Morals & Dogma
The Mob, the Method, and the Man
© 2005 by Frederick Graves, JD
All Rights Reserved
The blind force of the people. We know it's true. The people are a force. Billions of us. Crowding for space. Striving for recognition. Working for our place in the sun, a home, food, clothing, and as much as we can get for ourselves. Struggling. Fighting.
How shall such a force be managed?
How can the force be conserved?
How can the force be prevented from destroying itself?
It was not Adolph Hitler who crowded naked children into gas chambers. It was not Adolph Hitler who opened the cyanide valves. It was not Adolph Hitler who clanged shut the iron doors of those hateful cremation ovens in that terrible age when I was born. It was men and women just like you, persuaded by Hitler's rhetoric that they were doing the right thing, believing an empty dream, convinced of a hateful lie.
Is it so different today?
Dare we lull ourselves to sleep, convinced of other lies?
It was the people who built the Bastille and erected the guilotines.
It was the people who backed the regimes of Hussein, Hirohito, and Attilla the Hun ... armed with their collective ignorance, covered with the approval of military garb, assured and encouraged by the shoulder-to-shoulder comradeship of their fellow warriors, damned by the lies they believed.
It is the people who believe and act on what they believe.
It is always the same.
It will always be so.
Even as it is our duty to put forward the truth that alone can overcome the lies.
Pre-History's Awakening
In the dawn of man there were sabre-tooth tigers, man-eating lions, stampeding elephants, and poisonous reptiles arguing against the contentment of man, disrupting his quiet campfires, dragging his children off into the darkness of the surrounding jungles and forests. It was a difficult time to say the least. Danger lurked on every hand, and vigilance was the price of life itself. Courage was the cost that must be paid to keep death from the door. Men fought the animals competing for the fertile valleys and riverbanks.
But there was another animal competing for the best of the valleys and streams. Man!
Beasts of men. Barbarians that would make the warring hoards of Middle Europe run for cover at their hideous site. Blood-thirsty animals erect on hind legs with death glaring in their eyes and greed power pounding in their merciless hearts. Mindless men running in packs like wolves devouring everything in their pitiless path.
One man alone was helpless before their attacks.
Even a dozen could not protect their families from the ravenous destruction that came when a quiet settlement on the banks of a river somewhere in the unwritten past was taken prize by the monsters erect on hind legs. The women were raped and murdered for entertainment. The children were roasted or eaten alive. The men were massacred, mutilated, or conscripted to join the nomadic nightmare of men in search of pleasure at the cost of others.
Deep in that distant past, however, the light of a new idea emerged. The idea that men could organize, train, prepare, and meet their enemies with an ordered resistance equipped with weaponry and the collective wisdom of a vision to establish homes and settlements where order ruled, instead of the blind force.
From that moment the destiny of mankind was chartered.
All that's happened since has followed from that single vision ... transmuted in myriad ways but always aimed at a single goal ... order.
Of course the order is resisted. The order is corrupted. The order goes haywire when misconceived. The order succeeds for a season then fails when new presentments disrupt its plan. Still the struggle for order persists, as mountains crumble and tall towers fall, and the march of man's hope for peace with prosperity impels new visions of order, new lies.
The Quaker poet put it best, "Truth forever on the scaffold."
Yet, the poet soft reminds us, within the pale of mankind's struggle lies a changeless truth, a power to transform the human heart, a victory that knows no failure, a logos that decides the destiny of men and nations ... knowledge worth knowing, wisdom worth working for.
Dimly seen.
Too seldom recognized.
So men organized their tiny camps into tribes, and soon their tribes were nations of tribes, and order protected the people ... for a season.
Weakened by warfare without and within, the wisdom of order is supplanted by each new generation seeking to impose on leadership its private views of truth, altering the geometries, rewording the rules, restructuring the hierarchies, testing one foolishness after another, and always proving the truth by failures compounded by ego and arrogance. Order found its way into Mesopotamia, Egypt, the lands surrounding Ancient Israel, Greece, Rome, Great Britain, France, the Germanic Tribes, Spain, Asia, and the Americas ... order in place of chaos, force justified by statute or edict, power centrally controlled ... and always by the consent or compelled submission of the people themselves.
Always a vision of order.
Always order established by force.
Then all at once a new dream.
The Holy Experiment
William Penn (the man after whom the commonwealth of Pennsylvania was named) was one of America's greatest visionaries. Quaker. Teacher. Poet. Statesman. Mystic. Penn saw a vision of this Great Republic of ours in a way too few today consider. Perhaps they are blinded by the exigent forces of terror and disease and economic disruption and global discontent to see the light Penn wrote about, inspiring others like Washington, Payne, Franklin, Adams, and the others. Penn saw a nation led not by powerful men with weapons in their hands and in the hands of their obedient lieutenants. Penn saw a nation founded on the principle that Truth alone should rule, the Truth we symbolize by the All-Seeing Eye atop the pyramid on the back of your one-dollar bill.
One nation under Truth.
One nation led by a presiding Providence beyond the influence of politics or purchase.
A nation of men and women dedicated to the proposition that nothing is true but the truth.
A nation of men and women who would labor and go to war, if need be, to protect their children from the lies of oligarchy, despotism, and tyranny.
A nation of men and women led by a new order.
Jurisdictionary is dedicated to encouraging this present generation with that vision.
More to come ...
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