Ideas

  Providing a different answer or response doesn't automatically make you, or it, right. This is a lesson it seems to me that few have learned these days. I do hear how the world has changed over the years, how things are so much different now. Well, it is true that man has advanced in technological ways. We have advanced in science and developed amazing technologies to the benefit and the determent of mankind. Still, it needs to be remembered that man, human nature and our reaction to all of that has not changed one bit. We are basically the same creatures we always were and will be. Other than technology the only thing changing is societies responses. But even that hasn't really changed all that much, the rise and fall of empires has been a constant. There is a pattern to all of that if you look at history with an unbiased view.

 I'd suggest it is our desire to change everything that causes the turmoil that eventually destroys those empires. It is the small changes, the little exceptions to the rule, and the adoption of "new" ideas that create a friction. That old adage, give them an inch and they will take a mile, is appropriate. That does sum it up nicely. Those that implement the new always feeling they are right, making an improvement, being progressive in some fashion. Then when the next generation comes along and start to change that, they will complain and advocate for the past. It is a continuing cycle, like life and death. I'm fully aware I am responding in like fashion, that isn't lost on me. I also feel it doesn't make me wrong either. Call it confidence, call it arrogance, call it whatever you like, I just call it the truth.

 In the opening sentences of the declaration of independence it is stated, "when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have bond them to another" they are saying what? Government needs to change. It isn't the people that need to change, it is the governance of those people. The political bands that bind. And isn't that exactly what is happening today just as it happened yesterday, last year, in the previous century and the centuries before that. The people haven't changed, the politics have. A government establishes the moral and ethical practices allowed in the society. In our republic the idea is to allow the people to establish that. That is what the true meaning of a republic is, from the Latin word "respublica" and the reason for the phrase, we the people. People haven't changed all that much.

 Order and discipline require the denial of self-interest. "Respublica" means the common good, what is the best for all the people. And that is where the change begins when we feel like we are the exception to the rule. That is the seat of power whether it is being an Emperor, King, or a straight up dictator, we feel like we alone can decide upon right and wrong. If we want to do it, it is right, if we don't it is wrong. That's where the beginning of dissolving those political bands begins. Historically we can see that decline, that degradation in societies over time. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire is the classic example we are all aware of simply because a book was written about that. Many other empires have risen and fallen just as dramatically. 

 There is one thing about man that has never changed, and that is the desire to acquire wealth and power. It has been present in every society, every gathering of people since the beginning of time. It is what makes Kings, Emperors, dictators, and presidents. Wealth and power. "The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas engender social institutions, political changes, technological methods of production, and all of that is called economic conditions." (Ludwig Von Mises) It is those economic conditions that cause the changes. Whatever it takes to make a buck or gain power! "A bad idea is not made good by compliance." (A.B.Reichart) This idea that everything is right, is just plain wrong. History will prove it out, I just won't be here to say, I told you so. Then someone will get another idea, and it begins again.