“I think, therefore I am” or “I fear, therefore I hate”? Humankind chooses “We are, therefore we will.”

The Constitution of the United States was crafted in a vibrant milieu that is succinctly described by Descartes’s phrase, “I think, therefore I am.” This phrase has traditionally been taught as one that empowers individuals to reclaim self-worth and political power against another era of government described by Louis XIV’s “I am the State,” an era in which too many people were disposable and starved by the policies of their own government.

This year, we seem to be on the precipice of a return to tyranny that I believe is describe thusly: “I fear, therefore I hate.” World-systems historians and economists are not surprised to see a resurgence of hate-speech roughly 75 years since the fascist era in which Europeans nearly self-annihilated through genocide. We can chalk this up to Kondratieff cycles in objective, quantitative analyses. Philosophers and political scientists can do the same using Hegelian dialectic. The danger is that, while we write, the ink in our pens and printers may turn from black to the macabre iron oxide red of spilled human blood.

One of the tragedies of the 2016 presidential election discourse is the inward focused, navel-gazing that blinds too many from the positive achievements of the United Nations Millennium Development campaign. There is a beautiful movement in the world in which those who ascribe to “I think, therefore I am” are working collectively to use laboratory and indigenous scientific knowledge to find and implement sustainable solutions to climate change. http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sdgoverview/

“We are, therefore we will” is the zeitgeist of the planet now. The human family has decided that we will live and we have a collective will to do so with dignity. Many of us will still be poor in terms of material goods but we will not live in poverty. We will not be poor in spirit.

Ironically, it is the spirit of the U.S. Constitution, that document that secured and stabilized the first nation to throw off the chains of colonialism, that catalyzes the global evolution from “I think, therefore I am” toward “We are, therefore we will.”

Please, as you encounter those who suffer from and succumb to “I fear, therefore I hate,” inoculate them with love and kindness and knowledge that humankind, people of all colors, religions, genders and creeds, has decided to work to help them transcend the poverty of body or soul that ails them. They have no need to hate anyone or anything but fear, itself.

John Adams’ warning about mixing money, politics and national security

 

 

The United States of America is the elder sibling of formerly colonized nations and our national security depends upon us remembering the responsibility that comes with this historic position.

 

With every election cycle, we affirm our social contract by infusing our elected government with new representatives as a means of avoiding oppressive disconnections between those who govern and the governed.

 

In this presidential election cycle, we celebrate the opportunity that we have to achieve success. Definitions of that success vary. For some it is measured by service to civil society. For others it is measured by the ability to employ many others. Some are able to do both as they live out the concept in our Preamble to the Declaration of Independence that we have the inalienable right to the “pursuit of Happiness.” We are also painfully aware, and under international scrutiny, that this right is not yet universal.

 

In this presidential election cycle, we are also challenged to diligently pursue the inalienable right to Liberty. Liberty is more humane than the anarchy that arises when people take it upon themselves to step outside of the bonds of our social contract and disrespect the rights of others. Daily vigilance promotes Liberty.

 

This daily vigilance includes monitoring a source of corruption that Founding Father John Adams identified. “When the legislature is corrupted, the people are undone.” One cause of that corruption, future President Adams warned, occurs when the power of the ordinary person is diminished by money power. “The rich, the well-born, and the able, acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense in a house of representatives. The most illustrious of them must, therefore, be separated from the mass, and placed by themselves in a senate; this is, to all honest and useful intents, an ostracism.” Adams was wary of the power of monied interests usurping the sovereignty of the people. He recognized a role in the polity for those who are now identified as the One Percent. “When he has obtained the object of his wishes, you may still hope for the benefits of his exertions, without dreading his passions.” John Adams warned us that some members of the social class commonly referred to as the One Percent may use their power in philanthropic and virtuous ways to enhance “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” for all while a few others, acting for an infinitesimal constituency, may betray our Preamble.

 

In this presidential election cycle, we, the collective elder sibling of formerly colonized nations, have an obligation to secure Liberty for ourselves and to model for other nations the benefits of living within the values enumerated in our Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It is a matter of national security.

 

Preamble to the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

 

John Adams was quoted from The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1851) IV: 290-291.