from modern life; God is its ground, going unnoticed precisely because of His ubiquity.
If God's presence is structurally invisible to modern eyes, the way to restore it is experiential. This is the deep rationale for the Mosaic tabernacle. The Israelites were not asked to build it because God required a building; they were asked because they required the work. As Jonathan Sacks put it: it is not what God does for us that transforms us, but what we do for God. Dependency strips dignity; co-creation restores it. Father's Religious Youth Service applied the same insight: friendship across religious lines is built not by talking theology but by working together on a shared project all parties can dignify.
The same insight underlies Jesus's most political teaching — the second mile. Carrying the Roman soldier's pack the further mile turns the relationship from extractive to fraternal; the enemy, given time, becomes embarrassed of his enmity. Loving the enemy is not the sentimental refusal of politics; it is the only political programme adequate to a fallen creation. Coercion creates resentment; service creates relationship.
The Hebraic moral psychology was always concerned with the inside of the human person rather than the surface of conduct. The Sixth Commandment forbids murder, not killing; Jesus extends the prohibition beneath premeditated hatred, into the daily work of declining to be irritated — recognising the irritation as a clue to something in oneself, and cleansing oneself of it rather than shutting the other up. Inner cleansing rather than outer compliance has been the Mosaic project from the start; the Principle takes it to its proper depth.
What the work has accomplished
What, then, has the teaching been for? The answer divides into two halves, one outward, one inward.
Outwardly, the work has been to retell the providential story in language twenty-first-century people can hear. Stripped of in-group vocabulary, set beside the strongest secular thinkers, the Divine Principle becomes not a sectarian curiosity but a serious contribution to the conversation modernity is having with itself about story, evil, restoration, freedom and the human person. William's hope was that, told sober and without salesmanship, it might be heard by people who would never have crossed the threshold of a Unification Church meeting hall.
Inwardly, the work has been to correct a movement that by 2020 had lost its way on several specific points. The corrections were exegetical, not destructive: the worst tendencies in the movement's institutional life had no warrant in its founder's teaching. Father had not taught that Cain must obey Abel; he had taught that the unloved older brother is owed restitution. He had not taught hierarchical worship of the True Parents; he had taught that the truest member of the church is the one who loves his brothers and sisters more than he loves Reverend Moon — shocking to most rank-and-file members, and yet what the founder had said.
The reconstruction was not a competing church but a recovered original — the Abrahamic core of what Father had meant, restored from beneath the institutional barnacles. The rabbinic anecdote with which William closed his treatment of the Cain-Abel pattern caught the spirit of the whole reconstruction.
There is a Jewish story about a rabbi with many disciples. One day, the rabbi told his disciples that he had found out the Messiah was on the earth, and they were all excited. They asked, 'Who is it?' The rabbi replied, 'I don't know.' The disciples then asked what they should do, and the rabbi said, 'Go and treat everybody as if they were the Messiah.' This is what Father taught: treat everyone as if they are your Abel, treat everyone as if they are your Messiah, and treat everyone as a person from whom you can hear God's voice and learn.
This is what William believed the long story had been for. Not a privileged caste of the saved ordering the unfortunate about; not a doctrinal system one signs up to and defends to the death. A community of practice in which each person treats every other as if a messianic spark sat inside them, and is therefore willing to listen, to argue, to forgive, to wrestle, to carry the luggage a second mile. The whole providential history has been the slow education of the species into the disposition required to do that.
The story is not finished. The signs were not encouraging — populist totalitarianisms back in fresh costume, institutional churches in self-imposed irrelevance, the digital mob discovering it had inherited the heresy-hunting reflex of late antiquity. But the work to be done is the work Abraham began, Jacob completed in his generation, Joseph reframed, Judah owned, Jesus taught, Sergius embodied at Holy Trinity, Father taught in Korea — and any of us can begin tomorrow morning with the next archetypal position we are placed in. To find ourselves where one of the founders failed, and choose, this time, differently. That is the only mechanism providence has ever had, and it remains sufficient.
A note on omitted material: this chapter uses twenty-two of the twenty-six theses and eighteen of the forty-eight passages. Set aside for pacing, not disagreement: the Day 6 theses on same-sex marriage and Darwinism, and the rabbinic argument that Jacob should have married Leah rather than Rachel (each absorbing too much space for the synthetic register); also the Talmudic gloss on Ham's offence on the ark; the Nimrod and Tower of Babel material (subsumed under Plato); the Kierkegaard-on-Abraham polemic; the 400-year indemnity from the uncut doves; the Joseph-as-tell-tale, Rahab-in-Jesus's-lineage and Bathsheba passages; the Day 3 Eve-as-trauma-survivor material (load-bearing in Chapter 3); the Day 13 separation-of-religion-and-state thread; and second-passage redundancies from Days 1, 4, 11 and 12 of the umbrella series.