In 1978 Alexandr Solzhenitsyn delivered a fantastic speech telling us where we were as a Nation with clairvoyance. Today, we are a perfect reflection of his descriptions. These “TRUTHS” are commented on in the Nine articles on this author’s corner of the internet. The baseline article is here.
Eight Story: Our Moral Law
We have forgotten where we, as a Nation, came from.
The people continue losing faith in our government (shown in the Fifth Story) because our politicians have lost their compass. They need to read “The Declaration of Independence” daily to understand its implications. The “MORALS” they need to maintain are there.
The summary of it is, sustained “Performance with Integrity.”
Solzhenitsyn asked, “How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness?” Which is gotten worse today (2022).
He states:
“The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.”
He adds, “this means that the mistake must be at the root,” while I believe he was wrong in his deduction of the West’s thinking based on the Renaissance. His conclusion of what we are seeing today is correct:
“It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life, and it even adds a number of new ones.”
He asserts that, when our Nation was founded, we based our Revolutionary War against England on the “Moral Law of God” when he said:
“…as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility.”
However, with time the West — “State Systems became increasingly and totally materialistic.” Paradoxically “the West continued to enforce Human Rights, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer.”
Today, according to Pew’s article mentioned, WE, the people, are arguing about what God has to do with anything in our society. Our ignorance about “Systems” is rampant.
We still do not know the WHOLE BASIS of our Nation is based on the “Declaration of Independence,” which defines OUR “MORAL LAW,” and it contains a “Subsystem” called “The Constitution,” our “National Law.” ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER DOES NOT EXIST! (we don’t exist)
We are so materialistic that the Pew article has as its top image a “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” money picture. I guess we are supposed to worship that next? Or, maybe I am wrong; we are, honoring that!
Solzhenitsyn says Karl Marx was right!
“As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say that ‘communism is naturalized humanism.’”
Well, if that is true, we might as well embrace COMMUNISM. Why? He says that is the foundation for “despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism.” That is what the rest of the spectrum is when, as a society, we let the evil wolf win between a God-guided society and a Materialistic worshiping Society.
It is this simple according to Solzhenitsyn:
“Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition.”
New Moral Law?
On the other side of the God coin, if we want to dissociate ourselves from defining our humanism by God, we can adopt Christian Michel’s definition in his article from “Mises Institute” from Austria, titled “Why We Have Rights.” We can adopt this as our “Moral Law,” which is 4323 words long. Why? Because it explains “why we have rights.” God is never mentioned.
The first paragraph:
“Rights are the means by which we can reasonably predict human behavior. Without predictability, the existence of higher life forms would be impossible. The water source should be found at the end of the same track beaten each morning; berries which have always been edible should not suddenly become poisonous; species which have never posed a threat should not suddenly become predatory.”
The paper has several sections where he explains “Natural Rights,” “Implementing Rights,” “The Transference of Rights,” “False Rights — Possession,” “False Rights — The Legalization of Theft,” “The Moral Order,” and several others.
Our Moral Law
Our Declaration of Independence didn’t need all those words because the first paragraph captured the entire essence of who we are, and the first sentence of the second paragraph finished it. Even if we include the whole document, which includes “the facts” we were fighting for then and some similar we are fighting today with our government, the DOI has 1,531 words AND, and they ALL mean something even today.
If we read the words prefacing the list of aggravations we had, it sets the stage by saying:
“The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.”
What Our Moral Law Tells Us
DO you think any of “the facts” listed in our DOI applies today? It is Our History not only why we had the right to fight or die. It is also the list of why we were fighting and dying. If that was the cause for the revolution of 1776, and today we have issues similar to those. It ought to make us think. Right?
The list of the reasons for this fight:
Most of the items below are as written in the DOI. Where the DOI is prefaced with “He” (the King). For us today, if instead of “King” you think of it as “ He (the government),” the items below apply to us TODAY:
- He refused to pass Laws for the accommodation of their people unless those people would relinquish their right to representation….a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. (only Corporations and the rich have access, the 4th branch regulates us to death, and any complaints go to deaf ears)
- He called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. (again, the 4th branch keeps us at arm’s length and throttles our “society” at will. The “individual” no longer exists)
- He endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners…. (we have never had immigration laws we can understand, and the government has throttled immigration as they wish — today, the “natural citizens” are becoming a MINORITY in this country.)
- He made Judges dependent on THEIR Will alone for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries. (the whole system of judges is BROKEN and politicized)
- He has erected a multitude of New Offices (432 Agencies now, The 4th Branch, which holds 2.8 Million “civil servants” [an oxymoron] plus tens of millions of contractors — WE pay for them to tell us what to do every day)
- He has combined with others (the 4th Branch) to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving assent to their ACTs of pretended Legislation:
- Secret Courts (The Patriot Act) for the harassment of peaceful Citizens
- For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury (Secret Courts of the Patriot Act)
- For protecting them (Agencies like the FBI, CIA, Surveillance bodies, DOJ) from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States
- For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent (while they spend money beyond our means)
- For taking away our Charters (The Amendment Process), abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Government (Ignoring the Constitution when it is convenient).
- They have plundered our Treasury, ravaged our Costs with inflation, and destroyed the lives of our people (today and future generations).
- In every stage of these Oppressions, We have Petitioned (via letters to my representatives) for Redress in the most humble terms: Our (my) repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
It all sounds very familiar…wait long enough, and History repeats itself?
A Story of Morality
The one thought I read and liked in the “Why We Have Rights” document mentioned above was this poem by Blaga Dimitrova, “Grass,” quoted in Harold B. Segel, The Columbia Guide to the Literatures of Eastern Europe Since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003 [1974]
I’m not afraid
they’ll stamp me flat.
Grass stamped flat
soon becomes a path.
This poem was, in many ways, a prediction of the life of dissidents in the Soviet Union and also the fact that with enough people walking the same path behind her, the “System” would crumble, which it did on November 9, 1989, in Berlin.
Ms. Dimitrova has an exciting story. Early on, as a youth, she was “a Stalinist both politically and culturally,” however, as an adult, she became a dissident. This was when she became a poet and an intellectual. as the portrait described in the above reference says:
“By the 1960s, Dimitrova and a growing number of Bulgarian intellectuals found themselves increasingly unable to accept the harsh and arbitrary control of the Communist cultural bureaucracy over their artistic production.”
After a bout with cancer, the rest of her life became one of a dissident because, as she said, “she had no fear of death.”
