A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence:
from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.
Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813)
A quick search in Google tells me that this is a composite quote, not necessarily by Tytler as the comment poster cites it, and possibly of unknown origin. I feel like I’ve been through this all before, finding a quote I really liked, searching for the author, and finding that it has been attributed to several people, throughout time, and across nations. Well, it isn’t important who penned the words; the important thing is the apparent truth of them.
The cycle set forth, from bondage to faith to courage to liberty to abundance to selfishness to complacency to apathy to dependency and back to bondage, is prevalent in all aspects of life. You can find this cycle of behavior in your own life. It appears in individual behavior and in group behavior, and if you look into history, it appears in the course of large nations. What intrigues me is that it always seems to happen, and that it is clearly happening in the United States right now.
I can’t fully imagine a war fought on U.S. soil, but some of the current events seem to point that way. Thinking about this cycle of bondage points that way, too, if we look at the U.S. over the last 60 years. There was great prosperity and abundance after World War II. There were ups and downs along the way, but for the most part, the latter half of the 20th century was prosperous. The result is Generation Y, intent on finding pleasure, immediate pleasure, in all aspects of life. They, along with many of the generation that made them, (I’m on the cusp between Generation X and Generation Y, so I don’t know how I fit into this mess), therefore, we, are selfish, complacent, and apathetic.
We want services, but we don’t want to pay for them. We know there are a lot of people struggling in the world, but we’d rather watch people eat live tarantulas in prime-time than figure out how to help feed the children being neglected down the street. We know that people are suffering, but we don’t care. We are dependent upon the “gracious” hand of Uncle Sam. I have been thinking that the government has become its own entity that it was no longer made up of people, that it no longer represented the people. I hoped that the people still consisted of the types in the faith and courage part of the cycle outlined above. Now I wonder. Maybe the government really does represent the people. Maybe the greed and corruption we see in the government isn’t some separate body from the people of this country, but is an accurate sample of the people of this country. If this is the case, it is time for a new declaration of independence.
Thomas Jefferson and the Continental Congress declared independence from the British Monarchy on behalf of the people living in the American colonies at the time. Great Britain fought against the rebellion, but lost. Human liberty won. Human liberty is now threatened again, but not by the control of a foreign government. It is threatened by the control of a domestic government; it is threatened by the people of the country. We are endangering ourselves. How do we declare independence from ourselves?
War? I can’t picture what it would look like, and I hope it doesn’t come down to that. But the alternative is changing the way we do business (meaning how we conduct ourselves in general, day to day), and this doesn’t seem to be a realizable option. Without a change, without war, it will continue to stagnate and putrefy, and we will find ourselves in bondage.
As though we aren’t currently in bondage, I believe we are. In our country of liberty, I am not free to own anything of my own accord. Most items are taxed at point of sale, and then again yearly through registration fees, property tax, and income tax. I might buy a vehicle, but then I’m required to register it every year and be covered by insurance. If I don’t buy insurance, I can be fined, another form of tax. Now we will enter a similar process with health insurance. Buy it or be taxed. I can “buy” property, but then I pay taxes on it every year. If I wanted to have my own farm on which I raised crop and animals enough to provide for my family, I couldn’t do it unless I paid the taxes and licensing fees to do it. There is no ownership, there is only rental.
I might not be so unhappy about the arrangement if the rental fees I paid to the government were used for the purposes they are marketed to be used as, or at least, if the purposes they are used for were relevant to me. I understand property taxes insofar as they pay for local shared utilities and services. I can see the wisdom in this type of community living, what I cannot see the wisdom in is these monies being used to pay someone an extravagant salary and retirement. It has all gotten out of hand. And we’ve done it to ourselves. We have given up on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in return for a little security on what we have at the moment.
At some point we gave up our faith, and relied upon our own courage. But that was imperfect and we got scared, so when we developed any kind of abundance, we safeguarded it, but not through faith and personal courage, through fear and reliance upon an outside influence. All we had to do was give up a little bit of our liberty in exchange. So we did. And then with the security it gave, we fell into complacency, and ever since the carpet has been being pulled out from under us, inch by inch, a little at a time, until now we are on the very edge, about to have it yanked out from under us completely. The sick joke is that we are the ones pulling the carpet! We are about to pulled the carpet right out from under our own feet and then act surprised when we are lying face down on the floor.
We built a house of cards and it is about to fall over. Will we be able to rebuild that house of cards, or will someone else get to the deck first and change the game? In reality the game already changed a long time ago. While some were still working on the house of cards, others were slowly taking cards off of the house and reshuffling them in preparation for a new game. We can all buy in to the new game; of course, the ante is your freedom.
There is one answer, and it is found in that cycle describing our return to bondage. The path starts out in bondage, and the delivery from bondage is found in faith. Faith is the answer. The beauty of the process is that it can be restarted at anytime. We don’t have to return to full bondage (remember, we are already in bondage), we can go right to increasing faith, and then when we are able to incorporate courage, and abundance, we go right back to faith. It can be done, but only if we eliminate selfishness. Again, the root of all problems is selfishness. Meaning the solution to all problems is humility. Further, the root and solution to all problems lies within each individual person in choosing how they will live and relate to other people. Now for the whimsical portion of this revolution, we have the power within us to affect this change; we have always had it, just like E.T., Dorothy, and Rocky IV.
