Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World imagined two very different roads to the same destination: a population controlled either through fear or through pleasure, its individuality quietly dissolved into the state. Fiction aside, history offers no shortage of real rulers who wanted exactly that kind of total control—Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander, Caesar, Hitler. The drive behind them is as old as Eden itself: the temptation to “be like God” (Genesis 3:5), scaled up to the level of empires. This chapter traces that ambition from its first recorded appearance in Scripture through the secret societies and global institutions that, according to a wide range of researchers, still carry pieces of it forward today.

Nimrod: The First One-World Ambition

Genesis identifies Nimrod, grandson of Ham, as a “mighty hunter”—a phrase researcher Trey Smith argues is better translated “a mighty hunter against the Lord,” casting Nimrod as the ringleader behind the Tower of Babel rather than a heroic figure. The Jewish historian Josephus described Nimrod as a tyrant who turned the people from dependence on God toward dependence on himself, building the tower explicitly to defy any future flood—a direct challenge to God’s authority. Author Thomas Horn went further, describing the tower’s design as an attempt to breach into the divine realm itself, an interpretation Horn connected to Nimrod’s role as the archetype of every one-world ruler since.

Armenian tradition adds an unexpected thread to this story: Hayk, the legendary founder of the Armenian nation, is said to have defeated the Babylonian king Bel—identified by some researchers as Nimrod himself—near Lake Van in 2492 BC. Whether or not that identification holds up historically, it’s a detail I find hard not to notice, given Armenia’s long history of persecution and its distinction as the first nation to adopt Christianity.

What “New World Order” Actually Means

It’s tempting to wave away any discussion of a coordinated global elite as fringe thinking. But dismissiveness has been wrong before: for decades, credible reports of unidentified aerial phenomena were mocked as tabloid fodder, until a 2017 New York Times exposé revealed the Pentagon had been quietly studying them all along. That doesn’t prove every claim about a “New World Order” is accurate—but it’s a reminder that “conspiracy theory” is sometimes just a label attached to something true before it’s been fully confirmed.

The term itself usually traces back to institutions like the Rockefeller-founded Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group—annual, invitation-only gatherings of political, financial, and academic leaders operating under strict confidentiality rules. Author A. Ralph Epperson’s The New World Order argues these networks, along with older fraternal orders, share a long-term goal of centralized global governance. Whether one accepts that thesis in full, the documented overlap in membership between these organizations and the halls of real political power is not itself in dispute.

A Web of Old and Powerful Societies

Several historic organizations recur constantly in this literature, each with its own particular reputation.

Washington’s Hidden Symbolism

Why does an eye atop a pyramid appear on the U.S. dollar bill, beneath the Latin phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum—”New Order of the Ages”? Researchers like Thomas Horn have long argued these are Masonic and occult symbols rather than Christian ones, tracing them to Sir Francis Bacon’s vision of a “New Atlantis.” The Capitol dome’s fresco, The Apotheosis of Washington, literally depicts the first president ascending among classical gods—imagery Horn reads as evidence of the Founders’ genuine, if often overlooked, entanglement with Enlightenment-era esotericism rather than orthodox Christianity. Several key Founders bear this out in their own writing: John Adams rejected the Trinity, Thomas Jefferson famously edited the miracles out of his personal New Testament, and Benjamin Franklin moved in explicitly occult social circles.

None of this means America’s story ends there. As Horn himself puts it, the nation may not have been founded as explicitly Christian, but it became one anyway—through the preaching of the gospel and the sweeping force of the First and Second Great Awakenings, which shaped American culture far more durably than any founding-era symbolism did.

The Great Reset

Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum has for decades convened the world’s political and business elite at Davos, and its 2020 book COVID-19: The Great Reset proposed using the pandemic as leverage for sweeping change—”stakeholder capitalism,” new corporate ESG scoring, and a vision of a 2030 economy where, as the WEF’s own messaging put it, “you’ll own nothing and be happy.” Whatever one makes of the specific proposals, the underlying pattern is familiar: a global crisis used to justify a global solution, coordinated by unelected institutions rather than accountable governments. Schwab himself resigned as WEF chair in 2025 amid financial-misconduct allegations he denies.

New Age’s Secret-Society Kinship

As the previous chapter explored, New Age pantheism teaches that humanity simply needs to “raise its consciousness” to realize its own divinity—the same promise the serpent made in Eden. That theology turns out to overlap closely with the inner teachings of several esoteric orders, where Lucifer is recast not as deceiver but as “light-bringer,” the true source of hidden enlightenment. Historians of the Third Reich have noted a similar occult undercurrent feeding twentieth-century totalitarianism, a reminder that these ideas are not merely academic curiosities.

A Balanced Response

Scripture calls believers to be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16)—which cuts in two directions here. On one side, silence and secrecy are themselves worth noticing; testing claims against Scripture (1 John 4:1) matters more than dismissing every uncomfortable question as paranoia. On the other side, not every closed-door meeting is a satanic plot, and Christians do themselves no favors by chasing every viral rumor, from microchips in vaccines to numerology in every corporate logo.

The healthiest posture is neither naive dismissal nor constant alarm, but a settled confidence: whatever schemes human institutions pursue, the story does not end with them. It ends the way it always has—with the empty tomb.