Restoring the Hereditary Nobility - The Socialist Shell Game

 

The United States of America was formed in 1776 and founded on a radical principle; one that had been floating around the English speaking world for quite some time. It was a radical notion that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. 

 

This idea rocked the European nobility in particular because it was seen as a threat to their comfy if occasionally dangerous positions. It was bad enough that their squabbles among themselves ever so often cost one or the other of them their heads. That was just the hazard of being nobility. But the very idea that the ignorant rabble might want to get into the power game horrified them. Why, farmers and shopkeepers might make themselves presidents and prime ministers and start telling the dukes and barons and viscounts what to do. Pamphlets began circulating espousing the "divine right of kings."  But ideas like those of John Locke and the evidence provided by the fledgling United States which was founded on the ideas of Locke and other egalitarian philosophers, were powerful and found an eager audience among the downtrodden and oppressed.

 

By the mid 1800s, particularly in America, there had grown to be a powerful prejudice against the ruling classes. The fading nobility and upper classes of Europe and America, desperate to reestablish the idea of hereditary ruling classes, seized on Darwin and Marx as tools to change things back. The new "scientific" doctrine of survival of the fittest was, for them, proof that genetically superior persons and their offspring were endowed by nature itself with the capacity to rule. By layering Darwin atop Marx they could make the argument for the idea of a ruling class being "natural".

 

This of course was a thinly veiled bit of propaganda, useful in making the case that there should be but two classes - the leaders of the people class and the proletariat. It was also a nice bit of philosophy that justified the leader class's privilege and prestige. It was little more than a recycling of the "divine right of kings" argument. 

 

Socialism was seen as a way to restore the divine right, if not of kings, then at least of genetically superior smart people. There's a reason so many progressive / socialist countries have dynasties. Entitled tyrannies are Satan's favorite form of government. Centralized power means Lucifer has fewer people to deceive in order to do the most evil with the least effort. And make no mistake about it. Satan, per his original dispute with God, believes that free will is dangerous and that the way to handle humans is by rigid control. Little images of God running loose with their creativity and their ability to choose he argued were just too dangerous to order and stability. The old devil believed we needed someone like him to tell us humans what to do (and more importantly, what not to do.) It's why the old monarchies and the new socialist societies have had such lovely Gestapos, KGBs, Pravdas, pogroms, genocides, gulags, extermination camps and reeducation centers. 

 

THAT is the great controversy of our world - freedom vs tyranny. Christianity vs Progressivism, BF Skinner, Freud, Nietzsche, Marx and Darwin vs Jesus, Locke, Lewis. and White. God never intended that there should be a ruling class. He warned the Israelites against choosing a king. The very first king of Israel quickly proved that God was right about monarchies.

And yet today, down near the end of the world or at least the end of the humans on it who seemed determined to exterminate themselves, we wonder after the Beast, looking for a god of stone and fire, made in our own image. We seek gods we think we can control - human surrogate gods that reassure us that our fate is in our own hands and that no matter what horrors we commit along the way, we will have our utopia on our own terms. A utopia established by our own works, without submitting to any God, especially to a God who thinks we shouldn't sin and who won't come down at our insistence that He make Himself visible to us and behave like we think He ought to. We say, "If there was a God, then he would......" and then name something God would do if they were Him.

The thing is, God actually did come down and make Himself visible to us and showed us His character. And what did we do?  Because He didn't do it the way we thought, because He didn't come with power, fire, thunder and lightning to destroy our enemies and praise our leaders as we thought He ought to, we crucified Him. But for all our efforts to pound God into submission, to make Him into our image, God remains His own larger-than-life self, and we remain petulant children throwing tantrums before Him.

It explains the temper tantrums by the human supremacists among us when they don't get their way. It also explains the temper tantrums by the human supremacists when they do get their way and some of us don't genuflect to them in obeisance because they won.

 

Because things don't work the way we think they ought, we habitually look around among ourselves for someone to blame for our troubles.  Oddly enough, we always seem to settle on people. who are happy and content to trust in their Maker, people who are content and not as miserable as ourselves, to blame for the world not working the way we think it ought to. 

 

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that the actual God, the one not make of stone, and human narcissism, is, as CS Lewis described Him, "...not a tame lion."  There are no levers we can pull, no magic incantations we can say that will make God dance to the tune we want to play.

And that frightens people, or at least the ones who place no faith in Him who created us. So they look around for someone to blame, someone to put into reeducation camps, someone to imprison, torture and kill in a vain attempt to silence their own fears. It's always about power because the great deception that the devil has perpetrated is that seizing power for yourself is the only way to protect you from the consequences of your sins. But we cannot sin with impunity for the wages of sin is inevitably, death. 

And that really frightens them and makes them dangerous. But as I keep telling people, Jesus is coming soon and it's not a conquest this time around. It's a rescue mission. After the world immolates itself and has time to rest a thousand years, then we will return to an Earth made new without dictators, princes and potentates. No tax man, no police, no armies, no funeral directors.

Progress will be in our own hands after all. God built that wonderful gift of self-determination into us. Now that the sin has been cleansed from us and we have seen first hand what comes of evil, no one will need to be coerced, bullied, or thrown in jail to keep the peace. No one will desire to have power over anyone else. Mankind will be free to build, explore and create things we can only imagine and some things we aren't able to imagine. As my friend Steve used to describe it, "Always another tomorrow." I could really get into that, you know?

© 2021 by Tom King 

Dissin' TJ ? I Don't Think So!

July 5, 2010:

Someone wrote a post on Facebook today, critical of Thomas Jefferson and pointing out, his many flaws and failings as a person.  Well, they do have something of a point.  TJ was less than a moral paragon next to John Adams' rigid principles and Washington's effortless uprightness.  He slept with his slave girl, rewrote the New Testament (leaving most of it out), chased women and bought into all kinds of goofy conspiracy theories.  I, personally, have a problem with Jefferson's neglect of the fledgling U.S. Navy. His reluctant late start left us short-handed at sea during the War of 1812.

TJ, no doubt, had his problems, but his differences in character, compared to Washington and Adams and others, only accentuates what was the real source of the genius behind our new nation. The new country was not driven by personal preference, power or personalities, but by principles shared by all and those principles, it turned out, would protect the liberties of all.  Left to any one of them, the result might have been just another version of the disastrous European governments. Adams, for instance, wanted a presidency that would have made him virtually an elected monarch.  TJ and George talked him down from his high-handed position and made him see that such trappings of power, while they might make the French respect us, were not a good message to send to the country.

It took TJ's loose libertarianism, Washington's moral compass, Adams' principles and sheer drive and Franklin's wit and innovation to bring the nation together into a structure that while strictly ordered, left the citizens free to work, play, innovate and create without undue interference from the government that was supposed to protect them. After they wrote the constitution, it took Jefferson, returning from a debauch as Ambassador to France to remind them they needed to include the Bill of Rights.

The quality of the founders' work is evidenced by the sheer numbers of power-hungry, ego-maniacal, crackpots, crazies, racists and doofuses that have occupied the White-House, Senate, Congress and Supreme Court who failed to destroy the country despite their best efforts. Good things have happened in the U.S. like the end of slavery, women's right to vote, Child Labor Laws the protection of the rights and safety of workers and people with disabilities (at least one president thought the retarded ought to be euthanized as useless) and the protection of our freedoms from those who would have enslaved us. These good things have happened almost in spite of the efforts by our leaders to thwart them.

Bad things have, of course, happened too - like the slaughter among the Indian nations, the protection of corporate monopolies and robber barons and the provocation of war with Spain.  Yet, the will of the people stopped the Indian wars and brought forth laws to protect workers and break up monopolies. We're still paying reparations to the tribes and favoring the unions almost a hundred years later. The colonies we captured from Spain were all finally liberated and became nations unto themselves if they wanted to. America's charter, has led the nation to become largely a force for good in the world.  Twice in the last century, the United States prevented the rest of the world from slaughtering each other entirely and stopped many an evil tyrant from enslaving billions.

We are the dad gum good guys and largely because we share common principles as laid out in the founding documents.

Turns out we needed Jefferson with all his flaws - apparently something God knew when he He brought that group together at that time and in that place.


But then, He usually knows what He's about.

Tom