Less and less in
touch with the progressive and more compassionate society at large outside the
tower, the GB make demands for more money to further the real source of their
success: their property portfolio and investments. Like the Roman leaders and
any business or power base, the dictum is “money first”. Without money the whole
enterprise will dissolve and since the privileges of power will dissolve with
the organisation, there is an inbuilt incentive for the GB to continue, however
corrupt or stupid the far-fetched concept of ‘Watchtower truth’ proves to be.
At the end of the
Roman Empire as Peter Brown, a leading academic on the period, said in his book
Authority and the Sacred, the
emperors had “a lifeboat mentality”. The imperial ship was sinking and they
were looking for survival.
With KH sell offs, an unconscionable grab for money, a drop
in contributions and a fundamental decline in interest in religious belief as a
response and resolution to life’s anxieties; I feel that we are witnessing
events at the helm of SS Watchtower which have a resonance with the decline of
any authoritarian body such as Rome was.
Any thoughts?
My thoughts are that people continue making the assumption that the Wt is this crumbling entity about to break and collapse. All they have done is the exact same thing that publishing companies, newspapers and churches around the world have done, which is to change their focus and business model to something more profitable, and to keep up with the times.
Being less authoritarian is not a sign of collapse; it's blatant evidence that they can't care less about their people once they found a better way of making money. Poor JW suckers are still in denial about it.
It's a change in business model, not the end of the WT. Using the end of the Roman empire as an analogy I think is a little too exaggerated. The WT may look like an empire to brainwashed indoctrinated JWs, but to the rest of us it's just another company, nothing more, nothing less.
That said, I find the story of the Roman empire, its raise and fall, one of the most fascinating stories. It's amazing the way they built their empire. They weren't nice people, but their architecture, their business model, their tax model and their engineering were all very impressive and advanced during their time.
