The power of the wrong myths

David and Goliath is the wrong myth for social transformation. It flatters everyone. The powerful imagine themselves invulnerable unless some mythical hero breaches the wall; the powerless believe that moral courage alone can defeat entrenched evil. But modern power is no solitary giant in the valley of Elah. It's a social operating system: capital structures, tax regimes, media ownership, regulatory capture, elite philanthropy, tech platforms and the quiet hegemony of “common sense.”

The real challenge is not size. It's a higher commitment. The right can disagree on God, nation, markets and manners because it converges around property rights, natural hierarchy and inherited advantage. Transformation is more difficult: it must name what is absent, imagine what could exist, judge between rival goods, and forge institutions strong enough to elicit shared sacrifice.

This is the Achilles heel of liberal contractarianism: Rawls can ask what rules citizens might choose behind a veil of ignorance; he cannot command self-transcendence. The hidden frailty of progressive politics lies between Arrow’s impossibility theorem and Freud’s “narcissism of small differences”; the future is morally underdetermined, and overlapping consensus on abstractions — freedom, dignity, equality, ecology, belonging — does not yield a substantive common good.

Democratic proceduralism cannot cure this. Neutrality may restrain domination, but counting preferences is not discerning justice. Worse, dispersing power institutionally is a losing strategy when plutocrats are capturing the state. Michels was right: organisation favours the already organised.

Let me say it again, democracy cannot work; but then no country is genuinely democratic. We replaced the king’s monopoly of violence with parliamentary monopolies, then watched party politicians sell the franchise: institutions became bulwarks of special interest and concentrated power.

So the question isn't whether a band of modern Davids can beat Goliath. Even the most "inclusive" coalition of preferences will fail. The better myth is Exodus: transformation isn't the lucky sling, but a people constituted through law, ritual, relationship and covenantal submission to a transcendent horizon.

However hard it is for modern liberals to accept, every serious transformation has known this. The British labour movement, American abolitionism, the Protestant Reformation, civil rights and anti-apartheid prevailed not through luck or sentiment, but through sustained institutional craftsmanship — and a horizon larger than the self.

For a sustainable Europe, we must move beyond heroic individualism and loose movement-building toward the slower, harder work of moral and organisational architecture: turning private contradiction into public wisdom, raw power into service, and scattered energies into a common good worthy of allegiance.

Without that, Goliath need not fight. He simply waits.