Before there were Kings, there was order and cooperation in pursuit of the shared goal of survival; small groups formed to sustain themselves, undertaking tasks according to individual merit, competence, and proven ability, in need of no written law in order to survive and thrive. There was no lust for power, only the inherent yearning to live a free, self-determinant life in peaceful coexistence with neighbors and the surrounding environment. And, inasmuch as this describes the basic tenets of human nature, individuals coming together to attend to shared purposes before returning to individual pursuits, it is also true that a lust for power and control is likewise an inherent trait within our species. There is no short supply of explanations for why this might be, but it is incumbent upon me to point out several in particular as they relate to the current state of affairs in America.
As we frequently said throughout the first book, there is no prerequisite here that readers ascribe to, practice, or even disavow any particular faith, religion, or dogma, but the history of struggles between the Conquerors and the Conquered as told in any of the religious texts seems to inevitably come down to matters of what is known as the seven Cardinal or deadly sins. In order of severity, they are Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, and Sloth. In direct opposition to these, there exists what are often referred to as the seven “Cardinal Virtues”, listed this way; Humility, Charity, Chastity, Gratitude, Temperance, Patience, and Diligence.
It is an enlightening exercise to compare and contrast these diverging qualities, especially if you superimpose a metaphorical dividing line between them, and place there the final seven Commandments as they were handed down by Moses from God. These seven, explicitly, relate to the ways in which each individual member of the community should conduct both themselves and their relationships with peers in the community in waves that will more likely help them to be decent human beings and productive, contributing members of society. And these rules to live by we’re not terribly intrusive; preserve a communal day of reverence, honor your parents, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie, and don’t covet (chase after what you don’t need just because you don’t have it.
Having established our seven bad sides, our seven good sides, and the seven arbiters (collectively known as our “conscience”) that stand between them, let’s put this perennial internal human conflict into some modern-day, post-enlightened societal context.
The well-known expression “an angel on one shoulder, and a devil on the other” well-enough represents the internal struggle each of us faces within ourselves as we go about conducting the everyday business of our lives. As a symbolic matter, though, it is fair to suggest that perhaps our angels and devils are really comprised of these seven distinct and competing facets, especially when you consider the outside influences of the world around us and the layers of complications our so-called “enlightened” Society confront us with.
The undeclared Civil War 2.0, which began to percolate in the 60s, boiled over and became a full-scale conflagration in the late 2000s and into the 2020s. The aggressors in the fight for the soul of the American Nation, comprised of those seven “devils” I mentioned above, have been consumed by their lust for power, over-inflated sense of pride in a fatally flawed ideology, and have been exacting their civilization-ending wrath upon any that stand in the way of their goal to crush our free will, strip us of our right to self-determination, and overthrow the Nation.
That these aggressors have enjoyed so much success over the last three generations is not so much a testament to their prowess as it is a negative reflection on the steadily fading resolve of the self-determinant to resist. And it is easy to understand why our conscience convinces us that it is “the right thing to do”, ceding ground (so to speak) to aggressions against our morals and sensibilities because being a “good person” and a productive, contributing member of society necessarily requires our patients, diligence, charity, and humility in deference to our natural instincts to seek peace wherever it might be found. Notably, our Founding Fathers said as much in the Declaration when they offered that “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves “. And while the Founders put to good use their deep understanding and respect of human nature, and the collective honorable conscience of a good and humble people, those working to destroy us likewise understand human nature and have cynically weaponized it and turned it against us, taking full advantage of our instinctive reliance on our seven better angels.
Opinions widely vary as to which single event might have been the tipping point that brought us to the war in which we are now engaged; some say it was George Floyd, others suggest it might have been Trayvon Martin, and some- including myself- are inclined to believe that it was more likely a little farther back, during the short-lived days of the Occupy Wall Street movement. No real purpose is served, in trying to reach a consensus on the genesis of what led us to where we are now, rather it matters a great deal more that we focus on the single underlying thread that runs through each of these moments in recent history: Justice.
During my research for this essay, I was honestly quite bemused by how many knots the so-called “woke” internet twists itself into just to provide a simple definition for the word “justice”. The Bible only needs three: “Right a wrong”, but the terribly misguided, ignorant, and criminally misinformed ideological activist community that has usurped our language and the previously accepted meaning of our words, now tells us that “justice” means a great many different things and its definition is heavily reliant on context. There is now “Housing” justice, “Transportation” justice, “Racial” justice, “Reproductive” justice, “Gender” justice, “Sexuality” justice, “Climate” justice, “Economic” justice, and, by any measure, the most insidious of all, “Social” justice. I’m sure I have missed some, but new ones are invented more rapidly than “woke” dictionaries can keep up.
A comprehensive list of every form of “contextual justice” notwithstanding, at issue in the debate is the cost of attaining it and at whose expense the price of pursuing it will be paid. And, as with the previously accepted process for “righting wrongs”, which placed all its faith in the quality, qualifications, and provable impartiality of the judge(s), there is no possibility of an equitable outcome in our current environment, most especially because the entire concept of equity has been converted into a moving Target. What happens, instead, is that a narrative is invented which suggests that some perceived and vaguely described injustice is being exacted on a cherry-picked demographic – “the cost of rent is too high in an urban area inhabited primarily by low-income minorities”, for example – and then Justice is pursued by forcing landlords to charge less or demanding local governments subsidized costs of living for those affected.
While this might appear charitable and benevolent on the surface, the price for inflicting this housing “justice” will be paid by property owners and taxpayers at the expense of not only their personal financial freedom but also their self-determinant rights to do whatever they want with the money they have earned of their own accord and been able to set aside for their own intended pursuits.
It is important to recognize what is really at play in this malevolent dynamic that has become ubiquitous throughout our society; unimpeded vanity, ideological pride, and lust for power have only emboldened today’s aggressors. Their carefully crafted projection of blame onto those they have targeted, and from whom they intend to confiscate arbitrarily determine “just” compensation for fabricated injustice, is designed to punish and serve as retribution and has nothing to do with delivering “justice” to the “injured” classes while having everything to do with the power to be gained by those anointing themselves as the sole arbiters of those decisions.
To accomplish these objectives, a redistribution of wealth and possession will have to be inflicted upon everyone, and control over every aspect of every life across the entire population will necessarily require universal power to be handed over to those having the least understanding of the life experience(s) of the various demographics they intend to manipulate for their own benefit. Our Founding Fathers’ generation certainly didn’t foresee such a nation two and a half centuries ago, and the generations that proceeded from the Civil War likewise had a very different vision for America.
But then Barack Obama happened, followed by Occupy Wall Street, and right behind that was Trayvon Martin and Black Lives Matter and Antifa, followed not long after by the death of George Floyd and the rise of the anti-law enforcement/ pro-domestic terrorism militias now calling for the collapse of American civilization in the name of Social Justice and serving under the protection of our own democratically-elected politicians including the President of the United States himself.
In the movie “Patriot”, the fictitious character Benjamin Martin asks a question and follows with a very poignant observation: “Why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away? An elected legislature can trample a man’s rights as easily as a King can”. Despite this movie being fiction, this observation speaks two America’s current reality; Joe Biden is most assuredly not masterminding the Sedition taking place all around him, though his ineptitude clearly mirrors that of Nero, fiddling as Rome burned, it is nonetheless true that the 3,000 tyrants that surround him have been busying themselves with overthrowing America by crushing the freedoms and god-given rights to self-determination for the four hundred million people of which she is comprised.
America finds itself today buckling under the pressure of the “long train of abuses and usurpations” thrust upon us by the 3,000 mini-Kings, despots, and tyrants working furiously to put the finishing touches on the overthrow of the nation. Every law necessary to break is being broken to keep people that could make things better out of power, and retribution and injustice are being served to the innocent as their own rights are being revoked and redistributed, arbitrarily, to two others deemed to be in Greater need of them; “Such has been the patient sufferance” of our representative Republic.
It has been pride, vanity, sloth, and envy that have emboldened the power class(es) to project blame onto others for problems of their own making. Their unwillingness to “come together to attend to shared purposes”, too lazy and self-righteous to roll up their sleeves and do any of the heavy lifting themselves. Further exacerbating the national divide is the Society-ending dynamic between the powerful and the powerless that makes obvious the general lack of understanding (and completely obvious disdain for) the basic elements of human nature that have brought us to this place in American history. For today’s Kings to attain power, they must dissolve the bonds of human nature, but the nature of the enslaved can never be dissolved, and, as history and struts, the fall of the slave master is inevitable.
