Chapter Six
THE WILL OF THE ONE AND THE WILL OF THE MANY
The fundamental question facing the people of the earth today is the same question that has always faced every person on this planet: whose will does government enforce?
Governments are instruments through which will is enforced. Without will--the active energy of mind devoted to the accomplishment of goal--no power is present from which to form a government. And without power there is no government.
Governments differ only to the extent that a different will is being enforced. For example, the first form of government on earth is theorized to be the family unit headed by the Father. Since this unit existed before recorded history, little is known about the government but much can be inferred from what we see today among primitive family units. Order is established and survival is a product of the physical prowess of the Father. Therefore the will of the Father, the one, is supreme over the will of the wife or wives and children, the many.
The Old Testament, a book many believe dates from the 4th millennium B.C., offers the first recorded account of the age of the Patriarchs. The form of government found there is very similar to what is observed today among primitive cultures. Once again we see a loosely constructed government where the will of the Father, the one, creates law for the many.
To his family, the Patriarch looked like he had been created to rule. Since the Old Father was the oldest among a group of women and children, and since the physical strength and will of the Old Father provided the family with its survival, there was a sense in which the family actually owed the Patriarch their life. Add to this the fact that the Old Father had been created first and it becomes easy to see how the family could believe that the Patriarch had been created to rule the family. For those who believed in a Creator whose will had to be obeyed, it was natural to see in the Patriarch the person the Creator had ordained to rule.
When the family unit grew and an extended family began to form, the question of Right to Rule became less self-evident than in the days when all the children were offspring of one man. Families became tribes and tribes became kingdoms. But as governmental form evolved to include masses of people, the governments were still based on the will of the one in dominion over the will of the many.
In some cases, perhaps most, the will of the one held dominion because the people consented to see the Ruler in the same way the Patriarchs had once been perceived by the wife and progeny of the Patriarch. The King, or Pharaoh, or whatever the title, still was perceived as the Old Father who had been ordained to Rule by Will of the Creator.
Obviously some people did not readily consent to being ruled by One. Ancient Greece demonstrates that some people could conceive other alternatives. Yet ancient history is primarily a story about the battles in which the will of the one won the Right to Rule the many. Whether the One was called Pharaoh or King or Caesar or Father, the moral of the story in ancient history is the same: the Will of the One inevitably triumphed over the Will of the Many.
When the Roman Empire fell, the world experienced a vacuum of authority because no idea was present upon which to base government authority. Brute force ruled terrain that could no longer be called western civilization.
The Christian Church solved the problem by promoting the idea of the Divine Rights of Kings. This idea explained that it was God's Will for the King--the one--to rule the many.
Since the authority of secular rulers was dependent upon an idea controlled by the Church, there was great tension for hundreds of years between secular rulers and the rulers of the Church. Those familiar with medieval history will see myriad examples of the tensions created by the double minded attitude of secular rulers to the authority of the Pope: On the one hand, secular rulers were greatly pleased that the idea of the dominion of the One over the many was blessed by the Church, but on the other hand they were uncomfortable because their Right to rule was seen to be dependent upon the blessing of the Church.
Secular rulers had good reason to be afraid. In 1294, in an argument with Philip the Fair, king of France, Pope Boniface VIII issued the papal bull, Unam sanctam, in which he asserted that the whole human race (a category that everyone knew included Kings, Princes, and Lords of all varieties) was subject to the Roman pontiff and that all who differed from this doctrine were heretics and could not be saved. Few secular rulers in the centuries following were satisfied with the Pope's decree and medieval history is primarily a record of the ingenious attempts of secular rulers to free the Crown from the Pope's domination.
The turning point in the relationship between the will of One and the will of the Many can be traced to the Council of Constance which met in 1415 and for several years thereafter. This Council, made up of many Cardinals of the Church, came together to resolve the problem created by more than one Pope at the same time. The presence of two rival Popes had divided western Christendom and caused massive confusion. For people who had been led by the Church to believe that it was God's Will for the One to rule the Many and who had been led to believe that the One who ruled all of creation was the Pope, the presence of two who claimed to be the One, with all the powers understood to accrue to the One, caused massive head shaking and wringing of hands.
Unfortunately for the dominion of Will of the One over the Will of the Many, the only way to resolve the problem created by the two Popes was for the Many to declare itself to be the Supreme Ecclesiastical authority over the One. This the Council of Constance proceeded to do.
No longer was the idea of the Right of the One to rule the Many secure. The Church, upon whose authority the King had based his right to rule, had itself changed its mind about where Supreme Authority lay. The idea was let loose that the many had the right to rule. The repercussions of this change of mind echoed through the Protestant Reformation and forever altered the face of Christendom and government on this planet.
Why did it take nearly three thousand years of recorded history before the will of the many began to express itself in a significant way? It seems reasonable to explain this fact by looking at the way authority had been designed in the family unit and, given that fact, to conclude that during the first three thousand years of recorded history most people could conceive of no form of government other than the will of the one in dominion over the will of the many.
It took over three hundred years for the idea loosed at Constance to begin to reach its logical conclusion. That logical conclusion is called by historians the American Revolution. The document called the Declaration of Independence can only be seen in context when the document is understood to be the inevitable conclusion to the idea that the many have the Right to rule.
Let us examine again the reasoning in the Declaration from the perspective of the problem of the One and the Many. The reasoning is ingenious. "...all men are created equal...they are endowed with their Creator with certain inalienable rights...governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..." One the one hand, the American Declaration of Independence declares that the Will of the One, the Creator, is the source of all authority and Right. Then it declares that the Will of the One has designed government so that the Many can rule as long as the Many do not violate the Rights of the One.
In a few short paragraphs all the turmoil, confusion, blood and gore created by the problem of the One and the Many were resolved in favor of the Many without denying that there was One with the Right to Rule. It was simply declared to be self-evident that the One with the Right to Rule--the Creator--had decreed that the Many had the Right to form their own government. As long as the many were willing to cooperate with the plan of the One--the Creator--the government so established could operate with all the authority possessed by the One with the Right to Rule. The American Revolution finally explained how the the Will of the Many could form a government in obedience to the Will of the One.
At the conclusion of the American Revolution two distinct ideas justified all the governments on earth. Government in Service to the Ruler justified every government on earth except the American government, Government in Service to the people justified the government in the United States of America. From these two ideas every government now on the face of the earth can trace its roots. ************************************
Just as we saw earlier that the French Revolution took ideas unleashed in the American Revolution concerning the role of the Creator and gave them a reverse spin, so too did they do with the ideas about the One and Many. The French Revolution proclaimed that the purpose of government was to serve the people. The French Revolution proclaimed the will of the Many to be the source of Right. The role of the One was simply to obey. By eliminating the Will of the Creator--the One--from consideration, the individual disappeared into a mob gathered at the base of the guillotine, or, worse yet, beneath the blade of the guillotine.
Yet the ideas unleashed in the French Revolution provided the foundation upon which the Communist form of government was built. Communist ideology abolished the idea of a Creator with a Will and a Plan of His own, and the will of the Many was declared Sovereign. This idea was extended in communist ideology until the State, the embodiment of the Will of the Many, was forthrightly proclaimed to be exactly equivalent to what mankind had historically called god. The Many proclaimed themselves to be the One.
Today the medieval solution to the problem of the One and Many is preserved by Muslim fundamentalism. The world watched the Ayatollah return to rule in Iran, but few people understood that they were witnessing the resurrection of the Divine Right of Kings.
Muslim fundamentalists are fundamentalists because they advocate a return to exactly the same type of theocratic solution to the problem of the One and the Many offered by Pope Boniface VIII in 1294. But instead of the Christian Pope as the One to rule the Many, the Muslim fundamentalist would substitute the Ayatollah. In the Muslim solution to the problem of the one and many we see further evidence of the enduring strength of the idea of Government in Service to the Ruler.
The argument concerning the role of the Will of the One and the Will of the Many continues today. The argument continues because the question of whose will controls government is the bedrock upon which all government structures are erected. Inevitably those questions are answered as people embrace ideas that they decide to believe. While no government can exist without the ideas that justify government, government will never come into focus until we understand the role that people themselves inevitably play in government.
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