Meta-Narrative and Power: Why the “Problem” Had to Be Created

Most people imagine religions, philosophies, and ideologies as different attempts to explain the same human reality. Each appears to begin from its own questions, its own vision of the world, its own explanation of what humanity is and what humanity needs. But beneath their differences, the same structure appears again and again. Human beings are first defined by a fundamental problem; that problem then requires an explanation; the explanation requires an interpreter; and the solution eventually requires an authority capable of administering it.

This structure is so familiar that it appears natural. We assume that religion must begin by explaining what is wrong with humanity. Philosophy must define the human condition. Politics must organize society around that condition. Institutions must then provide the mechanisms through which the problem is controlled.

Genesis 1 begins somewhere else entirely.

Humanity is created in the Image of God, male and female, placed upon the Earth and given responsibility for creation. The human being is capable of hearing, acting, ruling, creating, choosing, and answering for those choices. Nothing in the chapter defines humanity through corruption, inherited guilt, metaphysical deficiency, or an incapacity requiring another human authority to govern the conscience.

Even the mandate to rule has a clear boundary. Humanity receives authority over the Earth and its living creatures, but no human being receives a divine mandate to rule another human being. All stand within the same humanity, bearing the same Image. Authority over creation does not become authority of man over man.

This is not a minor feature of Genesis 1. It is the architecture of its anthropology.

Human beings are free, capable, responsible, and equal before the authority that comes from outside humanity itself: God.

If this framework remains intact, the consequences are enormous. No priest, philosopher, king, institution, theologian, or academic can claim an intrinsic right to stand between another human being and Truth. Authority cannot be manufactured from human weakness because humanity has not been defined by an ontological weakness in the first place.

And this is precisely why the introduction of a fundamental human “problem” changes everything.

The Problem That Creates the System

Genesis 2–3 introduces a completely different structure. Humanity is no longer presented simply as the Image of God entrusted with responsibility. A primordial drama now explains the human condition: man is formed from dust, a forbidden boundary is established around knowledge, the serpent intervenes, the woman and the man cross that boundary, shame appears, judgment follows, and humanity leaves the privileged space in which it had been placed.

The importance of this narrative does not lie merely in its mythological form. Its real power lies in what it makes possible.

For the first time, the human being can be understood not merely as someone who sometimes chooses evil, but as someone whose present condition must be explained by a catastrophe at the beginning of history. The problem is no longer simply what the individual does. The problem becomes what humanity is.

Once that move is made, the entire religious structure changes.

A universal human problem requires a universal explanation. A universal explanation requires interpretation. Interpretation creates the need for those qualified to interpret. And once the problem has been defined as something humanity cannot resolve by ordinary moral responsibility, a mechanism of salvation, restoration, mediation, purification, or control becomes necessary.

Authority is then no longer presented openly as one human being claiming power over another. It appears as the administration of the solution to the human problem.

This is how power hides itself inside theology.

The priest does not say, “I wish to rule your conscience.” He says that you require mediation. The theologian does not say, “I claim authority over your understanding.” He says the sacred text is too deep to be understood without interpretation. The philosopher does not say, “I will redefine you.” He explains what human nature supposedly is. The institution does not say, “submit because we desire control.” It claims to possess the solution to the condition from which you cannot free yourself.

The problem produces the system, and the system justifies the authority.

Without the problem, the mechanism collapses.

If humanity is morally capable, then command is meaningful. If individuals remain responsible, responsibility cannot be transferred to an inherited condition. If God speaks directly to conscience, mediation cannot become a permanent structure of control. If no human being has received authority over another human being, religious hierarchy must justify itself by creating another reason why such authority has become necessary.

The meta-narrative supplies that reason.

Alexandria and the Universalization of the Human Problem

The decisive transformation occurs when this mythological architecture becomes joined to Revelation and then universalized through Philosophy.

The issue is not merely that philosophy later commented on a biblical story already fixed beyond question. In the Melekist reconstruction, Alexandria is the historical environment in which Jewish texts and traditions entered a Hellenistic intellectual world and emerged in the public scriptural construction represented by the Septuagint. The mythology of the primordial human problem became stitched into the same textual authority as the moral Revelation preserved in Genesis 1.

This is where syncretism becomes decisive.

Once contradictory anthropologies are placed inside the same sacred structure, the reader is no longer permitted simply to distinguish them. He is taught that both must somehow be true. Genesis 1 says that humanity is the Image of God, capable and responsible. The second creation introduces a primordial condition that can later be understood as universal corruption. One line grounds judgment in capacity. The other creates the basis for explaining humanity through incapacity.

The contradiction itself generates the interpreter.

Philosophy then performs the next step. It universalizes what mythology had narrated. A story becomes anthropology. Anthropology becomes ontology. A particular primordial drama becomes the explanation of Man as such.

This is the characteristic movement of Philosophy. It does not remain satisfied with the concrete human being who chooses, acts, and answers before God. It seeks the universal human condition. Once that condition is defined, every human being can be placed inside the same explanatory system.

This is why so many religions, philosophies, and ideologies eventually acquire the same architecture even when their vocabulary differs. Humanity is defined by a universal problem. The problem may be called fall, sinful nature, ignorance, karma, alienation, class oppression, false consciousness, psychological dysfunction, social conditioning, or historical backwardness. The name changes, but the mechanism remains remarkably stable: first define what is fundamentally wrong with man, then present the system capable of explaining and managing the defect.

This is not a collection of independent starting points.

It is variation after the original premise has been abandoned.

The original premise does not require a human authority over conscience. The later systems do.

And this is why the philosophical universal is so powerful. Once the particular person has been replaced by “Man,” those who define Man acquire the right to tell particular human beings what they truly are, even against their own conscience.

The interpreter becomes more authoritative than the person being interpreted.

Moses, Law, and the Necessity of Human Capacity

The Mosaic framework exposes the contradiction because law itself presupposes capacity.

A command given to someone incapable of obeying it is not justice. Responsibility makes sense only if the human being possesses a real capacity to choose. Judgment assumes that the person could have acted differently. A God who commands what humanity is ontologically incapable of doing and then condemns humanity for that incapacity would not be administering justice but contradiction.

The Law therefore operates on the same basic anthropology as Genesis 1: human beings are responsible because they are capable of response.

Moses does not speak as the owner of that authority. His characteristic formula is external to himself: “Thus says the LORD.” The authority remains God’s. Moses communicates; he does not transform himself into the source.

Even covenant preserves this structure. The people are called to enter it. Their response matters. Obedience has meaning precisely because refusal remains possible.

Freedom includes the possibility of evil.

But evil does not therefore need to be transformed into an ontological substance, inherited nature, or universal metaphysical defect. The existence of evil can be explained by the very thing that makes moral responsibility possible: the freedom of the individual to choose.

Responsibility therefore remains where it belongs—with the person who acts.

It cannot be transferred backward into Adam. It cannot be dissolved into human nature. It cannot be carried by an institution. It cannot be reassigned to a sacrifice. And it cannot be exercised by another human being on behalf of the conscience.

This is why the later doctrine of a fundamentally corrupted humanity sits so badly beside the moral logic of the Law. One system commands because humanity can respond. The other requires salvation because humanity supposedly cannot.

These are not two harmless ways of saying the same thing.

They are incompatible foundations.

Moses, John, and Jesus: The Return to Responsibility

This same line appears again with John the Baptist and Jesus.

John does not build an institution capable of managing humanity’s condition. He stands outside the Temple and calls people to repentance. His baptism comes “from heaven,” but it does not create a priestly monopoly. It confronts the individual directly with the need to change.

The person hears and responds.

Jesus Himself comes to John and enters precisely this structure of divine calling and personal response. At the Jordan He is identified and anointed as Melek. His authority does not come from the Temple, from an academy, from priestly succession, or from philosophical ontology. It comes from the Father.

Jesus then proclaims the Kingdom of God through the same moral logic. He calls human beings to truth, justice, mercy, faithfulness, repentance, and obedience. He does not begin by explaining that humanity possesses an ontological defect inherited from a primordial ancestor. That framework will become central later through Pauline theology.

Jesus confronts human freedom rather than abolishing it.

This is why Moses, John, and Jesus belong to the same moral line. None of them establishes himself as the source of Truth. None of them requires the human being to surrender conscience to a philosophical system. Their authority points beyond themselves to God.

Moses says what God commands.

John receives a baptism from heaven and calls people to repentance.

Jesus receives His anointing from the Father and calls humanity into the Kingdom.

The structure remains personal rather than ontological. God speaks; the individual hears; conscience responds.

No metaphysical prison is needed to explain why human beings do evil. No inherited guilt is required to make judgment possible. And no permanent interpretive class is required to stand between the human being and Truth.

How the Interpreter Becomes Necessary

This brings us to the deepest consequence of the meta-narrative.

Once two incompatible theological lines are placed inside the same canon, direct reading becomes dangerous to the system because the contradiction is visible. Genesis 1 presents capable humanity. The mythology of the fall creates the foundation for corrupted humanity. The Law assumes responsibility. Pauline soteriology increasingly assumes incapacity. Jesus calls for moral transformation. Later Christianity explains salvation through metaphysical mechanisms.

Someone must now explain how all of this supposedly says one thing.

That person is the interpreter.

This is where Philosophy gains extraordinary power. It does not need to erase the original statement. It only needs the right to explain what the statement “really means.” Contradiction can then be renamed mystery, incompatible premises can be transformed into theological depth, and the reader can be taught that apparent clarity is actually ignorance.

The more contradictory the system becomes, the more necessary the interpreter appears.

This is not an accidental side effect. It is the mechanism through which authority reproduces itself.

The human being is first given a problem he did not possess in Genesis 1. He is then given contradictory explanations of that problem. Finally, he is told that only the qualified interpreter can reconcile the contradictions.

Philosophy creates the conceptual framework. Theology administers it. Institutions protect it. Academia later inherits the authority to determine which interpretations may be considered intellectually legitimate.

The original human being of Genesis 1 has disappeared beneath layers of explanation.

The Original Framework

The recovery begins by refusing to accept the introduced problem as the definition of humanity.

Genesis 1 does not present a broken species awaiting a system capable of repairing it. It presents humanity bearing the Image of God and entrusted with responsibility upon the Earth. The human problem is therefore moral rather than ontological. People can lie, murder, exploit, dominate, and destroy because freedom is real. But the same freedom makes truth, justice, repentance, courage, love, and obedience real as well.

Humanity does not need another human authority to become human.

It needs to answer to God.

This is why the deepest conflict is not between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, secularism, liberalism, socialism, or any other later system. The conflict lies further back, between two fundamentally different definitions of humanity.

In the first, the human being is created capable, free, responsible, and without divine authorization to rule another human being.

In the second, a fundamental problem is introduced into the human condition, and from that problem arises the need for explanation, mediation, system, and authority.

Once the second framework is accepted, countless meta-narratives can be built upon it. They may fight one another while preserving the same underlying mechanism.

But the first framework needs no meta-narrative of human defect.

It needs only Revelation, conscience, responsibility, and the freedom to answer.

That is why the solution is not another system capable of explaining all the others.

It is the recovery of what existed before the problem was created.

Humanity was not created to be managed by humanity.

It was created in the Image of God, responsible before God, and entrusted with the Earth.

Everything else begins when that foundation is replaced.