The View From 1776

Commentary on Education for Slavery

By Kartik Ariyur

The lack of knowledge of history, combined with equating education (etymologically, bringing that which is already within--the Omniscience of the Image of God within everyman) with apprenticeship and vocational training certainly make for a populace ready for slavery. But then, the United States still has a greater proportion of its populace with a true education and a broad enough knowledge of history--somewhere between 10 and 20% would be my guess. So there is much more hope for better conditions. With most young individuals obtaining their information from the Internet through critical study rather than from a single source of propaganda, there is even greater hope.
 
Of course, modern conservatives (also socialists, albeit socialist lite) may well give the socialists the means to gut freedom of speech on the Internet for short term political expediency. This is likely given that they attacked political free speech through McCain Feingold, have opened the door to socialist bureaucratic control of organized religion through government funding of religious charities, and almost got rid of the filibuster in the Senate.

Most other parts of the world are much worse off--the prosperity of Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, or New Zealand is artificial; they haven’t paid for their defense for a long time. The United States has been paying the bills and has remained in constant war mobilization since WW-II at great cost to itself.

This is because the fall to ignorance is inevitable for any society that devalues its currency to pay for constant war mobilization. Indeed, no war can be paid for without inflation--it is just not possible to have a debate of raising taxes or borrowing under those circumstances.

Under inflation, everyone has to gamble to preserve their capital, and those with little capital end up losing what they have in the boom-bust cycles engendered by inflationary monetary policy. The middle class thus gets wiped out in this process, as has happened in Mexico, Argentina or India. And instead of a smooth gradient from the poor to the rich, you eventually have a society with a lot of extremely rich and poor individuals. Secondly, the middle class and poor have to scramble to make ends meet--they end up working much harder and longer, and then don’t have the time to raise their children. Because the cultural knowledge of dealing with different circumstances is not taught to them, the children default to the instincts of self-preservation and procreation, and this starts a vicious cycle, wherein the rate of degeneration is determined by the rate of inflation.

In the US, this cycle perhaps began during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson: the Federal Reserve, the temporary Income Tax, and complete abandonment of the noninterventionist foreign policy of the Founders all began in those eight years. From then onward, the ‘conservatives’ have over every election cycle continued to become more ‘liberal.’ Today’s conservatives want to preserve and expand the House that Johnson, Carter and Clinton built (Medicare prescription drug program, No child left behind, and nation building...), just as the conservatives of the 1950s preserved and expanded the House that FDR built (expansion of Social Security, and constant war mobilization combined with a supply of food and credit to the Soviet Union).

But all of these problems have their roots in spiritual progress failing to keep up with material progress--when individuals gain more power without concomitantly gaining more wisdom they end up making more poor choices everyday. Put in another fashion, power corrupts, and enhancement of power without enhancement of character results in the misuse of power. With greater prosperity, individuals have more power in their hands, and liberty is bound to turn into license without a greater awareness of the consequences of one’s actions.

In the political domain the course appears to have been set with the institution of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the Sherman antitrust Act of 1890. Interventionist policy began with the Spanish-American war of 1898, when society welcomed the Nietzschean Will to Power of Messrs. Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt among others. The secularization of religion--with organized religion taking up political activism rather than increased efforts at character building was another indication. A reverent understanding of the unlimited possibilities of the Infinite, and the inscrutability of His Justice through merely material means was replaced with a Gnostic certainty of ‘what God wanted to get done’--’social justice’--perfecting the world (to the limited lights of human planners who believe they can play God).

There is, as I mention in the first paragraph, much greater hope for America than for most other parts of the world, but that hope does not lie in the sphere of political or social activity. It lies in the efforts of individuals striving for perfection, with a humble awareness of their own fallibility, which eventually attracts the grace of God that removes all limitations. It is only when individuals improve themselves rapidly that they are able to influence others to experiment with cultivating virtue (cognate with virility). This only happens when those around them notice their improvement within their limited attention span. When they manifest the glory that God intends everyman to manifest, they turn many toward their Maker. Tis thus that the ten men good in the eyes of God save their societies from oblivion. If a society doesn’t produce such men in every generation, it will share the destiny of Sodom and Gomorrah. If it produces many of them, there will be a significant expansion of liberty.

Historically, all great expansions of social or political liberty and consequent prosperity have been preceded by a spiritual renaissance--the Reformation in Europe, the several reformations of the Hindus in India, or that of the Greeks due to the schools of Pythagoras and Orpheus. The printing of the King James version of the Bible, the efforts of the Puritans preceded the Glorious Revolution, the Scottish Renaissance and the settlement of many True Pilgrims preceded the American Revolution, the Reformation and the efforts of the Calvinists and Puritans to practice Scriptural tenets in Holland preceded their freedom from Spain, Gandhi making himself a moral man and catalyzing an upsurge of morality enabled a free India (though with a government antithetical to his vision of a confederation of village republics with a minimal federal government conducting foreign policy and coordinating the national defense, an armed citizenry and no standing army).

In closing, there is a condition where the expansion of the money supply need not be harmful. That would happen if the government consistently follows the Hamiltonian ideal.

There are three important components to this ideal besides a very small and therefore highly accountable Federal government: the import of enough capital (individuals with knowledge and character) into itself to offset the expansion of money supply through the increase of productivity. A national debt incurred from this importation of character (into the universities, and for specific pressing needs) large enough that the banks and the established businesses they control do not destabilize the government, but serve to strengthen it in order to recover their dues. The absence of subsidies for individual irresponsibility at the Federal level.

The Founders (the Federalists--Adams and Hamilton) had this policy of importing the best artisans and mechanics from Europe, offering them funds and resources to start up in America. It has been continued to some extent in the present day through the import of scientific and engineering talent into the Universities, mostly for working on defense related science and technology. But there is a need for much greater importation given the present rate of monetary inflation.

Second, there is seldom a need for any society to import labor on a permanent basis--this need has arisen in the United States simply because of the disincentive to work of the welfare state. Moreover, it is much more difficult for labor to quickly become part of the melting pot; the truly educated can adjust easily to new conditions. Indeed, if these steps were assiduously followed without mixing Hamilton with Marx, the US could solve most of its problems quickly. The Jeffersonian ideal of continually decentralizing authority can be attained through using the 14th amendment (in a manner consistent with the rest of the constitution) to limit and decentralize jurisdiction to smaller units (perhaps eventually leading to Jefferson’s Ward Republics) rather than centralizing jurisdiction. Jurisdictions are certain to discriminate against certain individuals, and the Federal government exists so that they can shop jurisdictions. It is only when jurisdictions discriminate against groups that order comes under threat. Greater decentralization of jurisdiction reduces the probability of miscarriages of justice and therefore of violence.