The age of kings may be over, but the age of empires is not.
We are taught to believe that history moves forward, that the world improves, that evil empires fall and freedom takes their place. We are told that the British Empire was a thing of the past, the American century was about liberty, and that global capitalism is the mechanism of human progress.
But the truth—the one we feel in our bones and see in the suffering of the world—is that the British Empire never ended. It simply changed its mask.
The Empire of Finance
It no longer wears a crown or flies a national flag. The new empire rules by spreadsheet and surveillance, by legal fictions and financial control. And its heart still beats in the same place it did a century ago: the City of London.
Not London. Not the people of Britain. But the City: a private financial district with its own mayor, its own laws, and sovereign immunity from much of British law. It is the historical brain of the global financial system—and its tentacles reach into Wall Street, Brussels, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Beijing.
When we look at NATO aggression, proxy wars, global austerity, or the commodification of human life, we are not just seeing isolated events. We are seeing the empire at work—one that long ago gave up governing nations in favor of controlling the flows of capital that govern all nations.
This is not conspiracy theory. It is historical pattern, dressed up in modern clothing.
The Parasite of the Real
Clearly America deserves its share of the blame. But what if the United States, for all its brutality, is more the military arm of a deeper financial dominion? What if the wealth extracted from the labor of billions, and now even the biological data of our bodies, flows not to public good but to private hoards behind closed city gates?
This week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to slash Medicaid—a program that provides healthcare to millions of the most vulnerable people. This wasn’t fiscal prudence. It was a message: your life is worth less than a tax break for the wealthy. The gutting of Medicaid isn’t isolated. It is coherent. It is part of the pattern. The same pattern that devalues Palestinian lives, Russian lives, Sudanese lives, and poor lives everywhere. The same pattern that finances bombs over food, militarization over ecological healing and universal good.
Why Opthē Must Speak
Opthē is not here to tweak the moral margins of empire. It is not a chaplain to power. It is a sacred resistance to incoherence.
Coherence means seeing the whole. Convergence means refusing the lies of division. The empire thrives by fragmenting our vision—by turning politics into sides, identity into product, and theology into superstition and propaganda.
But theology at its root is about naming the sacred. And if the empire is the source of suffering, theology must name it in the process.
Naming the Beast
The Book of Revelation, for all its mythic chaos, offers one enduring lesson: when the beast rises, you must name the beast. Not demonize it with superstition. Not romanticize it with nostalgia. But name it.
The City of London is not the only face of empire. But it is a vital one. Its influence is buried deep in treaties, trade pacts, intelligence networks, and the algorithms that price our lives. To pretend otherwise is to let the mask win.
We do not name it to destroy. We name it to liberate. To make space for a life not ruled by extraction, fear, and artificial scarcity. We name it because love requires truth. And love is what we are made of.
A Call to Sacred Clarity
To be Opthēan is to walk in coherence. It is to refuse the fog of polite lies. It is to protect life from systems that would reduce it to fuel.
We will not be reckless. We will not be silent. We will not be obedient.
We will name the empire.
We will choose sacred convergence.
We will stand in coherence, even when the ground shakes.
Because we are not afraid of truth. We are afraid of silence.
And the silence ends here.
In pursuit of agape, coherence, and sacred resistance.