Dear Friends,
It seems to me, tyranny seeks to change the people to suit the State, free States seek to change the State to suit the people. Tyrants presume wisdom to know what is best for humanity, and with that hubris that necessarily comes with such presumption, they dread what would happen to them if someone else took over their power. In free states however, the state simply forms a framework for the markets, society and culture to work. It doesn’t take charge of any facet of society that it doesn’t belong in. The free state does not presume to know what’s best, it simply provides standards as a structure for human society to grow on, while the oppressive state, wants to not only provide the structure, but everything else as well, to protect their power. To that end the dictatorship must change the very essence of humanity, evolve us to something different, to become socially aware, ubermensch or whatever the mastermind connives the name to be. This is the fundimental difference between liberty and tyranny, the one respects who and what we are as human beings while the other must change who and what we are to something else.
Karl Marx argued in many of his writings that people will evolve out of our individual selves into species self. Once the revolution happens and the people live communally we will forget the individual self that so alienates us from others, and embrace our species self, that will end our alienation from each other and our work. Never mind, almost everything Marx said is provably wrong, the immense human suffering that has been committed in the name of communism, or that every “revolution” has been led by the intelligentsia and soldiered by the peasants, never the workers, think of the presumption of this as a philosophy. That fellow human beings be forced by violence, (what else is a revolution but violence), and then given such little respect, we are to be the lab rats in an experiment in human evolution? Can presumption possibly be raised to a higher level than that?
The example of the United States serves to show the other side of the coin. For most of it’s existance the US has been a place where the individual has been allowed to do his or her thing. The nation was founded on the concept of maximum liberty. The founders tried mightily to put in place a system of government that would protect the rights, priviliges and property of it’s citizens. This system has yeilded some pretty startling results. There has never been a place in the annuls of human history or lore, including the tales of Atlantis, where a country brought about such seismic change to the standard of living of people the World over, led science to such heights, achieved such measures of efficiency in the production of the goods of humanity, restored a people to liberty then left, nor reached the Moon. That the US is turning away from it’s heritage of liberty and freedom for the individual, and to the oppression of a state that seeks to become everything, will be the verfying counter experiment. Where we change the fundamentals to the opposite so the outcome reverses fundamentally as well.
If those who have such egos and presumption actually had faith in their ideas they wouldn’t have to change the essence of who and what we are. It is the nagging uncertainty, that produces a disquiet in their hearts, that forces the would be oppressor to seek to change the very nature of what it is to be human. They know in their hearts that they are not God but have the hubris to presume to supersede him. The leader, senator or government that has humility will not try to force change through oppressive control. The state that is free will have a great diversity of people, busy working away at whatever each finds the most rewarding, or whatever he or she falls into. Humility gives a leader the self assured tranquility to trust that liberty is truly the best policy, while presumptuous power corrodes the oppressors’ self assuredness and sense of safety, until they go insane and hang their uncle.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
