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2024/10/02
This essay is not intended to be another piece of blatant anti-American bashing in the long lineage of primitive essays by the Marxists and the likes. We have to give credit that the benefits and conquests of the American State carved out of the British Colonies of the 18th century have been as impressive as they have been largely beneficial for the world. But it is my firm belief that the country's true potential has been hindered by the fallacies within the core of its founding principles. Worse, these very fallacies will eventually prove to be its downfall, and lead to a gradual degradation of its society and its politics, as a reflection of an inertia of ever compounding natural consequences of policies that are guided by the said fallacies.
These fallacies are not unique to that of the United States of America, but they have been perpetuated in Europe and Asia as well - especially after the World War II. Many national constitutions were written and rewritten to mimic the same false foundations, and they may be henceforth thoroughly examined in the light of the natural law, as it is known to us in the conquests of natural sciences.
Alas, I am not as optimistic as to expect any significant changes to the basic laws, as I am not expecting to change the views of people on either political side in changing these views, but the best I can offer is this essay for the curious reader.
The declaration of independence is the first among the founding documents of the United States, drafted shortly before the independence was unilaterally declared by the states in the city of Philadelphia on July 4 1776. The declaration was followed by a bloody Revolutionary War that lasted for over 8 years, and when the King of Britain and His Majesty's government led by Lord North had to begrudgingly concede to and recognize the fledgling American nation's independence.
The text of the declaration is a reflection of the many ideas of the Enlightenment era that were critical of the very essence of what the British monarchy stood for, and it showed the divergence of worldviews that were in decline in the Old World of Europe and that of the New World, where the government was not burdened with the medieval institutions, but was built upwards by the intellectuals who studied and shared the ideas of Enlightenment without the need to reform said medieval institutions.
And the text of the declaration shows it.
The first paragraph begins with an explanation of why such declaration is necessary, postulating that "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another ... a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." which lays the ground for the rationale of the document.
And the second paragraph (the Preamble) gives a detailed insight into the worldview of the declaration's drafters, arguing as to what gives them the right to express their desire for the said separation. It can be split into the following sentences:
The drafters continue to issue an explanation even though "Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes" they nonetheless proceed with this declaration, because they firmly believe that His Majesty acted in violation of the principles that they have outlined, and they proceed to list the exact violations committed.
Nothing in the world is a self-evident truth, and a modern natural scientist knows this like no one else. Not looking back to the prejudices of the past and the ideologies of the present, he yearns for truth and the truth alone. A philosopher (an outdated name for a scientist) gathers knowledge not to confirm his a priori beliefs but to gradually construct the vision of the world as it is.
Though the declaration of independence precedes Kantianism, the notion of self-evidence of certain truths, particularly that of mathematics may seem somewhat parallel. However, two plus two equals four is hardly comparable to the idea that men are created, and equally so. Furthermore, that notion itself is contradicted in the list of charges against George III in the declaration, where it says "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."
So are the "merciless Indian Savages" not men created equal?
And what makes the British subjects equal to each other, so that they may claim to be independent from the His Majesty the King?
The answer is: nothing.
The British Empire, its colonies and its inhabitants are the inalienable property of the monarch. This is the groundwork of the might-is-right logic referred to as the "Divine Right of Kings". Though it has to be conceded, that the king's predecessor King John the Lackland ceded certain rights to his vassal lords (but who were - in the spirit of the medieval world - seen as his peers in that they represented the landed knightly estate), such action was made under a duress after losing the fight to the barons led by Robert Fitzwalter, himself a non-Englishman whose lineage is that of the Count of Eu and Brionne, ultimately descending from the line of Rollo, the conqueror of Normandy, who invaded it and proved his worth to the King of the Franks, when the latter was forced to sign the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte and granted Normandy to the former.
What does this have to do with the Englishmen, let alone Scotsmen and other British islanders who migrated to the colonies? Absolutely nothing.
Men are neither created, nor equally so. They are born of their parents, who have either formal or informal social status, various degrees of income, skill and intellect - all aspects that are well recognized as inherently different since the ancient times. And on top of that, every man is a unique combination of genetic traits inherited from his parents. Thus, as no man is equal to another in his essence, no man has the same and equal right to dictate what government above himself he can impose or change, but only that government that he imposes on his own land and that of his own household - and the one he can enforce with the force he possesses.
The wolves living in hunting packs regularly feasting on the cattle cannot be told by the sheep or the cows as to how often and how many of them can be eaten. Unless, of course, that cattle has cowboys and shepherds at their defense, ready to kill the said wolves with arms.
This leads me to the second point - the claim that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". This is a perversion of the natural law. It is not the consent of the governed but how content they are. The charges thrown at the King are the charges akin to that of the outraged peasants who challenge the King in a rebellion. This is not a claim to righteousness but a claim to a show of might - and a show of might it turned out to be - with the King losing in a prolonged overseas rebellion. This has absolutely nothing to do with whether the claim that government derives its legitimacy from the governed being right or wrong, because it makes no sense at all.
A sheep reared by the shepherd is not dictating to him how it would want to live, but it is the shepherd's knowledge of what is best for the sheep's welfare. How woolly and how fat that sheep grows is entirely dependent on the shepherd's skills of selecting the sheep and the market conditions for wool and mutton. Likewise, The governed are not the customers of their sovereign, but his tenants at best, at worse they are his property.
No conscientious landlord will hurt his tenants purposefully unless it is a reaction to adverse conditions, be it harm to his land (in case of sheep - overgrazing) or poor market conditions (thus, culling the woolly sheep to keep the price equilibrium), and no conscientious owner will damage his property unless it is a burden to him.
Even if we agree that the tenants and the serfs (the living property in every but literal sense) have rights that they can enforce through an uprising, no such right is fundamentally inalienable, nor is it self-evident. Only through a show of force and the subsequent compromise a consensus can be reached. Which means that the "self-evident truths" are neither necessarily true nor self-evident, unless backed by might.
Consequently, there is neither right nor duty to throw off any government, just like there is no right nor duty for an eagle to catch a prey larger than it can carry away, nor is there a right nor duty for hares to attack a fox instead of fleeing, unless it is cornered. Nor is there a duty from the woolly sheep to rebel against the shepherd, or is there a right to its sheared wool, other than what's enough to keep the sheep warm in the winter, and I am being extremely generous at this assessment, since the forces of elements will not care about the sheep's rights if the shepherd dies and the sheep are forced to graze freely and hide from predators like their wild ancestors did.
This is not to say that I personally consider it immoral or non-righteous to rebel against a tyrannical government. Quite the contrary, it is only natural for a weak government that cannot impose itself with force to be toppled. It is a natural right of the strong to rebel against the weak - and who's strong and who's weak is to be seen in a show of force. But spare me the nonsense about the governed being the source of the government's powers. Quite the contrary, the power of a shepherd is his dog and his stick and not his herds - just like the power of an osprey is its beak and its talon, not the fish it fishes for.
The final paragraph following the 27 unique grievances closes the declaration with the following sentence:
A false impression may arise that such Supreme Judge of the world is the figure of the Creator but such judgment is an outcome of might alone, and the willingness to inflict harm upon one's foes, as well as the tolerance to pain and suffering. Perhaps it was so in the limited understanding of the world that was the consensus of the declaration's drafters, but we know that the world is vastly different from the one seen in the ages of John Locke, whose principles were greatly influential in drafting this document.
Thus, this false impression is only strengthened by the fact that the American Colonists were victorious and the King's forces lost. A primitive reflection of something akin to the Koranic interpretation of why the Romans lost to the Persians and why they shall be victorious afterwards (see Surah Al-Rum 30:2-4). That the divine providence guided one party to be victorious over another and vice versa. A game of chance and sheer luck, and a will to fight created a fallacy that the false idea of "self-evident truths" have to be right.
Today every American politician refers to the abominable idea that all men are created equal without specifying why and how. It is unclear if they are equal before the U.S. law or before the laws of nature (because the latter is way harder to prove anyway). The word "men" is given a poetic form to include women, and the mention of the Indian Savages as somehow distinct from the men in the Preamble is excluded altogether from any discourse, except in enumerating the "sins" of the White Man before the world that is predominantly a giant slum of hominids that can barely be called "White", and who are responsible for some of the worst crimes against nature - from mass extinction events to unspeakable pollution of this world.
But in sheer adherence to this "self-evident truth" Americans allowed themselves to be fooled with lies and fill their own government with incompetents, whose only response to any criticism is that "all men are created equal" and perhaps they should be given an equal opportunity in spite of - not thanks to - their sheer incompetence.
It is no wonder then that today the very non-British Judiciary, independent from the King George, is receiving kickbacks from alimony cases that are victimizing men, while others are busy upholding the asylum and refugee law that grants the right of residence to fraudulent seekers of asylum and refuge - no, not from war and famine - but rather from responsibility and self-reliance. And to think that the drafters of the declaration charged the King of preventing the populating of the Thirteen Colonies by Europeans for the benefit of the frontier Indian Savages!
That these creatures are somehow "created equal", whether they are lowlife illiterates and innumerates born in the United States or brought over for the sake of electoral manipulation, is the ultimate excuse for these crimes against the American people and - more egregiously - the nature and the landscape of North America, already disfigured by the excesses of agriculture and (post-)modern cities sprawling all over, rampant with vice and crime of all sorts, forcing the least dysfunctional elements to settle on their verges in suburban neighborhoods that keep growing in space and claiming more and more natural land.
This "equality" of being "created" through the disgusting orifices of females was granted to the Blacks once, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives of mainly White men, so that by 1960s and through 2020s these same Blacks would bring their dysfunction into the lives of the White Americans. Then it was extended to the wronged and offended Natives, erroneously called the Indians, only to be subjugated by their corrupt tribal politics, unjust federal welfare and its terrible consequences - third world lifestyles poisoned with gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse and familial violence - all addressed by stripping the very same Natives of all semblance of "equal" rights like the right to buy alcohol or bear arms, which are yet granted to the teetotalers and pacifists, be their Christians, Jews or Muslims, migrant or native, for they are not members of those officially recognized Indian "Nations"
It is then no wonder that more and more destitute, aimless young Americans, "created equally" as the Preamble says, are embracing the insanity of post-Hegelian ideologies. The atavistic, anti-scientific Marxist ideas are spread by people who dare call themselves Atheist, not for their desire to search for truth, but sheerly for their spite against the American Christians, regardless of how true or false the causes of that disdain may be.
The average destitute millennial or Gen-Z American is fed a perverted lie of equality, which they perpetuate with their political activism, demanding the same rights as their richer counterparts without having to earn them - which keeps feeding the political class with worse and worse ideas.
If America proves anything successful, it is that - no - men are not created equal. The sheer beauty of Capitalism that shaped the United States of America as we remember it was that it went directly against the principles laid in the Declaration of Independence. The success of America's free markets is the success of engineering and scientific innovations of the 19th century, fueled by the drive for profit of some men against others, some men's successes and other's failures. The Darwinian principles that shape life as we know it also shaped America in spite of all the odds - especially the delusions of the "Founding Fathers" and their misguided belief in a static, Euclidean world governed by an either detached or authoritarian Creator, standing above the rights of property as laid by the precedence of the medieval kings, like the one they rebelled against, or the one ultimately leaving the world to be government by those static laws in an act of detachment. Either way, the view is pure delusion having little to do with the world as it is.
And it is back against the kings that the United States of America of today is turning. No longer it is King George and his right over the colonies that is the enemy. Now it's the average Joe who dared to make a million dollars to spend a quiet life without being pestered by the IRS, the family courts and parasites - whether native born or brought over. If the Colonists of Massachusetts could rebel against King George, so can your landlord's tenants. And the government deriving its power from the consent of the governed - the tenants that is - is here to help.
Until the average American sees what his nation was built upon he will not realize that what he is destined for is exactly what several generations of Americans spent fighting against - a Communist nightmare, a Hegelian bog filled with corpses, corpses in a frostbitten GULAG where the human-like archaea, the bottom feeders, are made rule supreme over more advanced forms of life. Those will be the corpses of those who were not created equal. "Because all men were!!!" And if you were not ... then you're not a man...