Regarding the tumultuous
2020, there are some who are able to acknowledge the deeper roots of discontent
in society – the underlying causes of division, angst, and
anger. This is not to discount the purposefully created agitation –
certainly driven by the press and the many political agendas for which the
press plays merely a public relations role.
But this manipulation by
the press and its political clients can only work if there is a lever in
society waiting to be pulled. It only works because the cracks
exist. Society cannot be fragmented unless there are defects to
exploit.
What are some of these roots of discontent? It all
certainly starts with central banking, and this exploded nationally in
2008. What the people saw, fully exposed like never before, was a
system designed to protect the connected and wealthy; a system that inherently
disfavored the rest of us.
Trillions in bailouts – from both the federal government and the
Fed. Bankers saved despite making trillions in counterfeit loans –
counterfeit due both to the fiat credit offered and counterfeit because the
borrowers were unqualified in the first place. Bonuses paid and
stock values rising when making these loans, and further bonuses paid and stock
values rising when being bailed out of these actions.
Next comes the drug war. A pretext for every kind of
intervention, search, invasion, and taking by the state. The United
States has the largest population of people incarcerated on the planet, and (if
memory serves) something like half of these are in for non-violent offenses –
primarily drug related.
Families torn apart, search and seizure, infinite additional
cause for negative interaction between police and the people. All
designed to tear the fabric of society apart.
This issue cannot be separated from the militarism
abroad. An adventurous foreign policy – violent and ruthless –
transfers its weaponry, hardware, skills and tactics to the home
front. But it is even worse: ethically, what’s the difference?
A society that accepts – even worships – militarism and torture
abroad cannot at the same time deplore it at home. Many want to
believe it is two different things, but the actor in each case is the
same. And the effect on our conscious selves of the foreign
interventions dissolves any means by which to hold firm against a similar
condition at home.
We grow numb to all of it. We decry the death of one
man in Minnesota as an attempt to salve our wounds of supporting the millions
of murders overseas.
Deeper in our conscience lies abortion. Murder on a
very grand scale, against the most vulnerable and most defenseless of
society. A society that sacrifices unborn infants for a better
future. No, child sacrifice has not left this earth.
No one wants to admit the damage this causes to society, but how
can it not be a permanent scar? Those who have gone through this
trauma suffer one of two fates – either a permanent condition bordering on
depression, or a permanent callousness. Or some combination of the
two, at neither extreme. And this, not just for the mother, but all
those around her – certainly to include the father.
Next: we live in a fact-free world. The level of
cognitive dissonance has reached unimaginable levels – both on the discussion
around the corona and on the discussion of race relations (whatever that means)
in American society. The internal turmoil brought on by the
prayerful desire to believe the story despite what our own “lying” eyes tell us
can result in nothing other than societal suicide.
Finally, a sense of self and a sense of
community. This is manifest today in the debate on
immigration. Is there a culture and society worth protecting and
defending? Should it mean something to be a resident, and,
ultimately, a citizen? If the answer is no to these questions,
society is lost.
Now, only the first and to some degree the second of these on
the list above is being somewhat discussed as sources underlying the current
turmoil in society. Certainly, the Wall Street bailouts and a
financial system designed to enrich the connected and exploit the rest is
identified as such. The drug war is only starting to be discussed in
light of the question of policing.
The rest I say are also underlying our condition, but I have not
seen these discussed in the context of today’s turmoil. Yet these
are there, in varying degrees in the collective conscience of
society. The state of being human makes these internal conflicts
unavoidable – and makes living a life as a human being rather difficult.
What does all of this have to do with
rEVOLution? That label was born in Ron Paul’s presidential campaign
twelve years ago. Ron Paul ran on all of these issues in 2008 and
again in 2012. I recall telling relatives and friends that he
offered the last hope for holding the society together.
Not that I think things would be
fundamentally different today had he won. Paul himself said that
just electing him would not be enough. Senators, congressmen, the
marriage of the bureaucratic apparatus and big business – these all offered
powerful counterforces to what anyone elected to the presidency might hope to
accomplish.
His was a message of LOVE in the best sense. Yet his
biggest boos came from audiences of so-called Christians – primarily aghast at
his views on the military. His biggest cheers came on college
campuses – the same ones used as weapons against civil society.
What is interesting is that four years ago Donald Trump ran on
many of these same points – I don’t believe he made a point of the drug war,
and I am sure he didn’t make a point on abortion. But central
banking, militarism, our fact-free world, and immigration – these were all
central to his message and his popularity.
Trump was no Ron Paul. He certainly did not have
Paul’s principled grounding, but he had a bluster that Paul does not have –
Paul is too much of a gentleman. But in this age of 140 (more
recently, 280) characters, Trump was the master.
The two have something else in common: of course, being republicans,
they had all the democrats against them. They also had most of the
republicans against them and most, if not all, of the bureaucratic state
against them as well.
And this last point is telling. Look at the list
again: central banking, the drug war, military adventurism, abortion, a
fact-free world, sense of self and community. I can make a very
sound natural law argument in support of the position Ron Paul took on every
one of these issues. This suggests that the tact taken by society
and our political (and many Christian) leaders on these same issues is directly
counter to sound natural law.
The run of Ron Paul (and, later, of Donald Trump) fully exposed
that the supposed left-right divide we are supposedly offered in politics is
nonsense. Over the last weeks, I have begun formulating a view that
the divide – the actual divide in society – is one of natural
law. There are those who accept it and desire it – on both the left
and right of our superficial political spectrum. There are many who
reject it – on both sides of the same false political divide.
We are seeing that natural law cannot be long ignored or
abused. We are seeing it in our society today. God – or
for you atheists out there, our human nature – cannot long be mocked, ridiculed,
or ignored, without pushing back. Violently, if necessary.
Conclusion
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart:
This
means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking
in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world
which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression
from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and
social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic
autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force
above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the
center of everything that exists.
We are five-hundred years past the Renaissance, and three
hundred (or so) years past the Enlightenment. In the late 1800s –
after the Franco-Prussian War and before World War One – the West enjoyed – for
a brief forty-year period – the best fruits of Enlightenment
thinking. That’s it. Forty years.
Progressivism: the scientistic man, freed from any higher force
above him was set free on the world, giving us communism, fascism, modern
democracy, central banking, two world wars.
No higher law. No God. No natural
law. What is the result? Truthfully, we have lived
through it since 1914. What we are living through today is the last
breaths of a dying carcass.
We look back on the God of the Old Testament (I know, He is the
same God – allow me a shortcut) and exclaim: how can he be so cruel – even
genocidal? We have the nerve to ask such questions given the
man-made genocides of our time.
This is where we are today.
Epilogue
And this is why the sin
of the Christian churches (not Christianity, but many of its most prominent
churches) will be counted as the greatest.
