As I read the Five Thousand Year Leap (FYL) the idea that I feel is the most important issue is principle #1 and 2. You can’t have principle #2 without the idea that there is a natural law and a divine law that we are obligated to understand and follow. As I read further and further through the book, my thoughts kept returning to principle #2. If the people are not a virtuous and morally strong people then freedom is not likely to exist. You can have good kings and bad kings. You can have other government system that are good and bad. But when you have a group of people that do not believe in the ideas of private and public virtue others will always take over the government.
Quoting from FYL p. 235: "The centralization of political power always destroys liberty by removing the decision-making function from the people on the local level and transferring it to the officers of the central government. This process gradually benumbs the spirit of "voluntarism" among the people, and they lose the will to solve their own problems. They also cease to be involved in community affairs. They seek the anonymity of oblivion in the seething crowds of the city and often degenerate into faceless automatons who have neither a voice nor a vote".
I am guilty of that; I have left problems of the community for others to deal with. Of course, I was not taught differently so I am not overly surprise that I am not involved more in the community. But returning back to the idea of a virtuous and moral people. The miraculous part of the American Government is that by setting up the government with many layers that check and balance each other within each layer and by each layer you can delay the collapse of the government longer. When the spirit of public virtue is not as strong, when people are turning to the government to fix their problems, there are still checks in place to slow down the centralization of the power, so the people still have some liberties. All of the principles after #1-2 are needed to deal with the conditions where the people are not strongly virtuous and moral.
What an amazing document the Declaration and Constitution are when you take in light how long they have held together a people that has slowly been neglecting its responsibility toward themselves and their neighbors.
Quoting from FYL p. 235: "The centralization of political power always destroys liberty by removing the decision-making function from the people on the local level and transferring it to the officers of the central government. This process gradually benumbs the spirit of "voluntarism" among the people, and they lose the will to solve their own problems. They also cease to be involved in community affairs. They seek the anonymity of oblivion in the seething crowds of the city and often degenerate into faceless automatons who have neither a voice nor a vote".
I am guilty of that; I have left problems of the community for others to deal with. Of course, I was not taught differently so I am not overly surprise that I am not involved more in the community. But returning back to the idea of a virtuous and moral people. The miraculous part of the American Government is that by setting up the government with many layers that check and balance each other within each layer and by each layer you can delay the collapse of the government longer. When the spirit of public virtue is not as strong, when people are turning to the government to fix their problems, there are still checks in place to slow down the centralization of the power, so the people still have some liberties. All of the principles after #1-2 are needed to deal with the conditions where the people are not strongly virtuous and moral.
What an amazing document the Declaration and Constitution are when you take in light how long they have held together a people that has slowly been neglecting its responsibility toward themselves and their neighbors.
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