Of the things that might be said about our species, the last surviving species of the genus Homo, what we know cannot be summed up in an introductory paragraph any more than could the sum total of what has been said about us across the span of History be jammed into a publication the size of the United States Code, which is currently “about 60,000 pages long and has 54 volumes.”
Why our current governing system requires so many words to lay out the method(s) of restrictions and constraints on the freedoms and liberties of American citizens when the founders only needed 4,543 to describe how the government would operate deserves scrutiny a few pages hence, but as we begin, it is worthy of mention that we continue to survive, thrive, overcome adversity, and withstand the storms of governmental, social, and cultural pressure to restrict and constrain the exercise of our natural rights; despite the countless threats over the millennia to drive us into extinction, it would be instructive, and worthy of much closer inspection, to understand how it is that the inherent Free Will of our species never long-tolerates being forced to violate the first principles of Natural Law.
Having already determined that our species is arguably an enigmatic paradox, reminding readers that obedience to the fundamental tenets of Natural Law long predates being forced to take a knee at the feet of Kings, it is useful to consider our “earliest formations of communal faith and belief systems.”
After many generations of observations on the world around them and the lessons they learned from the successes and failures of their experiences with each other and their natural environments, our ancestors developed their faith and beliefs based on what they could see with their own eyes, hear with their own ears, taste, touch, and smell with their own senses, and imagine with their own instinctive minds what they could not physically prove.
Historical records and artifacts dating as far back as 50,000 – 30,000 BCE suggest some sort of religious practices and rituals began to appear with the finding of burial sites containing personal items of the Dead. Some experts suggest this behavior might have been early signs of an evolving belief in life after death. We know that paganism, still practiced in a number of cultures around the world today, was actively taking place in Mesopotamia but began to change there with the arrival of Abraham (early 2nd millennium BCE).
For Billions of people on the planet, Abraham’s presence in the historical chronology of faith and belief systems is important because he and his descendants have had an incredibly significant impact on Human Civilization. It is important, as we proceed with a closer look at this Global dynamic, to remind readers that there is no prerequisite here that anyone ascribe to, practice, or even disavow any particular faith, religion, or dogma. As a historical inquiry, the Abrahamic narrative is instructive for the extent to which his legacy, arguably, can be said to have built the first bridge between ruling Authority and communal Faith systems.
It is written that Abraham left Mesopotamia because God told him His plan for Abraham was to make him “the father of a great nation” and that God would give to Abraham a land (later identified as Canaan) described in the biblical book of Exodus as “land flowing with milk and honey” and is located in the southern Levant, which is the area that includes modern-day Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and parts of Syria and Lebanon… Referred to in the Bible several times as the “Promised Land,” these are the very same lands the Muslim and Hebrew people have been killing each other over for nearly 4,000 years and continue doing so in the present day.
It is said that as Abraham’s progeny grew and multiplied, he established a mutually beneficial relationship with the Egyptian pharaoh. Some accounts suggest Abraham may have been one of Pharaoh’s confidants. During the years prior to his death, Abraham’s offspring (later to be known as the 12 tribes of Israel) were welcome ongoing visitors to Egypt; Pharaoh had no quarrel with the monotheism of Abraham’s people, and Abraham’s people had no quarrel with Egypt’s paganism. They enjoyed a mutually beneficial and peaceful coexistence, which was the cornerstone of the relationship between them.
Generations after Abraham’s death, a new Pharaoh would rise. Threatened by the power, strength, and influence of the 12 tribes, he ordered their enslavement, which lasted for centuries before the appearance of Moses and the eventual Exodus narrative. After the Israelites left Egypt, they developed a system of rules and laws, effectively establishing a theocracy detailed in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The fundamental principles of this system of governance were rooted in the obedience to the basic tenets of natural law and that rebuilt bridge between a ruling Authority and the communal faith system founded in the shared worship of their one true God.
Although specific dates are difficult to determine, a fair review of biblical accounts – with help from Britannica – tells us that it would only take three centuries for the Hebrew people to determine that they needed a King to rule over them. The reasons why are well enough described in the two books of Samuel (Old Testament), but it would not be much longer after this time that they were conquered and enslaved, and a new era of Kings would rise and force our species to once more, bend a knee at the feet of Kings that would wedge themselves between our communal Faith systems, and the freedom to exercise our natural rights.
The last of the Hebrew Kings eventually fell. The King that came after would likewise eventually fall. And the next King, the next, the next, and so on ad nauseam. From the perspective of the communal faith systems, forced to huddle in secrecy so they might continue their obedience to natural law without penalty or persecution, it would be the arrival of Jesus in the historical chronology of faith and belief systems that would attempt, once again, to repair that bridge between communal Faith and ruling Authority.
In his teachings, Jesus encouraged a renewal of faith and a redoubling of their commitment to not only serving God but loving and serving one another. He implored the Hebrew people to renew their adherence to the Ten Commandments handed down to them centuries earlier by Moses. His “Sermon on the Mount” and “Sermon on the Plains” together (found in the New Testament books of Luke and Matthew), arguably the most well-known of his sermons, acknowledged the suffering of the people under the crippling rule of men while encouraging the faithful to find solace in one another.
He understood that Kings would come and go and that many of these would test their faith, reminding them that the laws of God and nature could never be taken from them by Kings, no matter how many were written attempting to do so, effectively imploring them to accept what they could not change (be pragmatic) while embracing what had been given to them by God, making a finer point on this when asked by the Pharisees about paying taxes, He said, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”
The ancient Greek philosophers, who developed theories and concepts that would eventually come to be known as Natural Law, had already been inquiring about the dynamics between the masses and the ruling authority centuries before Jesus’s life. After his death, influenced by the introduction of Christian theology, a whole new generation of philosophers began similar inquiries into these same dynamics. Names such as St. Paul ) one of Jesus’ Apostles), St. Augustine of Hippo, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Aquinas, and even the likes of Edmond Burke and Thomas Paine continued that work through the lens of Christianity.
Even as these works and the countless others that have been done over more than two and a half millennia contain disagreements or contradictions, several consistently agreed-upon fundamental truths are worth considering about what they have in common.
It is said that Thomas Aquinas believed the first principle of natural law was that “good is to be done and evil avoided” and that humans discover this imperative in their consciences as if it were written there by God. Morality and justice were also ordained by God, and survival and procreation are core human values. The work of Darwin affirmed the human imperatives of survival and reproduction six centuries later, but these are not the only fundamental principles of natural law, especially considering the continuing evolution of the relationship between humankind and the natural world when considered in the context of the effects of governing systems on that relationship.
It can be fairly observed that despite the concepts of Natural Law being uniquely separate from those of Human Nature, the relationship between them is, at the very least, symbiotic; where the latter derives its understanding of its own existence from the former, the former cannot realize any meaning or purpose for its own existence without the existence of the latter.
Aquinas, along with all of the faith-based philosophers on this dynamic, agrees that nature, including humankind, comes from God and argues that there is a clear distinction between Divine Law (Natural Law) and Positive Law (Laws of Men/Legislatures).
An official definition of Natural Law suggests that it is a “system of right or justice held to be common to all humans and derived from nature rather than from the rules of society.”
Something is missing, however, from this statement that must be included in this discussion. Along with natural law, which applies equally to all of us, it is important to recognize that there is also the matter of Natural rights, which is defined as follows: “Natural Rights are rights that people are inherently born with, possibly from nature or God. These rights are universal and inalienable (remember that word), meaning they are not dependent on the beliefs, customs, or laws of any specific government or culture and cannot be repealed or restricted by human laws.
This suggests that each of us, from the first day we stood upright in Africa 300,000 years ago, is born with the equal right to breathe, to sustain ourselves, to reproduce, to live free, self-determinate lives, to defend ourselves, to express ourselves, and to live in harmony with our natural environment. It also means that we are born with the equal right to be sovereign individuals, enjoy bodily autonomy, and possess the right to be free to live in peace with one another and the world around us. Notably, these rights are the same for the wealthy as they are for the impoverished, and it was only after the rise of Kings that some proclaimed the right to be more equal than any of the rest of us. From that day to this, the endless struggle between the governing and the governed continues to grow and evolve.
The first King of England, Athelstan, rose to power in the early 900s AD. Roughly three centuries later, King John put his seal on the Magna Carta (a charter of rights to address grievances between the King and a group of rebel barons), which effectively came to be considered England’s Constitution. In 1649, General Oliver Cromwell (a long-time advocate of the execution of Charles I) overthrew the English monarch, disbanded Parliament, and established what was known as a protectorate over which he ruled until his death roughly four years later.
Cromwell’s arrival in the chronology of developing communal Faith systems is oddly out of place, especially considering the violent upheavals taking place amongst various factions of the ruling class)es) of the mid-1600s.Although Cromwell was more or less a revolutionary who became effectively a military dictator, unlike most military dictators, he actually had a plan to restore Parliament to its former glory as a truly representative voice of the people. Even if his efforts did not fully restore that bridge between communal Faith systems and the British ruling Authority, it is fair to suggest that he set that process in motion.
Forty years after that Revolution against the King of England, the post-Revolution English Parliament approved what stands today (although continuously modified over the centuries) as The English Bill of Rights.
A review of that document makes clear that the British Parliament had moved beyond the will of Cromwell, restructuring the Monarchy while managing to assign itself power over the King and relegating the throne to little more than a conferee … a secondary role… in managing the affairs of the British people. Within approximately seven decades, King George sitting on the throne, British Parliament would begin its final downward spiral into “absolute despotism”.
Between the Stamp Act (despite its subsequent repeal), the Townsend Act, British shots being fired on colonists in Boston – killing five – followed not long after by defiance against England at the well-known Boston Tea Party event, battles at Lexington and Concord drew a line in the sand over which the colonists refused to cross.
It is well enough known that America’s founding fathers declared independence from England on July 4th, 1776. Pieces of the text of that document have been quoted countless times over the centuries, the most popular of which is the part about throwing off “such Government,” but there is rarely much mentioned of the extent to which they allude to Natural Law, Natural Rights, Human equality, or the existence of a higher power than government – God.
At just over 1300 words, it is easy enough to spend a few minutes reading from beginning to end. There were five authors who contributed to the text (John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston), and not all of them were known to be deeply religious. They were, however, collectively, great students of History and philosophy, and it has been written that many of them leaned heavily on John Locke and Cicero for guidance in the drafting of the Declaration.
A decent argument can be made that it was Cromwell who ultimately began setting the foundation of a bridge between the days of the old-school despotic Kings and the ancestors of the new King that would follow and ultimately be overthrown by the ancestors of our founding fathers. At the very least, he certainly deserves an honorable mention for his role in giving birth to the idea that men could break free of the chains of bondage and aspire to a life of freedom and self-determination. It would not come easy, nor would it be without blood and sacrifice.
In contrast with the Cromwell narrative, de-throning Kings until he was satisfied that the right one was in place, consider that when George Washington was offered the presidency after the ratification of the US Constitution, he had already turned down the offer of being made King. It seems many of his political followers, like England, never quite understood the full gravity of the Constitution. Throughout history, humankind’s thirst for Kings is quite well-known and runs deep, but Washington did posterity a great service by declining to quench it.
Thus did America’s Founders finally cross Cromwell’s Bridge and set it alight upon reaching the American Shore. Yet, for all the sacrifice of blood and treasure that bought freedom, a nation of, by, and for the people, and a long-awaited reaffirmation of the concepts of life, Liberty, self-determination, acknowledgment of the God-given rights, and obedience to fundamental tenets of Natural Law, the strength of the foundation of the newly constructed American Bridge would not go untested for very long.
In the earliest days of the new American Nation, invigorated by victory in the war against Britain, the American people had to set about the business of figuring out how to best put to use their newfound freedom. Much the same as it was in early Mesopotamia, or the earliest days of Abraham in Canaan, or Moses centuries later, or even the first pilgrims landing in Massachusetts in 1620, in their own Promise Land of sorts, the newborn American Nation had to attend to the more mundane tasks of further securing the things that would be needed to sustain that handshake between the Governing and the Governed, and the guiding principles for that process – effectively the American Citizen Users’ Guide – was the contents of the Constitution itself.
The United States Constitution is comprised of seven articles, several of which are divided into sections, and lists each of the 27 Amendments to the original document. The first 10 of these, known as the Bill of Rights, were considered crucial in the negotiations that led up to the document being signed and ultimately ratified by a majority of the “some several States.”
As mentioned earlier, the Constitution serves as a symbolic handshake, accepted by both sides as the sole arbiter of any dispute between the Governing and the Governed; the latter freely consenting to abide by the laws the former would establish over time, and the former freely consenting to be replaced in their office should they fail to keep their end of the bargain. Even as modern-day detractors continue to argue otherwise, it is well enough agreed that the Bill of Rights was designed to enshrine the inalienable rights of the people and serve as an affirmation that these rights are derived from Natural Law and Natural Rights that come from a higher power than Government.
Another word for this “handshake” between the Governing and the Governed in the young American Nation is a “Covenant,” and Covenants have existed since there were humans. In the biblical narrative of Abraham, it is written that God made a covenant with him and, a renewed one in the Moses narrative, and one last time, through Jesus, between God and all of Humankind. In the Millennia, since those biblical narratives, every manner and form of Covenant imaginable has been tried, and with a microscopically small number of exceptions, they have all eventually been broken.
There are always great excuses, an overabundance of blaming others, and finger-pointing, but the only unbroken (and unbreakable) Covenant that this Author can think of is the one between our species and Natural law; deceit may be hardwired into our species, but Natural Law never deceives.
Author and Theologian OS Guinness, in a presentation called “The Greatest Enemy of Freedom is Freedom — Exodus and the Paradox of Freedom,” offers stunning insights into human nature and the inherently fallible constructs of relationships we establish between each other and, collectively, with the governing systems and bodies we allow ourselves to be subjected to.
The word he uses to describe these systems of human interaction is “Covenantalism,” and he suggests that there are practically limitless numbers and forms of covenants all around us in our everyday lives. With this observation from Guinness, It is reasonable to assert that the governmental Covenant struck in America between the founding Fathers and “we, The People” is one uniquely grounded in the idea that, through mutual guarded trust, the people would consent to be governed so long as the system of governance served the people.
Striking in his presentation is Guinness’s historical review of covenants between societies and Kings and between individual members of society with each other, and his emphasis on the period between the 1950s and the present day is instructive and worthy of closer inspection.
For context, Guinness observed that “Exodus is the master story of Western freedom, certainly in the English-speaking world. Exodus is the story behind the English Revolution and the American Revolution but not the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, or the Chinese Revolution.
They are much closer to Frederick Nietzsche, who, in his book “On the Genealogy of Morality,” calls Exodus the slave revolt in morality, and he wants to overcome the power of the herd and replace it with the power of the hero.” The important takeaway from this proposition, proven consistently throughout the history of humankind, is that relying on external forces (government) for personal safety, security, and survival is inherently flawed and ultimately self-destructive. That humankind, throughout its existence, consistently cycles itself through the innate desire for freedom and the desperate cries for leadership exemplifies the paradoxical nature of our species and, likewise, explains the continued dynastic rise and fall of societies throughout our history.
Guinness provides concise explanations for this dynamic, saying that there are “Three types of government – monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Each one has an ideal form and a corrupt form: Monarchy, the rule of one, corrupted into tyranny. Aristocracy, the rule of the excellent few, corrupted into an oligarchy. Democracy, the rule of the people… Of the many… Corrupted into mob rule.” He goes on to suggest that, over the last 50 years, the focus has shifted more toward an emphasis on society rather than government, and a different set of three dynamics has evolved and begun to spread.
Paraphrasing here…”The first is organic society, linked together by blood and kinship, such as a Scottish Clan or African tribe. The second and most powerful is the hierarchical society, linked by force and conquest, such as a kingdom or Empire. The third type is covenantal, linked by a freely chosen binding agreement between the people.”
Offering an additional layer of complexity, he suggests that there are yet another three societal considerations. First, covenant is a matter of freely chosen consent. Second, it is a morally binding pledge. Third and most important, it is a reciprocal responsibility of all for all, implicitly the idea of loving your neighbor as yourself.
Even the most casual observers of governing systems around the world can see that much of what Guinness tells us, generally, about the corrupted equivalents of Covenantalism can be seen everywhere we look. Monarchies have increasingly been corrupted into tyrannies, Aristocracies have been increasingly corrupted into Oligarchies, and Democracies have overwhelmingly been completely overthrown by Mob rule. I suggest that in the case of the American Nation (technically a Federal Constitutional Republic, routinely mischaracterized as a Democracy), our transition to this current “chaos by design” system of governance began, as Guinness pointed out, as far back as the 1950s, after the world victory in the so-called “war to end all wars” which clearly turned out to have been premature to suggest.
For as much as the discussion up to this point has been primarily directed toward the changing dynamic between the Governing and the Governed, which has devolved in recent decades, this doesn’t tell the whole story about the state of affairs in America today. The nature of the relationship amongst and between American citizens (the Governed) and the extent to which the dynamics of that relationship have deteriorated in recent years requires further study.
Much of the blame for the erosion and decay of our society, culture, and overall body politic can be put at the feet of willful ignorance of History, a general disdain and disregard of the fundamental tenets of Natural Law and Natural Rights, and “the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities.”
Having already suggested that, between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (especially the Bill of Rights), America’s Founders rebuilt that bridge once more between the Governing and the Governed. Remember, as well, that this euphemistic Bridge connects Communal Faith systems with ruling Authorities, each intending to peacefully coexist with the other in a symbiotic relationship between those consenting to be governed by those freely selected to Govern. Further, enshrined in the very first amendment was the promise that” Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
A fair argument can be made that, in the earliest days of the American Nation, our communal faith systems were essentially uncomplicated; there were Christians and agnostics, a small number of alternate religious practitioners, and collections of Indigenous tribes. With the promise of the first part of the First Amendment – “make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” – the individual members of society were given the promise that the government would leave the people to work out any differences between themselves.
To be sure, there were many conflicts in the early days, but the American population was under 3 million at that time, and the difficulties were local and far removed from the national body politic. In today’s America, with a population rapidly nearing 400 million, the dynamic between communal Faith systems, just in the sheer number of different ones there are in our society and culture, has grown increasingly hostile and adversarial. It is difficult enough to contend with the tattering edges of our social fabric caused by hostilities between communal faith systems, but the notion that some of these factions are engaging the Governing, seeking assistance in shutting down other communal faith systems with which they disagree, is having some amount of success. This is in direct conflict with the promise in our Constitution, which guaranteed that communal faith systems were off limits to Congressional interference.
While it is true that the world has vastly changed since the days of 1776, now more technically advanced than could have ever been imagined back then, has it gotten better? It is obvious that the worlds of faith and belief systems have dramatically grown and expanded, but the idea that some of these are being protected by a supposedly neutral ruling Authority to the benefit of some while others are being vilified, ostracized, or marginalized with total disregard for the cost to those practicing them is anathema to everything our Constitution affirms, equally, to every member of society.
The persecution of Judaism and Christianity has been around since there have been Jewish and Christian practitioners, but the Constitution promises such treatment would end at America’s shores. No such Government-sponsored persecution exists against the third of the major organized religions, the Muslim faithful, and neither should there be any such treatment of any believer of any sort based on others’ animosity toward things with which they might not personally agree. America’s current ruling Authority, especially over the course of the early 2020s- and its management of the COVID-19 pandemic response- might be the most recent example of selective interference in the First Amendment rights of selected groups of American citizens, but it is certainly not the only example.
In many other societies around the world, the natural rights of individual freedom and self-determination, inherent natural human rights, are not universally affirmed. In free societies, as they are in America or used to be until recent decades, these rights were affirmed to be equally available to every citizen and thereby equally upheld and defended by the “Proper Laws” of our governing system(s).
By design, the fabric of our society and its various and disparate communal Faith and Belief subcultures is stitched together precisely because of the promise of peaceful coexistence amongst and between fellow citizens, the commitment to a shared communal faith in the “idea” of America, and a mutual commitment to maintain and defend her was intended to be the tie that bound all of us together. Such has been the American Covenant for two and a half centuries, but our National “Collective” agreement between the governing and the governed, and between the different collectives of faith and belief systems with each other, has been broken.
Among us today, living side by side, our society and culture are made all the richer and more diverse by the presence of everything from Atheists and Agnostics, Buddhists and Transcendentalists, Nudists and Naturalists, Spiritualists and Faith Healers, Wickens and Fortune Tellers, Shamans, Witch Doctors, Satanists, Vodouists, and everything imaginable in between. Why? Because that is what freedom and self-determination is all about.
Despite there being every possibility of conflict between some of these collectives, the right to be a member of one or more of them is assured in our Constitution and defended by our proper law(s). Peace is kept between us because we all respect that each of us is guaranteed, equally, to exercise these rights so long as doing so does not infringe on the rights of others to do likewise. To put a finer point on this, consider the quote attributed to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (among others), who once famously said, offering a Layman’s definition of Freedom, that “your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.”
The core principles of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights intended to secure our natural rights to personal freedom and self-determination. Over the first two centuries, our imperfect Union worked steadfastly to continuously improve at making good on this promise. Over the course of the past half-century, however, the American equality dynamic has dramatically shifted to more of a hierarchical approach, in practice, to our system of governance. The obvious problem with this way of thinking is that a select few held in higher regard above others today will soon enough find themselves loathed and reviled at some point in the future.
Referring back to the earlier mention of OS Guinness, and his observations on American Covenantalism, he referenced Alexis de Tocqueville, who was amazed to see, in America, that the spirit of Liberty and the spirit of freedom went hand in hand and faith and freedom supported each other. Guinness reminds us that – as history has routinely shown – this should never be taken for granted because such Covenants can be easily corrupted into oppression. Guinness warned that, as we have witnessed in recent decades because humans don’t keep promises well, it doesn’t take much for promises to be broken and oppression to replace freedom.
The surest signs that Liberty and Freedom have been corrupted, if one looks closely enough, are all around us. As Guinness and others have alluded to over the millennia of history, wherever power over others is threatened, the corrupt will, by force, if necessary, exact every means of punishment against that perceived threat until it has been conquered and subjugated. As mentioned in the introduction, ” when threatened with losing the ability to defend themselves against violence and harm”, the American people were pushed into a corner by a despotic king and corrupt Parliament and given no choice but to engage in armed revolt. Such a reaction, in today’s America at least, would be counterproductive; keep in mind that our sitting president has dared us to try, reminding us that he had all the F-16s.
Wiser (and cooler) heads would be well served by taking pause, reflecting, and trying to understand the root cause(s) of how it came to be that our freely chosen ruling Authority abandoned its commitment to that handshake and now dares the consenting governed to hold them accountable (through our promised arbiter of all differences) for thumbing their nose at the rights of the governed.
It is my contention that, in the Darwinian context, humankind’s unquenchable thirst for siege and conquest can never be sufficiently slaked because it is innate in the human species, and we have an inherently limitless capacity for it. The only difference between those who lived at the dawn of man and those of us living today is our so-called “culturally refined “and “socially enlightened” ability to rationalize the death, destruction, and elimination of those perceived to be weaker and inferior and, therefore, worthy of subjugation and enslavement.
One need look no further than the first three generations, give or take, of America’s own National evolution and her campaigns of siege, conquest, and subjugation. Nor will I attempt to twist myself into knots over any effort to inject any sort of “American Nation apologia” here regarding the obvious parallels between Joshua’s re-taking of the Promised Land and America’s taking of its own Promised Land, inasmuch as our modern-day history revisionists strive to weaponize the actions of our founders, we must remind ourselves that, fundamentally, Homo Sapiens continue to exist today singly because of our continued submission to the Darwinian primal imperatives of security, sustenance, and reproduction.
Consider the historical events of the infant American Nation in the early years after the Constitution and Bill of Rights had been codified on paper and emblazoned in the hearts and minds of her people. 12 years after George Washington was sworn in, we bought the Louisiana territories from the French, and 5 years later, we abolished the Atlantic slave trade. 4 years after that, we were at war with Britain again, and this conflict would last three years. Over the next 40 years, we fought the resistance of the indigenous peoples, expanded our presence across the territories, bought a huge swath of Mexican land, added stars to the National flag, and brought in waves of immigrants from other countries, all of whom wanted nothing more than a better life in a land of promise that guaranteed individual freedom and liberty and the opportunity to pursue their own flavors of happiness.
Yet, for all the great, as well as all the accompanying, but necessary, evil that occurred during the first 70 years of our history, as it has been throughout the history of humankind, it was inevitable for our young Nation to lose sight of the elder wisdom of our forefathers and ignore the warnings they handed down to us generations earlier. We had forgotten the value of adequately sustaining thorough and well-reasoned reflection and most honest and vigorous debates. Within “only” 70 years or so of gaining our freedom and independence, we had cast off or brushed aside the stark and stern warnings of Hamilton and others about the delicate balance that must be fervently and forcefully maintained between the competing interests of Federalism and Anti-Federalism.
The Founders understood, having experienced it themselves, the effects of tyrannical oppression by the central monarchy and the elite ruling classes on the lives, liberties, and freedoms of the individual. So, too, did they recognize, in the interest of assuring peaceful coexistence with coequality amongst and between the citizenry, that a balance between Central Authority and individual sovereignty and self-determination must be found and fiercely defended.
Further, they had warned us against depending “on accident and force for our political constitutions” and implored us to be wary of “views, passions, and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.” As well, while celebrating the idea that this nation must surely have been designed by Providence, in Federalist No. 2, they forcefully insisted that we “should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties” while, in Federalist No. 6, they made soberly clear the very real probability that, given Mankind’s propensity for “ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious” behavior, only an efficiently run, minimally-invasive, and judiciously managed government would prevent its citizenry from being “subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities.”
Nonetheless, 73 years after Hamilton published this warning, on December 20, 1860, South Carolina decided to ignore him and choose, instead, to secede from the union and prove Hamilton correct on the dangers to The Republic of dissension between the states and, on April 12, 1861, the first shots were exchanged between the Confederate States of America and the United States of America, and by the time the smoke had cleared, more than 600,000 lives had been lost for essentially all of the reasons Hamilton had anticipated and implored us to, in all things and at all costs show restraint for the sake and safety of the Republic.
Volumes have been written, after the fact, about the history, costs, and consequences of that war. Letters written by Rebel and Union Soldiers, have been published, and movies have been made about the lives of soldiers and generals alike, along with the many stories about the freed slaves and their courage and commitment to being part of a renewed and revitalized Nation, set free from the darkness and evil of slavery, and redoubled in their commitment collectively – to our nation’s founding principles “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and Abraham Lincoln will be forever recognized as the one brave man that made it all happen.
Something else happened as a result of the Civil War, however, which is widely acknowledged yet seemingly -intentionally downplayed and brushed aside; the balance of power between the Federal government and the “some several states” was, more or less, obliterated and the 10th Amendment to the Constitution was effectively relegated to the ash heap of National inconveniences contained in America’s Bill of Rights. This truth was little more than a minor detail in the early days after the war, but it would eventually give rise to what ultimately became America’s modern-day Federal largesse that now symbolizes the very Leviathan that Hobbes anticipated in 1651 and Burke warned against around the time we declared independence from the King.
The American Nation in front of us, at the time of this writing, bears very little resemblance to either the one our Founders envisioned two and a half centuries ago, or the one Abraham Lincoln and his successors stood back up on its feet after the Civil War.
The Executive and Judicial branches are under relentless siege, both directly and indirectly, by the Legislative branch. Also, the Legislative branch has, by and large, usurped the powers of both the sovereign Individual and the “some several States” while allowing itself to be co-opted and corrupted by external special interests and an unfettered stream of cash and privilege(that third rail mentioned in the first part of this pamphlet) that enriches Congressional members and inevitably comes at the expense of the very people they were elected to represent.
Arguably worst of all, thanks to our technological advances since the days of Lincoln, we find ourselves overrun by an un-elected Oligarchy comprised of obscenely powerful and wealthy Corporatists and monopolistic Media Enterprises and Communications elites, which is effectively more powerful than the Federal government and has, more or less, taken control of our freedoms and our liberties and our ability to freely and openly engage the National conversation.
We find ourselves today living under the increasingly tyrannical thumb (and whimsy) of the one branch of government our founders designed explicitly to protect us from ever indulging in the whimsy of aspiring to a monarchical system of rule. Also, it seems breathlessly unthinkable that we could have ever allowed our elected representatives to corrupt themselves and our entire system of representative governance only to return us to the days of the corrupt British Parliament from which we demanded separation and declared our independence. All the same, here we are.
Readers are invited, at this juncture, to conduct a little thought experiment and consider the parallels and contrasts between the days of the Israelites begging for a king, the Founders sacrificing their lives and their livelihoods to be rid of theirs, and the modern-era oligarchy that has coronated itself as some sort of ruling Authority over every aspect of our lives, ostensibly because they presume to know better how we should conduct our lives than we could ever determine ourselves if left to our own device(s). As such, I contend that if these simultaneously divergent and competing dynamics are left unchecked, humankind’s social, cultural, and moral fabric will soon enough become irreparably torn and ultimately shredded into tattered pieces.
To better understand how we have gotten to this point in the relationship between the Sovereign Individual and the American ruling Authority, it would be instructive for readers to consider one particular faith and belief system rarely mentioned by name despite being arguably at the center of our national disunion, upheaval, and dissension: Political Faith.
Attempting to define “political faith” in simple terms is difficult because, generically, these words are mutually exclusive (especially around the Thanksgiving table), and when combined, they form somewhat of an oxymoron. The word “political” is straightforward enough. It is generically defined as “relating to the government or the public affairs of a country.”
The “faith” part of this expression is admittedly troubling for some, depending on an individual’s particular belief system, but in this context, Faith isn’t exclusively a God vs. no God proposition; there are as many different types of faith as there are people open to the idea that it is at least possible they are little more than microscopic upstarts in a vast, incomprehensible eternity and it is this humility, and lack thereof, that forms the nexus of modern Humanity’s Faith dichotomy.
For my purposes here, “faith” simply means a belief and trust in something for which you can show no physical proof but for which you are willing to sacrifice your lives and your livelihoods to uphold and defend. Putting these two words together, then, brings us to this idea of believing in a political system, placing your faith in politicians and thought leaders, and trusting them to lead the “faithful” down a prescribed path toward some shared goal or aspiration.
As mentioned earlier, the American nation is comprised of many different faith and belief systems (“collectives”), and these social constructs date back to the earliest days of our species settling in one place, building sedentary communities, and, over time, establishing hierarchical societies. It is fair to suggest that America, as a nation, is one large Collective – the American people – broken up into smaller collectives, each comprised of like-minded members. Because “the sovereign individual” is compelled by Natural Law and Human Nature (as fundamentally social creatures) to socialize, further inquiry is necessary in order to understand that previously described human paradox and the extent to which it has been infected by the decaying nature of collectivism over the past five decades or so.
Beginning with the Sovereign Individual, the core element of any Collective, each of us holds to principles inherent in our species that require us to be independent and self-reliant. Many studies have been conducted over the years attempting to understand the human psyche. Some of these have suggested that each individual has four unique “selves,” and although plausible arguments are out there to suggest this theory has merit and is worthy of your time to look into more deeply, there is certainly the possibility that there may be more or less. I won’t presume to be smarter than the experts, but for the purposes of looking at the fundamental Individual, as S/He relates to the Collectivists, let us focus on the two most important ones: the public self and the Private self.
As it has been since we first stood upright in Africa and later began to establish sedentary communities, the Individual is comprised of two very distinct yet disparate features, each of which fluctuates in its degree of power over the other: the primal and compelling need to socialize, and the oft-times overwhelming yearnings for solitude and isolation. And, as much as we like our peace and quiet, it is inevitable that, sooner or later, we will seek out human contact.
On a primal level, it is incumbent upon us to seek out others in order to sustain the species, but because we are inherently social creatures, we are, by nature, compelled to interact with one another. We share stories about our experiences, we listen to the stories of others, we offer ideas to each other, we learn from each other, and we form or carry forward our opinions about the matters at hand. Also, some of us teach, some of us learn, and all of us improve, hopefully, our “human condition” while at least trying to help others improve theirs.
And yet, at those moments when we take the risk and step outside of our “Private self” bubbles and present our “Public self” personas to our fellow homo sapiens, depending on our unique sets of styles and personality traits and how these are perceived by others, we present as Predator/Prey (our Primal natures) or Leader/Follower (our social natures). Once we are effectively “sized up” by the group and categorized accordingly by its leadership, we are relegated to this or that, oftentimes arbitrarily decided, position in the hierarchy of the collective.
Over the hundreds of thousands of years that we have wandered the globe upright and aimless, our free will has always served as our traveling companion, and our Free Will’s endless struggle between the need to socialize and yearning for solitude and isolation has always determined our ultimate destination.
Collectivism, on the other hand, holds to the principle that the good of the group is prioritized over the interests and priorities of the individual, making it easy enough to recognize the inherent conflict in such a social arrangement. Further, a fair-minded assessment of the Individual and where he/she sits in the social and cultural “food chain” of modern-day American society makes clear how it has become that our individual rights of speech, expression, and especially dissent, have been under such relentless attack in recent decades.
To be sure, the existence of the Collective in a civilized society serves the fundamental survival imperative of each Individual member… Strength in numbers and all that… Thus, we will be naturally drawn to that Collective, which promises to best fulfill our wants, needs, and aspirations. But when the leadership of the Collective allows itself to be corrupted by personal ambition to ends that countermand the imperative(s) of some or all Individual members, the usual result is the collapse of the entire system and subsequent chaos, confrontation, and sometimes violent disorder and active celebration of disobedience of the founding norms, principles, and practices that served to form the Collective at its inception.
A strong case can be made that the American Collective has reached that point of collapse and has descended into chaos, confrontation, and violent disorder, as well as an active celebration of disobedience to the founding norms, principles, and practices that served to form the American Collective at its inception. Just as it had been in 1860, when the South chose to ignore the warnings of the founders, in many ways, we are right back where we started, relying on accident and force for our political constitutions, giving in to our violent propensities, and have turned against each other and are now fighting it out on the streets all around the country… As our ruling Authority sits back and watches it all unfold, with no attempt to make the peace and restore order.
In today’s America, it cannot be argued whether or not our ruling Authority holds anymore to the same principles as those agreed upon at our founding. It does not. Consider the preamble to the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Our Union is less perfect today than it was when this document was signed; our system of justice is being weaponized against select elements of American Society, domestic tranquility is effectively non-existent, our common defense has been defunded, and prosecutors are increasingly releasing criminals back on to the streets without holding them accountable for their crimes, our general welfare is under constant assault, the blessings of our Liberty are less secure than they have ever been, and this state of American affairs is what we are currently passing on to our posterity.
Returning once more to OS Guinness, leaning on the title of his presentation “The Enemy Of Freedom Is Freedom, “I invite readers to consider the “other” part of the First Amendment, which affirms the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” because of the extent to which this has been abused in recent decades. While acknowledging that protests are a crucial part of a free Society, and there have been plenty throughout our history, I suggest that much of the blame for the decay of modern American society, especially since the rise of the so-called” paid professional protester”, can be laid directly at their feet.
I suggest as much because, where protests used to be an expression of anger and frustration in response to a perceived injustice, we have evolved—I assert, since the 1960s—into acts of violent retribution by the few to force change upon the many against their will.
Where it has once been MLK and the movement that peaceably assembled “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” on matters of racial equality, in that case, it has become, since his assassination, a submission “to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities” that is being employed as the means by which many of these activists collectives are demanding a redress of their grievances.
Putting it in the simplest of terms, I suggest that, in a civilized society governed collectively by a system of laws blindly enforced equally across the span of every member of that Society, there can be no peaceably assembled petition for a redress of grievances where participants and bystanders alike are being beaten or killed, their homes and storefronts looted and burned, and our children being shot by stray bullets; no socio-political change can long survive wherever it is derived from the business end of a loaded gun.
This brings us back to Guinness’s suggestion that freedom, corrupted in modern America now into mob rule, has effectively become its own worst enemy. This is not to suggest that Freedom must now be restricted and constrained to bring mob rule to heel, but it does suggest that the ruling Authority must be brought to heel and made to enforce the many existing laws we already have so that we might once again “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” It’s what we hired them to do, and as the American citizen is footing the bill for everything they were hired to do, we have – or we were at least once promised that we had – the ultimate power to remove them from our service and bring in those who are willing to do the job we pay them to do.
With all that has been put forward thus far, the final yet arguably most critical element of this inspection of matters concerning the Governed, it is crucial that readers recognize the damage being done by our ruling Authority and that “third rail” discussed at length in the previous section, to the Cornerstone of any civilized Society: the core family unit. In the strongest of terms, I assert that the greatest threat to the long-term survival of our entire species is the ongoing assault, disruption, interference, and slow death decay of the family unit. And, even as this might seem to be stating the obvious, it cannot be understated to suggest our own ruling Authority is playing an active role in encouraging the dismantling of the core family unit.
From the earliest times in the history of our species, once that first mating pair conceived, carried, delivered, and raised to maturity their first posterity, they had given our species the greatest gift- the promise of a future generation to come, and all that might come from that promise. Although those first children might have come 300,000 years ago, and subsequent Generations have surely gifted our species with scientific, technological, and medical advances to further improve our chances of a continued existence, it is (and always will be) the child that must be born, and the family unit that must sustain and protect, educate and inspire our posterity that can at least attempt to guarantee the continued existence of our species.
How, dear reader, are we doing with our children and our family units as of 2024?
Marriage rates have fallen by more than 50% since 1970. The divorce rate has been coming down from its high in 1976, but don’t be misled; buried in this statistic is the reality that fewer people are getting married. The US birth rate was the lowest it had ever been a year ago (2023), and over a million pregnancies were terminated in 2023, the highest number in over a decade. Each of these statistics is associated with actions people have every right to engage in, not only because of our inherent rights to Free Will and self-determination but also under our founding documents that Affirm the rights we were born with in accordance with Natural Law and not conferred upon us by the laws of men.
A child should be the greatest expression of love and innocence. He or she should be given every opportunity to live, thrive, and experience the love of their parents, the security of their family, and the joy and wonder of the world around them that they will grow into and, hopefully, make a little better for them having been a part of it.
In our world today, the numbers of our most precious gift to humanity are deprived of many of these simplest pleasures, and far too many of them do not survive their surroundings long enough to reach adult maturity. Right here in America, none of the following things should ever happen:
A Pew research study in 2010 tells us that 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse. Self-report studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident. During a one-year period, 16% of youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized, and over the course of their lifetime, 28% of U.S. youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized. Further, Children are most vulnerable to child sexual assault between the ages of 7 and 13. , And according to a 2003 National Institute of Justice report, 3 out of 4 adolescents who have been sexually assaulted were victimized by someone they knew well.
As troubling as these statistics certainly are, the quality of life for our most precious gift, our children, is arguably the worst that it has ever been. In addition to the cruelty of starvation and disease and fighting for their lives in war-torn countries around the world (and even our own American city streets), many of the so-called privileged Nations are seeing dramatic increases in the sexualization of our children, their sexual abuse, and human trafficking of them, and even the purchase and sale of them into a lifetime of slavery, sexual or otherwise.
Making matters worse, here in America and across a widening span of other Western Nations, our children are being increasingly pressured (even in classrooms of government-funded schools) to either feel angry or apologetic about the color of the skin they were born with. So, too, are they increasingly being encouraged, long before they reach the age of biological sexual maturity, to reject their gender and, chemically or surgically – and irreparably – alter it. At the same time, our ruling Authority, both federally and at the state and local level, so sure of their superior wisdom on matters of raising children, are increasingly removing children from their homes and their families wherever the parents try to sustain and protect, educate and inspire them and impart their better long-term wisdom to their own posterity as they fight to keep their own parental rights that were not granted by governments but affirmed by the laws of nature.
As true as it is that “Rome was not built in a day”, neither was the Egyptian, Greek, Russian, Chinese, United Kingdom, Persian, Ottoman, and now – in our turn – the American Empires. Importantly, each of these fell – or began its respective collapse – in little more than a generation. Reminding readers that, statistically, dynasties and Empires have an approximate three Century shelf life, America finds herself nearing that number as well. And, as it has been throughout history that individual sovereignty ebbs and flows according to the governing systems it must endure, the rising power of globalism around the world threatens not only the sovereignty of the individual but the sovereignty of all Nations around the globe. I will make that case in the closing section of this pamphlet.
