The Tyranny of Utopia
by Mark Levin
Tyranny,
broadly defined, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and de-legitimize
his nature. Political utopianism is
tyranny disguised as desirable, workable, and even a paradisiacal governing
ideology. There are, of course,
unlimited utopian constructs, for the mind is capable of infinite
fantasies. But there are common
themes. The fantasies take the form of
grand social plans or experiments, the impracticability and impossibility of
which, in small ways and large, lead inevitably to the individual's
subjugation.
Karl
Popper, a philosopher who eloquently deconstructed the false assumptions and
scientific absurdities of utopianism, arguing that it is totalitarian in form
and substance, observed that "any social science which does not teach the
impossibility of rational social construction is entirely blind to the most
important facts of social life, and must overlook the only social laws of real
validity and of real importance. Social
sciences seeking to provide a background for social engineering cannot,
therefore, be true descriptions of social facts. They are impossible in themselves." Popper reasoned that being unable to make
detailed or precise sociological predictions, long-term forecasts of great
sweep and significance not only are intended to compensate for utopian's
shortcomings (paradise cannot be delivered overnight) but are the only
forecasts considered worth pursuing. (Although Popper differentiated between
"piecemeal social engineering" and "utopian social
engineering," it requires us to ignore history, or to make a leap of
unfounded faith, in order to suggest that once unleashed, the social engineers
will not become addicted to their power; and Popper could never enunciate a
practical solution.)
Utopianism
is irrational in theory and practice, for it disregards or attempts to control
the planned and unplanned complexity of the individual, his nature, and mankind
generally. It dismisses, rejects, or
perverts the teachings and knowledge that have come before--that is, man's
historical, cultural, and social experience and development. Indeed, utopianism seeks to break what the
hugely influential eighteenth century British statesman and philosopher Edmund
Burke argued was the societal continuum "between those who are living and
those who are dead and those who are to be born." Eric Hoffer, a social thinker renowned for
his observations about fanaticism and mass movements, commented that "for
men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be
intensely discontented and yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling
that by possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader, or some new
technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and
potentialities for the future... They must be wholly ignorant of the
difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is, therefore, a handicap."
Utopianism
substitutes glorious predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge,
science, reason, and experience while laying claim to them all. Yet there is nothing new in deception
disguised as hope and nothing original in abstraction framed as progress. A heavenly society is said to be within reach
if only the individual will surrender more of his liberty and his being for the
general good, meaning the "good" as prescribed by the state's
masterminds who luxuriate in abysmal ignorance and limitless malevolence. If the individual refuses, he will be
tormented and ultimately coerced into compliance, for conformity is essential--often
even to the point of a clownish banality of attire in order to display
conspicuous public fidelity to the official doctrine of selflessness. Indeed, nothing good can come from self-interest,
which is condemned and ridiculed as morally indefensible and empty. Self-interest becomes criminalized in many
ways, large and small. Through
persuasion, deceit, and coercion, the individual must be stripped of his
identity and subordinated to the state.
He must abandon his own ambitions for the ambitions of the state. He must become reliant on and fearful of the
state. His first duty must be to the
state--not to family, community, or faith, all of which challenge the authority
and supremacy of the state. Once
dispirited, the individual can be molded by the state with endless social
experiments and lifestyle calibrations.
Especially
threatening, therefore, are the industrious, independent, and successful, for
they demonstrate what is actually possible under current societal conditions--achievement,
happiness, and fulfillment--thereby contradicting and endangering the utopian
campaign against what was or what is.
Prosperity cannot exist without freedom and there is nothing more
terrifying to utopian masterminds than the idea of people free to pursue their
own lives. The individual must either be
co-opted and turned into a useful contributor to or advocate for the state, or
he must be neutralized by sabotage or other means. Indeed, his contribution to society must be
downplayed, dismissed, or denounced, unless the contribution is directed by the
state and involves self-sacrifice for the utopian cause.
In a
somewhat different context, although relatable here, the extraordinary French
historian and prescient political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville explained,
"When the traces of individual action upon nations are lost, it often
happens that you see the world without the impelling force being evident. As it becomes extremely difficult to discern
and analyze the reasons that, acting separately on the will of each member of
the community, concur in the end to produce movement in the whole mass, men are
led to believe that their movement is involuntary and that societies
unconsciously obey some superior force ruling over them. But even when the general fact that governs
the private volition of all individuals is supposed to be discovered upon the
earth, the principle of human free-will is not made certain. A cause sufficiently extensive to affect
millions of men at once and sufficiently strong to bend them all together in
the same direction may well seem irresistible, having seen that mankind do
yield to it, the mind is close upon the inference that mankind cannot resist
it." Tocqueville was writing about
religion, but his observation assuredly applies to utopian tyranny whose
constructs are identical to religious dogma such as an infallible leader whose
pronouncements cannot be questioned by heretics who will, in many cases, be put
to death. Communism's utopia is far from
godless; its deity is composed of its masterminds--they worship themselves. Similarly narcissistic utopian elitists, indulging
their boundless conceit, have no doubt that they possess the divine power to
control the climate, just as the apocryphal King Canute would turn back the
tide.
Utopianism
also attempts to shape and to dominate the individual by doing two things at
once: it strips him of his uniqueness, making him indistinguishable from the
multitudes that form what is commonly referred to as "the masses,"
but it simultaneously assigns to him a group identity based on race, ethnicity,
gender, age, income, etc., to highlight differences within the masses. It then exacerbates old rivalries and
disputes or it incites new ones. This
way it can speak to the well-being of "the people" as a whole while
dividing them against themselves, thereby stampeding them in one direction or
another as necessary to collapse the existing society or to rule over the new
one.
Where
utopianism is advanced through gradualism rather than revolution, albeit steady
and persistent as in democratic societies, it can deceive and disarm an
unsuspecting population, which is largely content and passive. It is sold as reforming and improving the
existing society's imperfections and weaknesses without imperiling its basic
nature--"We can do better!"
Under these conditions, it is mostly ignored, dismissed, or tolerated by
much of the citizenry and celebrated by some.
Transformation is deemed innocuous, well-intentioned, and perhaps
constructive but not a dangerous trespass on fundamental liberties. Tocqueville observed, "By this system
the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their
master and then relapse into it again..
A great many persons...are quite contented with this sort of compromise
between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they
think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they
have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large..."
Utopianism
also finds a receptive audience among society's disenchanted, disaffected,
dissatisfied, and maladjusted who are unwilling or unable to assume
responsibility for their own real or perceived conditions but instead blame
their surroundings, "the system," and others. They are lured by the false hopes and
promises of utopian transformation and the criticisms of existing society, to
which their connection is tentative or nonexistent. Improving the malcontent's lot becomes linked
to the utopian cause. Moreover,
disparaging and diminishing the successful and the accomplished becomes an
essential tactic. No one should be
better than anyone else, regardless of the merits or value of his
contributions. By exploiting human
frailties, frustrations, jealousies, and inequities, a sense of meaning and
self-worth is created in the malcontent's otherwise unhappy and directionless
life. Simply put, equality is
misery--that is, equality of result or conformity--is advanced as a just, fair,
and virtuous undertaking. Liberty, therefore, is
considered inherently immoral, except where it avails equality. So no matter how hard you work, you will have
no more; no matter how little you do, you will have no less. As productivity is therefore punished, living
standards decline and the gulags become populated--all in the name of "the
people."
Equality,
in this sense, is a form of radical egalitarianism that has long been the
subject of grave concern by advocates of liberty. Tocqueville pointed out that in democracies,
the dangers of misapplied equality are not perceived until it is too late. "The evils that extreme equality may
produce are slowly disclosed; they creep gradually into the social frame; they
are seen only at intervals; and at the moment at which they become most
violent, habit causes them to no longer be felt." Among the leading classical liberal
philosophers and free-market economists, Friedrich Hayek wrote, "Equality
of the general rules of laws and conduct...is the only kind of equality
conducive to liberty and the only equality which we can secure without
destroying liberty. Not only has liberty
nothing to do with any sort of equality, but it is even bound to produce
inequality in many respects. This is the
necessary result and part of the justification of individual liberty: if the result of individual liberty did not
demonstrate that some manners of living are more successful than others, much
of the case for it would vanish."
Thus, while radical egalitarianism encompasses economic equality, it
more broadly involves prostrating the individual.
Equality,
as understood by the American Founders, is the natural right of every
individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the
property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before
a just law. Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man
is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just
society, imperfect. Otherwise, inequality
is the natural state of man in the sense that each individual is born unique in
all his human characteristics.
Therefore, equality and inequality, properly comprehended, are both
engines of liberty.
Still, in
democracies, the attraction of equality too often outweighs the appeal of
liberty, even though individuals are able to flourish more in democracies than
in other societies. Liberty's wonders and permeance can be subtle
and ambiguous and, therefore, unnoticed and underappreciated. Despite its infinite benefits, for many,
liberty is elusive--for one must look below the surface to identify it. Conversely, equality can be more transparent
at surface levels. It is posited as a
far-off concept of human perfectibility but it is also delivered in bits and
pieces, or at least appears to be, in daily life. It usually takes the form of material
"rights" delivered to the individual by the state. Consequently, equality and liberty are both subjects
of utopian demagoguery and manipulation.
Liberty is
encouraged if its end is equality. Liberty, by itself, is
not.
Equality is
also disguised as or confused with popular sovereignty--that is, the conflation
of "the people's will" with egalitarian campaigns, such as
"social justice," "environmental justice," "immigrant
rights," etc. In essence, then,
true democracy cannot be achieved unless society is reorganized around the
demands of disparate and endless claimants.
In due course, such a society becomes chaotic and balkanized. As it dissolves and crises build, the stage
is set for escalating coercion and repression.
Utopianism's
authority also knows no definable limits.
How could it? If they exist, what
are they? Radical egalitarianism or the
perfectibility of mankind is an ongoing process of individual and societal
transformation that must cast off the limits of history, tradition, and
experience for that which is said to be necessary, novel, progressive, and
inevitable. Ironically, inconvenient
facts and evidence must be rejected or manipulated, as must the very nature of
man, for utopianism is a fantasy that evolves into a dogmatic cause, which, in
turn, manifests a holy truth for a false religion. There is little or no tolerance for the
individual's deviation from orthodoxy lest it threaten the survival of the
enterprise. Heretics are tortured,
tormented, and exterminated by any and all means available.
In truth,
therefore, utopianism is regressive, irrational, and pre-Enlightenment. It robs society of opinions and ideas that
may be beneficial to the human condition, now and in the future. It stymies human interaction, including
economic activity, which progresses through an historical process of
self-organization. Adam Smith, a
towering philosopher and economist of the Scottish Enlightenment, referred to
it as a harmony of interests creating a spontaneous order where rules of
cooperation have developed through generations of human experience. The utopian pursuit, however, commands the
imposition of a purported design and structure atop society by a central
authority in order to arrest the evolution of the individual and society.
As Popper
noted, "[T]he power of the state is bound to increase until the State
becomes nearly identical with society....It is the totalitarian intuition....The
term 'society' embraces...all social relations, including all personal
ones." The power, according to
Tocqueville, is "immense and tutelary" and "takes upon itself
alone to secure" the people's "gratifications and watch over their
fate." That power is absolute,
minute, regular, provident, and mild. Thus it every day renders the exercise of
the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will
within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. It
covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute
and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic
characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd."
Utopianism's
equality is intolerant of diversity, uniqueness, debate, etc., for utopianism's
purpose requires a singular focus. There
can be no competing voices or causes slowing or obstructing society's long and
righteous march to the Promised Land.
Utopianism relies upon deceit, propaganda, dependence, intimidation,
ruthlessness, and force. In its more
aggressive state, as the malignancy of the enterprise becomes more painful and
its impossibility more obvious, it incites violence inasmuch as avenues for
free expression and civil dissent are cut off.
Violence becomes the individual's primary recourse and the state's
primary response to it. Ultimately, the
only way out is the state's termination.
In utopia,
rule by masterminds is both necessary and necessarily primitive, for it
excludes so much that is known to man and about man. The mastermind is driven by his own boundless
conceit and delusional aspirations, which he self-identifies as a noble
calling. He alone is uniquely qualified
to carry out this mission. He is, in his
own mind, the savior of mankind, if only man will bend to his will. Such can be the addiction of power. It can be an irrationally egoistic and
absurdly frivolous passion that engulfs even otherwise sensible people. In this, the mastermind suffers from a
psychosis of sorts and endeavors to substitute his own ambitions for the
individual ambitions of millions of people.
Legislatures
are capable of democratic tyranny by degenerating into a collection of
masterminds, passing laws not because they are right or moral, but because they
can. Writing of the French Legislative
Assembly, Frédéric Bastiat, a statesman and pioneering advocate of classical
liberalism (limited government), noted, "It is indeed fortunate that
Heaven has bestowed upon certain men--governors and legislators--the exact
opposite inclinations, not only for their own sake but also for the sake of the
rest of the world! While mankind
advances toward evil, the legislators yearn only for good; while mankind
advances toward darkness, the legislators aspire for enlightenment; while
mankind is drawn toward vice, the legislators are attracted toward virtue. Since they have decided that this is the true
state of affairs, they then demand the use of force in order to substitute their
own inclinations for those of the human race." He added that there "is this idea that
mankind is merely inert matter, receiving life, organization, morality, and prosperity
from the power of the state. And even
worse, it will be stated that mankind tends toward degeneration, and is stopped
from his downward course only by the mysterious hand of the
legislator." Thomas Jefferson put
it this way, "All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and
judiciary, result to the legislative body.
The concentrating of these in the same hands is precisely the definition
of despotic government. It will be no
alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and
not by a single one. One hundred and
seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one...As little will it
avail us that they are chosen by ourselves.
An elective despotism was not
the government we fought for...."
The
mastermind is served by an enthusiastic intelligentsia or "experts"
professionally engaged in developing and speaking utopian fantasies. Although there are conspicuous exceptions,
longtime Harvard professor and political theoretician Harvey Mansfield
explained that modern intellectuals have "monumental impatience...with
human complexity and imperfection....They believe that politics is a temporary
necessity until rational solution is put in place." Of course, the rational solutions are not at
all rational. While intellectuals might
be smart, they are not smart enough to have conquered the social sciences and
to use them to rejigger society. They
are merely posers to knowledge that they do not and could never possess. Meanwhile, intellectuals are immune from the
impracticability and consequences of their blueprints for they rarely present
themselves for public office. Instead,
they seek to influence those who do.
They legislate without accountability.
Joseph Schumpeter, was a harsh critic of intellectuals. He wrote, "Intellectuals rarely enter
professional politics and will more rarely conquer responsible office. But they will staff political bureaus, write
party pamphlets and speeches, act as secretaries and advisors, make
the...politician's...reputation....In doing these things they...impress their
mentality on almost everything that is being done."
For the
rest, transforming society becomes a struggle between the utopia and
self-determination and self-preservation, since the individual must acquiesce
to the centralized decision making.
Apart from brute force, the mastermind has in his arsenal a weapon that
provides him with a predominant advantage--the law. Bastiat explained that "when [the law]
has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some
inconsequential and debatable matters.
The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to
its own purpose. The law has been used
to destroy its own objective: It has
been applied toward annihilating the very justice that it was supposed to
maintain; limiting and destroying rights which its real appeal was to
respect. The law has placed the collective
force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit
the person, liberty, and property of others.
It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a
crime, in order to punish lawful defense."
When the law is used in this way, the few plunder the many (e.g.,
public-sector unions), the many plunder the few (e.g., the progressive income
tax), and everyone plunders everyone (e.g., universal health care), making
utopia unsustainable and ultimately inhumane.
Centralizing
and consolidating authority is required to replace dispersed decision making
with a command and control structure, the purpose of which is to coerce
behavior in pursuit of a fantasy, a dogmatic cause, a false religion, etc. That is not to say that knowledge and
information from outside the central authority go without notice. Rather, it is collected in a self-serving,
haphazard, and incomplete way, to tinker and adjust, to torment and control,
but never as a means to fundamentally challenge assumptions, reconsider
policies, or disprove the utopian ends.
How could it, since utopianism rejects rationality and empiricism from
the outset? It repudiates experience. It is said to be new, different, better, and
bigger.
Moreover,
the reproduction of knowledge and information that exists outside the central
authority would not only pointless but impossible. Individuals are complicated, complex
beings. No centralized authority can
know what is in their minds or discern and assimilate the distinctiveness and
assortment of their myriad daily activities, no matter how many academics or
experts advise it. For example,
respecting the social engineers and their distortions of economics to justify
their manipulations of behavior and outcomes, Popper noted,
"Economics...cannot give us any valuable information concerning social
reforms. Only a pseudo-economics can seek
to offer a background for rational understanding."
Consequently,
the mastermind relies on uniform standards born of insufficient knowledge and
information, which are crafted from his own predilections, values, stereotypes,
experiences, idiosyncrasies, desires, prejudices, and, of course, fantasy. The imposition of these standards may, in the
short term, benefit some or perhaps many.
But over time, the misery and corrosiveness from their full effects
spread through the whole of society.
Although the mastermind's incompetence and vision plague the society,
responsibility must be diverted elsewhere--to those assigned to carry them out,
or to the people's lack of sacrifice, or to the enemies of the state who have
conspired to thwart the utopian cause--for the mastermind is inextricably
linked to the fantasy. If he is fallible
then who is to usher in paradise? If his
judgment and wisdom are in doubt then the entire venture might invite
scrutiny. This leads to grander and
bolder social experiments, requiring further coercion. What went before is said to have been piecemeal
and therefore inadequate. The steps
necessary to achieve true utopianism have yet to be tried.
For the
individual and the people generally, this is dispiriting, destabilizing,
stagnating, and impoverishing. Although
all state action is said to be taken in the people's interest, the heavy if not
crippling burden they shoulder is the price they pay for the impossible
cause--a cause greater than their lives, liberty, and happiness. The individual is inconsequential as a person
and useful only as an insignificant part of an agglomeration of insignificant
parts. He is a worker, part of a mass;
nothing more, nothing less. His
existence is soulless. Absolute
obedience is the highest virtue. After
all, only an army of drones is capable of building a rainbow to paradise.
The
immorality of utopianism, albeit obvious to sober thinkers, requires explicit
attention nonetheless for, perversely, too many remain enthusiastically
committed to it. Utopianism is immoral
per se. On what basis does utopianism
make such a thorough claim on the individual's existence? On the mastermind's dogma? In criticizing socialism's immorality and its
appeal to "dropouts" and "parasites," Hayek wrote,
"Rights derive from systems of relations of which the claimant has become
a part through helping to maintain them.
If he ceases to do so, or has never done so (or nobody has done for him)
there exists no ground on which such claims could be forwarded. Relations between individuals can exist only
as products of their wills, but the mere wish of a claimant can hardly create a
duty for others...."More broadly, the individual's right to live freely
and safely and to pursue happiness includes the right to benefit from the
fruits of his own labor. The
illegitimate denial or diminution of his labor--that is, the involuntary
deprivation of the private property he accumulates from his intellectual and
physical efforts--is a form of servitude and, hence, is immoral.
There is
also no morality in utopian deception and distortion promoting this
abstraction, forcing the individual to behave in ways contrary to his best
interests and destructive of his nature; and attacking the civil society's
ethical norms and social arrangements; and making commonplace dependency and
coercion. Rather than cultivating a
moral society and individual virtuousness, whether through faith, education, or
sociability, and building on the accumulated experience and wisdom of earlier
generations, utopianism breeds dishonesty not good character; it encourages
ideology not reason; it rewards rashness not reflection; it attracts fanatics
not statesman; and it is transformative not reformative. As the world around him grows increasingly
more unpredictable and hostile, and the moral order of the civil society frays and
then unravels, the individual may feel that his daily survival depends on
abandoning his own moral nature and teaching, including prudence,
self-restraint, and forethought. He may
become radicalized and join the ranks of the predators, or become isolated and
conniving, hoping to avoid notice. He
may become dispirited and detached, resigned to a soulless life of misery. He may defiantly stand his moral ground, in
which case he may become the predator's prey.
In any event, the law of the jungle becomes the law of the land as the
civil society disintegrates.
Clearly,
utopianism is incompatible with constitutionalism. Utopianism requires power to be concentrated
in a central authority with maximum latitude to transform andf to control. Oppositely, a constitution establishes
parameters that define the form and the limits of government. For example, in the United States,
the Constitution divides, disperses, and delineates governmental power. It grants the central government not plenary
but enumerated powers. It further
de-concentrates power through three
branches of the central government, reserving the rest of governmental powers
to the sates and to the people. The
Constitution enshrines a governing framework intended to ensure the longevity
of the existing society and to stifle the potential for tyranny.
The
Constitution reflects the Founders' repudiation of utopianism and any notion of
omnipotent and omniscient masterminds.
In Federalist 51. James
Madison wrote, "But what is government itself but the greatest of all
reflections on human nature? If med were
angels, no government would be necessary.
If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on
government would be necessary. In
framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great
difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the
governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." He argued that the draft constitution had
achieved that end. In Federalist 45, Madison explained, "The powers delegated
by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and
defined. Those which are to remain to
the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on
external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which
last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States
will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs,
concern the lives, liberty, and properties of the people, and the internal
order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
For the
mastermind, where the Constitution is believed useful toward utopian ends, it
will be invoked. Where it is not, under
the pretense of legitimate interpretations it will be abandoned outright or
remade through various doctrinal schemes and administrative evasions. For the mastermind, the Constitution's words
are as undeserving of respect as the rest of history. They will be used to muddle and disarrange,
not to inform and clarify. Moreover, the
Constitution's authors, ratifiers, and present-day proponents will be dismissed
as throwbacks. To follow these men will
be to renounce modernity and progress.
And yet to follow the masterminds is to renounce the American founding
and heritage.
The late
associate Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall demonstrated the point in his
repudiation of the Framers. "I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution
was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia
Convention....Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight and sense of justice
exhibited by the framers particularly profound.
To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the
start, requiring several amendments, a civil war and momentous social
transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its
respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental
today. They could not have imagined, nor
would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be
construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the
descendant of an African slave. 'We the people' no longer enslave, but the
credit does not belong to the framers.
It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of
'liberty,' 'justice' and 'equality,' and who strived to better them."
There is no
denying that slavery blights the history of many societies, including American
society. But the Constitution neither
preserved nor promoted slavery. As
explained in the response to Marshall,
"Discrimination, injustice, and inhumanity are not products of the
Constitution. To the extent they exist,
they result from man's imperfection.
Consequently, slavery exists today not in the United
States but in places like Sudan. Indeed, the evolution of American society has
been possible only because of the covenant the framers adopted, and the values,
ideals, and rules set forth in that document." In fact, had there been no Constitution there
would have been no United
States.
If there had been no United States
there would have been no Civil War--no Union
versus Confederacy. Slavery in the
southern colonies and later territories may well have lasted much longer. While the delegates to the Constitutional
Convention were unable to abolish slavery, many tried. Moreover, their progeny did, and at great
personal sacrifice.
The
Constitution evinces the Founders' broader comprehension of human nature and
natural rights, set forth most succinctly and prominently in the Declaration of
Independence. To cast the Constitution
off its mooring is to cast off its mooring as well. The Declaration provides, in part:
When in the course of human events, it
becomes necessary for one people to
dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth,
the separate and equal station to which the
Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that
they should declare the causes which impel them
to the separation. We hold these truths
to be self-evident, 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.--That to secure
these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed....
President
Abraham Lincoln, during his 1858 campaign for the U.S. Senate, explained:
"In [the Founders'] enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine
image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and
imbruted by its fellows. They grasped
not only the whole race of men then living. but they reached forward and seized
upon the farthest posterity. They
erected a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the
countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the
tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident
truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest,
should set up the doctrine that none but the rich men, or none but the white
men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their
posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take
courage to renew the battle which their fathers began--so that truth, and
justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be
extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and
circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being
built...."
America's
founding documents set in place the philosophical and political foundation for
a just and humane society--unlike any before it or since. Fidelity to these principles abolished
slavery, just as they can ensure the civil society's longevity. The mastermind and his followers mostly
ignore the Declaration and pick at the Constitution like an old scab. The modern liberal believes in the supremacy
of the state, thereby rejecting the principles of the Declaration and the order
of the civil society, in whole or in part.
For him, the individual's imperfections and personal pursuits impede the
objective of a utopian state. In this,
modern liberalism promotes what Tocqueville described as a soft tyranny, which
becomes increasingly more oppressive, potentially leading toward a hard tyranny
(some form of totalitarianism). As the
word "liberal" is, in its classical meaning, the opposite of authoritarianism,
it is more accurate to characterize the modern liberal as a
"Statist."
Utopianism
is not new. It has been repackaged
countless times--since Plato and before.
It is as old as tyranny itself.
In democracies, its practitioners legislate without end. In America, law is piled upon law in
contravention of the governing law--the Constitution. But there are no actual masterminds who, upon
election or appointment, are magically imbued with godlike qualities. There are pretenders with power, lots of
power. When they are not rebelling they
are dictating, but the ultimate objective is always the same--control over the
individual in order to control society.
They are adamantly committed to their abstraction and their accumulation
of authority to pursue it, no matter the devastating effects and misery which
they ignore or they dismiss as necessary costs for "progress."
