Moral Posturing, Political Nets, and the Price Nations Pay
How the West Learned to Trip Over Its Own Virtue
“The nations have sunk down in the pit which they made; In the net which they hid, their own foot is caught.” - Psalm 9v15
It’s a Bible verse for our times.
Ours is an age defined by elaborate pits and carefully woven nets.
We dig them with moral posturing, calling them “progress”, “safety”, or “the right side of history”.
And then, with stunned sincerity, we act surprised when we trip over them and fall into them.
The modern Western nation has become expert at this.
We dismantle the institutions that made us stable in the name of compassion, then act bewildered when instability follows.
We mock borders, police and shared values as crude relics of a darker age, then demand emergency powers when order collapses.
We silence dissent to protect democracy, undermine merit to achieve fairness, and hollow out truth in pursuit of feelings.
The pit is dug with the finest moral intentions. The fall is no less real for that.
Civilisations rarely fall because of external enemies alone.
They rot internally first, convinced of their own virtue, intoxicated by the belief that history has ended and that only the unenlightened could possibly disagree.
The real danger is not malice, but arrogance dressed up as kindness.
Look at the nets we’ve hidden.
Speech laws that were meant to stop hatred now stop debate.
Identity politics designed to heal divisions now hardens them.
Economic policies sold as compassion quietly punish work and reward dependence.
And all of this while the political class insulates itself from the consequences.
These were not accidents. These were choices, applauded at the time by people absolutely certain they were smarter and better than those who warned against them.
Psalm 9:15 reminds us that there is a moral architecture to the world, whether we like it or not.
You can ignore it for a while.
You can sneer at it, rewrite it, or try to cancel it.
But eventually, gravity reasserts itself.
Actions have consequences.
Nations that trade truth for comfort and order for applause don’t escape the bill. They just defer it.
The most striking part of the verse is not the fall, but the ownership of it.
“The pit which they made.”
“The net which they hid.”
No foreign power forced this. No invading army compelled it. The foot caught is our own.
That is both the warning and the hope.
If nations can dig their own pits, they can also stop digging.
But that requires humility, memory, and the courage to say that not every new idea is an improvement, and not every inherited value is a crime.
Psalm 9:15 is a verse for our times because it strips away the excuses.
It tells us that decline is not mysterious, and neither is renewal.
The question is whether we keep weaving nets, or finally have the wisdom to step back from the edge of the pit we so proudly dug.
Wow James, Wow. So very well said. Thank you!
Spot on Mr Macpherson.
Although it might be too late to step back from the edge at this point. 2 Thess 2 10-12 tells us of the consequences of loving not the truth … ‘God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie’… the self-inflicted, God-sent strong delusion where mutilating babies in the womb is called healthcare, children are confidently told they can change genders on a whim and that men can get pregnant, that marriage is not the sole preserve of one man and one woman and where society’s worship of the creature over the creator impacts political, economic and academic decision making.
The love for truth - or more importantly THE truth found in the person of Jesus - has long been rejected in favour of individual truths and subjective morality. And so we find ourselves trapped in a deception of our own making. Is there any stronger delusion than believing a man can become a woman? And more importantly, is there any coming back from such a position of self imposed judgement?