Dream On

Posted by Frankly Francis on June 8, 2010 under Social Issues/Politics | 2 Comments to Read

“There are those who would say that the liberation of humanity,

the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream.

They are right. It is the American dream”

– Archibald McLeish

I whole heartedly buy into that, but this is not a political dialogue.  I am so weary of the professional politicians and their political parties.  Weary to the bone.

This is me, as an individual talking to you, as an individual, about the direction that our lives could and should take as we revolve around the sun together.

Our Founding Fathers were not just revolutionaries in their fight for independence from England – they were more revolutionary in their view of people and the possibilities of what human life could be under the inalienable natural laws of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

They thought that we could personally and socially become something better through individual freedom, coupled with personal responsibility.  The Declaration of Independence is a remarkable document in this regard.  And the philosophy extolled to maximize society by maximizing the individual is truly radical in its historical context.

The world watched (with motives on both sides of the coin) as “The Noble Experiment” of the American Republic unfolded.

As America prospered, history is replete with the failures of governments built around the collective good.  Fascism, communism, totalitarianism, and socialism have all either outright failed or have not been able to match what we have done in the good old US of A.  Centralized governments have not made an impressive case for themselves in terms of results.

That is because we are not an ant colony.  We are humans.  Pardon the Star Trek reference, but we are not yet Borg.  And resistance is not necessarily futile.  Frankly Francis says, “Fight the Power!”

We are each endowed with our own unique character and abilities.  I celebrate that.

I believe that society should be based around individual freedom.  In fact, I would go so far as to assert that the primary purpose of society is to ensure the rights and liberty of the individual.

From my point of view, we have gone astray in two different ways:

The first is that we, the people, have allowed government to exceed its authority.  Enough said on that.

The second is that we continue to make efforts to legislate morality, or at the very least, attempt to impose our own personal beliefs on the life style choices that others live by.

Tyranny of the Majority oppresses people.  Oppression always produces less, never more.

This results in some pretty serious blowback, as in how alcohol prohibition gave us the lasting gift of major organized crime or how the manipulated fear of Commies in our midst, placed upon us through McCarthyism, resulted in untold loss of art, creativity and productivity.

And if we go further back, do you remember the murders perpetrated by the good citizens of Salem?

H.L. Mencken said that Puritanism is “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

Amen, Brother Mencken.

Health Nazis continue in their vigilant quest to eliminate cigarettes, while they work on weight standards, which will soon be followed by their fitness standards, because they somehow know better than the rest of us how we should each live our lives.

Of course, this could inevitably lead to the right amount of time spent watching TV or on the Internet…all to be appropriately taxed, of course.  And never mind that those taxes will never be used to help curb the supposed infraction of proper living – those taxes paid for by the sinners actually reduce the taxes that the moral busybodies would otherwise pay.

If we can’t legislate morality in others, we try to do it through taxation, through so called “Sin Taxes.”  We should immediately stop trying to socially manipulate others through taxation.  That is tyranny in its worst form.

And here, I would remind you of the words of C.S. Lewis, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.”

For myself, I believe that humankind will socially evolve (if we don’t kill each other first) along the ideas that this nation was founded upon…eventually.  America is on the opposite course right now and it may well be too late to do anything about it.

But if not our America, it will be another culture in the future, this I know in my heart.

In closing, the words of John Lennon, “You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.  I hope some day you’ll join me, and the world will live as one.”

And what a world that will be.

Frankly,

Francis