Human Sense: Pt. II – On The Governed, Section II

No socio-political change can long survive wherever it is derived from the business end of a loaded gun.

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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 Goverment-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 more rich and 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 itself 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. As well, 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 their 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.