Chapter Twelve
THE SOVEREIGN IDEA
At a time in history when the concept of National Sovereignty is in the process of redefinition, it is helpful, even necessary, to clearly grasp what it is that actually constitutes this thing called national sovereignty. At first glance it might seem obvious: national sovereignty is intact if an invader has not occupied territory previously held by the nation. What is not so obvious is the fact that territory includes more than physical terrain.
As we have seen as we traced the evolution of government on this planet, a nation, before it occupies any physical terrain, stakes out a definition of truth, a definition of reality, that justifies the existence of the government. This self-evident truth is expressed by words that form ideas about the Cause of government. Without these Ideas, government is not human government, and any physical terrain occupied is no different in form and substance from the government established by a pack of wolves. Therefore the Idea must be seen to be the foundation upon which human government bases its claims to Sovereignty.
History demonstrates that not only is the Idea foundational to National Sovereignty, without that Idea there can be no National Sovereignty. For instance, the Roman Empire was established upon the idea of the Sovereignty of Caesar. The will of Caesar was defined as equivalent to the will of the Creator of the Universe. This idea was expressed by the phrase. "Caesar is Lord." This idea, once accepted as Sovereign, justified every word and deed of Caesar. The logic of the idea impelled all who accepted it to grant Caesar the Right to do whatever He willed, since, after all, he had the same Rights of Ownership as the Creator Himself. Early Christianity presented a grave threat to the Roman Empire precisely because Christianity was encouraging gentiles all across the Empire to do what the Jews of Israel had always done: deny the Sovereign Idea upon which the Empire rested. Christians as well as Jews simply could not admit that Caesar was Lord. Instead of destroying the threat to his Sovereignty when he sacked and destroyed Israel in 71 a.d., Caesar saw Christian evangelists spreading throughout the Empire, encouraging all who believed in the new religion to refuse to grant that Caesar was Lord.
Faced with this threat to the Sovereign Idea, a succession of Caesars used every conceivable weapon to stop the Christian attack on the Sovereign Idea.
Caesar failed and finally, under Constantine, Rome formally accepted the Christian definition of reality.
One of the interesting paradoxes of history is that the success of the Christian idea spelled the destruction of the Roman Idea. Without the Idea of the Sovereignty of Caesar, and in the absence of any alternative Idea upon which to justify Sovereignty, the Roman Empire was destroyed.
As earlier noted, The Christian Church stepped into the political vacuum created by the fall of the Roman Empire and supplied the Doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings to justify government sovereignty. This Sovereign Idea became the foundation upon which every government in western civilization relied for the better part of one millennium. With the American Revolution's attack on the Doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, a new Sovereign Idea was established upon which government sovereignty was erected. Time after time throughout history the sovereignty of government has been erected upon the Sovereign Idea.
The nations of the world stand today arrayed against each other with no power, no mechanism, no institution, no structure separating them except the resistance generated by each individual nation. Like tectonic plates they tend to move relentlessly in one direction or another, inexorably scraping against the adjoining plate, resistance against resistance. Pressure builds, ever increasing pressure, until finally an eruption.
While nations are analogous to tectonic plates in that their presence leads inexorably to earthshaking catastrophes, nations are an utterly different species. The mind of man did not create tectonic plates but did create nations. As a creature of the mind of man, the thing called nations is subject to man's decree in a way no tectonic plate will ever be.
From time immemorial the thing called nation has been a vehicle created by people in order to carry a people's self-image. People would answer for themselves the key questions of life: who am I? where am I? what's wrong? how do I fix it?. The answers became the facts that defined a person's self-image.
People who shared a common self-image have always banded or bonded together in defense of their common self-image. Responding to an instinctive awareness that an intact self-image was the best insurance for an intact flesh and blood body, people congregate with those who share the same self-image.
Throughout history, people have tended to deposit their self-image in the nearest vehicle that appeared to have the power to carry and protect that self-image. Since an individuals self-image is naturally informed by the family unit, the family unit became the first vehicle of government. We have traced the evolution of government from the Age of Patriarchs to the present Age of Nations.
The reason the Age of Patriarchs was replaced by the Age of Nations is because the family unit proved an ineffective vehicle for the protection of self-image. The dangers encountered in a hostile world proved too much for the tribe to cope with. In order to protect the individual self-image, people were forced to answer the question who am I? in terms that included more than their natural family tree. People were forced to admit that they needed a broader self-image, bigger answers to the question who am I? where am I? what's wrong? how do I fix it? than the answers provided by the immediate family.
In time, when a large group of people agreed upon the same answers, the answers agreed upon came to be deposited in a vehicle called nation. The vehicle was armored and armed to stand waiting to repel contrary and competing answers to the same questions provided by other peoples on earth. In this way a person's self-image was projected into a protective mechanism that had much greater power to ward off potential threats to the Body that projected the self-image outward.
It is self-evident to most people that they cannot survive alone; they need help. For most people throughout history the group has been perceived as the only effective defense for the individual made of flesh and blood. Since a nation embodies the ideas, the beliefs that define the perceived minimum requirements for the sustenance of the flesh and blood of the individual, the nation and the ideas it represents becomes a literal umbrella sheltering the individual from elements perceived to be hostile. Any threat to the ideas embodied by the nation can be resisted by the combined power of all the individuals made of flesh and blood. Instead of one person being forced to stand alone in a hostile world, the nation provides the vehicle for individual defense.
This aspect of individual defense tends to be ignored and nations defined as mechanisms of mutual defense. While it is true that individual defense in nations occurs because people cooperate in mutual defense, it might be obvious but it still needs to be said, mutual defense cannot occur unless individuals survive.
The presence of nuclear proliferation and the resulting dangers forces all individuals today to ponder whether nations sitting atop tectonic plates composed of different definitions of Right and Wrong are an effective vehicle for either individual or mutual protection. We all know that nations create war. People can kill people in many ways, but only when nations kill people is it called war. Strictly speaking, war can only occur between nations. Even the grey area called Civil War occurs only when two alternative governments vie for control of a single nation. Individuals who kill people without government authorization are called murderers, or insurrectionists, or rebels, or assassins, or any of a plethora of terms, but with government authorization the same individuals are called soldiers, or warriors.
Obviously, if war is a problem that threatens the survival of our species, the elimination of that problem is going to require a redefinition of this thing called nation. But when the thing called nation is understood by all to be Sovereign, no one has the Right to interfere with that which is Sovereign. As long as the earth is divided into fragmented groups of people who see themselves as Sovereign nations, war will always be defined as a legal activity of man. Therefore, the solution to the problem of war involves gathering the different nations into a single, united, nation.
We will never see this union of nations until we understand how the fragmentation of people occurred on this planet. Many theories have been offered to explain the divisions of the people on this planet. The Bible traces the beginning of this process of the division of the people's of the earth to the plain at Shinar at the foot of what has come to be known as the tower of Babel. It was at that place, the Bible tells us, that people ceased to speak the same language and were fragmented into disparate and discordant groups all with different answers to the questions asked by every person on earth. Whether the story be seen as myth or historical fact it serves as a starting point for understanding how people of the same species arrived at different answers to the same questions.
Given the influence of the story of the tower of Babel on the thought process of western civilization, we tend to think that people disagree because they do not speak the same language. Disagreement goes much deeper than this. People disagree because they literally do not perceive the same reality.
People are limited by the fact that we can only perceive what we perceive. A person born and raised amid snow and ice, surrounded by people who only knew snow and ice, would reasonably believe the world was completely filled with snow and ice. In the same way, if all we perceive leads us to believe we are the only people with the Right to inhabit and control a certain area of the planet earth, then that is what we will believe. If outsiders arrive who believe they have the Right to control the area we believed we had the Right to control, we have the choice of surrender or resistance. Resistance has proven itself in history to be the most likely response.
While on the surface, terrain is and always has been the immediate cause of conflict between people; inevitably, beneath the surface, beneath the terrain, was what we perceived, what we believed, to be our Right.
So people's perception of right and wrong becomes the bedrock, the tectonic plate, upon which all action is founded. If we perceive we are Right, we can act; without such perception we are paralyzed into inaction. Our perception of Right and Wrong composes the ideas, the facts, that define our self-image.
Today we live in a world where all the people of the planet have deposited their self-images into the vehicle called nation. We are all taught to believe it is Right to deposit our self-image into the nation. Nationalism is the predominant idea in the mind of modern man.
But we all see clearly that wars occur between nations. And War is perceived to be a threat that today has the power to not only destroy the self-image of our species but the flesh and blood body that carries the self-image.
We live in a time where the wisdom of man has founded its way of life on a Truth that is specious. War is defined as a legal activity between nations. International Law holds that it is legal for a nation to bomb, destroy, annihilate another nation. War is Just. War is Right. Yet War is the mechanism that can unleash the power that can destroy us all. The logical conclusion of that Law says clearly that is it Right to destroy our species. Such logic must be declared to be specious.
The only way to eliminate the specious truth from the mind of man is to declare conflict between nations to be illegal. Yet such a law is meaningless unless there is a power that can enforce the law. In order for such a law to be enforced, a legal authority would have to exist with the power to force nations to obey the law. Such a legal authority would have to be created by we, the people.
But we, the people, are at risk because we have created a monster. The nation that we have created cannot be a nation unless it is Sovereign. No nation on earth can accept a sacrifice of its sovereignty. The nation today has developed a self-image of its own. It is as if the nation has become a living thing with a mind of its own that is independent of the will of the individuals that make up the nation. Instead of the nation being a repository for the self-image of the individuals in the nation, the nation has become the mind that creates the individual's self-image.
This happened once before in the United States of America. Prior to the Civil War, people in the South had deposited their self-image not in the nation but in the State. Sovereignty was perceived to lie in the State, not in the nation. Since the state was perceived to be Sovereign, the State could do whatever it wanted to do. Secession was a Right.
The people of the South had created a monster that had the Right to destroy the nation founded by their forefathers. They perceived themselves to have that Right because they perceived the Founding Fathers to have created a government with Sovereignty deposited in the States.
The Founding Fathers of the United States of America created a Sovereign Nation. But the Sovereignty of the Nation was founded upon an idea. The idea stated specifically that the Creator, Nature's God, had endowed people with Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of those ends "it is the Right of the People to alter or 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. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, that to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security..."
Today most people on this planet believe Sovereignty has been deposited in the Nation. The mind of man is controlled by Nationalism. But, according to the words of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, we, the people, of the United States of America have the Right, the duty, to alter or abolish any form of government that is destructive of the ends government is created to accomplish. We must all understand clearly that just as we, the people, had the Right to deposit Sovereignty in the nation, we have the Right to deposit Sovereignty in a Power higher than the nation. The Nation does not control us. We, the people, control the Nation.
The only thing we know with certainty about the future is it lies ahead. But we can forecast with some degree of accuracy. The relationship between competing forms of government is the cause of conflict. When nations believe it is Lawful and Right to do anything in wartime, the stage is set for unrestrained horror. Examples of that horror have surrounded us for centuries and surround us today.
With the exception of the Civil War, the people of the United States of America have experienced the horror only vicariously. The real horror occurs overseas and far away. Our nation has been strong enough to keep the real horror away. But we live in a time where the weapons of horror are proliferating. If the horror comes to these shores, we will all be faced with the fact that there are some things the Sovereign United States of America cannot protect us from.
I hope and pray that time never comes. But the proliferation of nuclear weapons makes me think it is only a matter of time. I want us to be prepared. If the nation called the United States of America cannot keep the weapons from destroying we, the people, at least we can know that the ideas upon which the United States of America was erected do have that power. That is, as long as we, the people, are willing to defend those Sovereign Ideas by seeing them used as the basis for a New World Order. I am writing this because I know we will never defend them--the Sovereign Ideas upon which the United States of America was erected--either now or in the future, unless our self-image has been deposited in those Ideas.
As a Free Lance Social Scientist, my job is to present evidence that would allow hypotheses to be verified or nullified. One hypothesis common in the United States is that this nation will survive into the third Millennium. My purpose in writing this book is to point out that the thing called the United States of America is now actually two things: the United States of America created by the Founding Fathers; and the United States of America created by Judicial Decree in 1973. This nation is divided now into those who believe they live in the nation founded by the Founding Fathers and those who believe they live in the nation created by Judicial Decree. Abraham Lincoln told us that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
I have tried to demonstrate that the concept of Sovereignty can only be rightly grasped when it is understood that Ideas alone are the basis for Sovereignty. Even if Lincoln is proved to be wrong in this instance and we continue to stand into the third millennium, the ideas that we contribute to the establishment of the government that will rule the New World Order will necessarily be different ideas than the ones upon which this nation was founded. The Sovereign Ideas that provided a basis for the Sovereignty of the United States of America have already been removed from the thought process of the legal authorities in this nation. The redefinition process that led the people of this nation to see that our Founding Fathers were incorrect in saying that "all men" were endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, the redefinition process that led us to conclude that all people were endowed by their Creator with inalienable Rights, has now become a perverse attempt to destroy the idea of the Creator itself. The only question remaining as we move toward the formation of the New World Order is whether we, the people, will allow the idea of the Creator held to be a self-evident truth by the Founding Fathers of the United States of America to be removed from the face of the earth.
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