Truth Is Not True

The truth is never true. There are too many perspectives, too many definitions and too many diviners of truth for it to matter. A leftist truth is too harsh and unyielding to their enemies and so it is with the right. There is something between capitalist greed and socialist utopia.

Tom Baugh recently issued a quiz, which most Constitutionalists, as I claim to be, would find initially erroneous on a couple of points, but the overall truth of it is valid. Our republic was founded upon certain documents that no president has followed, not even the revered George Washington, but their initial instincts were not wrong because they, when in power, proved their own thesis. Government itself, every one of them, is the evil to be quelled. That doesn't make me anti-government, it makes me a realist about government.

Governments attract people willing to dictate rules to others. Those vile usurpers and despots are no different from the average person given too much power. They are in fact magnets to people who are otherwise defective, but with the power of the office they are cured and even righteous in their own minds. It is the nature of government itself to destroy the individual humanity. Every bureaucracy proves this. It is a shield for petty people to hind behind policy, it is what causes that daily dose of incomprehensible actions of social workers, principals and police officers. It's out of their hands, you see, it's policy.

The Constitution is not a magical document that bestows liberty on us all, it is a contract. In exchange for the recognition of our rights, we agree to be fleeced and occasionally put out. But, any contract which has one party faithful to its intent and another who is not, is broken. It is invalid. The general concept of Baugh's quiz was to make us all look at the Constitution as a flawed document. I don't see it that way. I see it as a perfectly good document, better than one we might come up with in the future given the nature of people in general.

The trouble with the Constitution is it has been void since the Whiskey Rebellion and a few hundred years later a few of us are pointing that out. There was one point in particular that Baugh focused in on, the one where militias ultimately are under the authority of the president. I take exception to that statement on the grounds that when the contract is void, so are all of the provisions within. In other words, there would be no disagreement for our self-formed militias to come to the aid of the president if that president were faithful to the oath administered. It is the governmental reversal of all of these rights through definition which has voided it and caused people like myself and others to recognize that with all of the legal maneuvering words mean the opposite of what they once did. That does not make the document flawed, it means that we have let the government define our rights through legal re-definition for much too long.

So the question remains, what do we do now? This was the gist of the quiz, to wake some people up and to put that question to them, which he then answers by proffering the idea that we should change the Constitution. How? When that time comes, when the dollar is nothing but a bad check with which you got stuck and the creditors come to get the gold, we will be just one group in a thousand looking to re-write the Constitution and we will lose that battle.

It will be like the Arab Spring and the fighters, the muscle, will ultimately yield to a civilian authority, one that will act much more like Bolsheviks than the founders. The calls will be great to return to our "democratic" roots and the misinformed public will act much as it does now, with mindless stupefaction at the sudden sea-change, but will nonetheless go along with it.

The truth, as I see it, is that no document will ever harness the hearts of Man. No government will ever be faithful to its founding. "It is impossible," Karl Popper once said, "to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." The desire for Man to control his/her environment has led to the fantastic life most of us live, but it brings with it the desire to control everything. One cannot legislate that out of human nature, or write a document so ingenious that it sways the yearning heart.

Liberty is not a static value, it undulates like a wave, sometimes stronger and sometimes weaker, we are at a low tide in this country. Most people know that deep down. We must be clever and thoughtful and seek the ways to turn the tide, to push back against oppression in a way that awakens the others and brings them to our side. Or, we burn it down and sort through the ashes for something of value.