very small refusals make a path for bigger ones
These are very small refusals, tiny ways to act in the city of man as a citizen of the City of God. But very small refusals make a path for bigger ones, and in the very long run can make Babylon system a falling empire. It’s important to remember, as James Scott says, that “A great deal of the symbolic work of official power is precisely to obscure the confusion, disorder, spontaneity, error, and improvisation of political power as it is in fact exercised, beneath a billiard-ball-smooth surface of order, deliberation, rationality, and control.” The Principalities and Powers are not as mighty as they contrive to appear; and resistance to them is never futile.
Alan Jacobs