William Monje's Political Blog

Individual Sovereignty and Institutional Bigness

I watch the news, pretty much, and do have an idea of what’s going on from day to day.  And, like most people, I have opinions and could even work up a commentary on such as who, I believe, is the better candidate for president.  But I consider that exercise only one more voice in a cacophony of blathering idiots like all those bellowing and squawking “panels of experts” who harp upon it incessantly, almost as if their righteous opinion, which is rehashed party talking points, actually meant something.  It’s not that I don’t have opinions and quite a bit of commentary; it is more an issue of subject matter.  I prefer to address conditions and how we created them than nitpick at current events and personalities in the news.

I do take some pleasure, from time to time, in pointing out the failing of our present leaders and other elected representatives, but in doing so I also do not miss the opportunity to remind one and all that we put them there…for one reason or another.  I cannot buy or excuse the claim that they were “the lesser of two evils,” however.   That can only mean one willingly chose what they knew to be an evil in the first place.  (Frankly, I would say anyone who runs for public office is suspect.)  There was always another choice, including none at all.  Personally, I always vote for a sure-not-to-win third party anyway.  That way I am not a party to however our glorious new leader leads us farther done the path to ruin and damnation.

My greater interest is in how we got where we are and why.  Where did it start?  What went wrong?  What was the noble purpose and intention somewhere in our long lost history that became so obviously altered and distorted?  And what, if anything, could possibly be done to remedy the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into?  I will admit, however, that correction, whenever attempted, which is almost always the case in all such incidents of rot and corruption, without fail tends to make matters worse.  Every solution tends to expand a new set of problems exponentially.  I even wonder sometimes that if we were to remove all those splendorous and celebrated solutions, going backward in time, we might actually discover there never was a problem in the first place.

When all that went wrong is examined, considering those examiners are honest with themselves, it seems to me that the most basic failing is the lack of a knowledge of history, leading most specifically to a repetition of past mistakes, which can only mean an obvious absence of a well-rounded education, particularly in the social sciences.  In fact, the greatest wrong to be examined begins right there in formal education itself.  Somewhere along the line we stopped teaching our kids the basics of not only where our way of life came from but how to maintain and put into practice those concepts of equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness our founders and forbearers thought they had established.

Surveys and statistics, although not the end-all we might believe, do, if nothing else, give us a hint at why things went wrong because of what is missing.  Democracy as we would practice it in this republic of ours is a failed institution when all those people who would assert themselves as the all-powerful and righteous majority are innately ignorant of democracy and do not even know what a republic is or that they were meant to live in one.  They fail in that knowledge because they do not know the beginnings of those ideals, nor do they seem to care.  History bores most people; and the concept of the most people—as in “the majority rules”—is the essential relevance of democracy.

Ignorance Without Bliss

Getting back to surveys and statistics, it is a point of regret and distress that elementary and high school students’ knowledge of and interest in our government today and the origins and principles upon which it are based is grossly lacking.  American history and civics seem to be low on the list of public school successful teaching, but in too many cases simply aren’t on the list at all.  Civics is frequently one of the first subjects to get dropped from what should be a well-rounding curriculum.  Geography is another sorely lacking bit of knowledge in the average American, not just school children. 

People who find it okay to make comments about countries in the news, it seems, frequently cannot find that country on a map.  Frankly, I don’t find it difficult to believe that people can talk a great deal about things they know little about.  Much of it is a matter of parroting some newscaster or commentator, maybe even a commercial.  Most people, for instance, cannot define what a calorie is, even though it may be a popular word in their vocabulary; and up until the seventies hardly anyone knew what ecology meant.  It has always amused me when relatively obscure (in a popular sense) technical or scientific terms become the latest fad and/or advertising campaign.

Ironically this population, which cannot find North Korea, Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan on a map, is regularly surveyed by big corporations and institutions and broadcasters who ask them such questions as whether or not we should be in or even attack these countries they cannot find on a map, and then their answers become a major element of what should have been an educated and factual news report relating to those countries.  Worst of all, politicians and other government functionaries then tend to make crucial decisions and even take momentous and perilous actions based on those surveys of opinionated ignorance.  It is a fallacy of contemporary journalism that surveys of a basically uninformed public is an exercise in reality, fact and truth and is somehow earnest, reliable and thorough news reporting.  It effectively acts as if the opinion of an uninformed and uneducated public has been called upon by the powers-that-be to formulate serious policy and help make grave decisions.

We seem to have drifted into a nation of people who believe or are convinced they have been better educated than any other people, complete with good grades, while all the time we have been officially dumbed down and propagandized to obey and serve what could only be called “the greater interests of the greater institutions,” which, of course, is a long way from the individual rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Such rights are necessarily individual rights and must be alive in the soul of each and every person to exist on any scale at all.  Such as liberty and the pursuit of happiness can never be the product of an institution.  The ultimate goal of any institution, regardless of any stated purpose in its conception, is the self preservation of that institution.  Institutions exist for their own sake, with the decisions and actions of that institution a product of dehumanized and institutionalized, unwavering policy.  Any other declaration of intention, such as mission statements, came from individuals who preceded the damn institutions.

When one of my granddaughters was in high school she told me she had gotten an A in American history.  That sounded good, but having learned over a couple of generations how public education had deteriorated into an exercise in awarding grades for student self esteem, not for a student learning the damn subject matter, I asked her, “Who was the second President of the United States?”  She said, “John…somebody.”  I guess nowadays that is close enough to get an A in American history. 

Perhaps it is easy to see how some impressive and easily repeatable propaganda can cause otherwise rational people to believe that our invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with any threat whatsoever to our country, and our continued and extremely long and costly prosecution of a war against what had been a sovereign nation, is being billed as “protecting our freedoms.”  What on earth can our continuing and costly assault on the people and property of a nation who never threatened us have to do with “protecting our freedoms”?  But that is what we call our reason for being there, and we do so with the same righteous patriotic fervor as if it were another WWII—as if Iraq had bombed Pearl Harbor.  If anything, the Patriot Act, which was a part and parcel of this whole hyped-up “war on terror,” did more to relieve us of all those precious freedoms, which began with the Declaration of Independence, then has any act of aggression against our country yet.

A few years ago I wrote a series of articles on my site in the section My Political Blog: Part One.  It was an attempt at the time to spark at least an interest in our origins as a nation and as an ideal, hopefully in the minds of our grossly neglected younger generation.  We were, at one time, an example of the most successful of democratic republics, probably in all of history anywhere in the world.  But that was then and now is quite something else.  Something went wrong, not over night, but over a couple of hundred years.  Even Jefferson lived long enough to not only become disappointed in where we were headed, but to actually express those feelings.  He was particularly disappointed in the people’s and their leaders’ disregard for the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.    It may have begun very early on in our still glorious history, but it seems to me it has accelerated over the last few generations.  Today the spirit of that declaration of personal rights has not only gone out of the hearts of people, but too many of those people do not even know what it is, when it happened, and why.

That is, however, where it all began—with the drafting of that document, the Declaration of Independence.  It was not only a declaration of national sovereignty but of individual sovereignty as well.  That is the part we seemed to have missed.  The second paragraph would seem to make that quite clear:

“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.”

The wording addresses the rights or individuals who, given like needs and consequently like rights, will form a “People,” in this case a nation.  This is where free nations come from—from individuals who agree upon certain inalienable right, such as Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness and who move together to establish those rights.  It also states clearly that as a People, necessarily made up of individuals, that when any government becomes destructive to their ends, they have the right, if not duty, to institute new government most likely to affect those desired ends.

Of course, we have already done that bit of business—instituted a new government…over a couple hundred years ago.  The people of this country threw off one government and instituted a new one, “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.”   Well, good for them—that’s them, at that time, not necessarily us at this time, however.  Things do change and certainly have.  Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that we “instituted” a new government.  In other words our government is in effect one big institution; it is one big institution made up of a multitude of smaller, but not small, institutions, all of which is highly influenced, if not controlled, by even more institutions of immense wealth and power called corporations.

It is the establishment of institutions that seems to be the fail-point or break down of ideals and purpose, historically speaking.  Institutions have taken the place in society of what used to be the endeavors of community effort, of people with like but various interests who worked together for their individual and collective good.  Ultimately the only goal of any institution is to survive and consolidate power within its domain, meaning to exist for its own sake, all ideology, purpose and intent becoming lost along the way, existing only in the hearts and souls of those few individuals who first expressed such goals before it all became institutionalized.  In the end institutions will favor and support the huge multinational corporations which tend to share the same single-mindedness of purpose and power inherent in what is best described as “bigness,” always leading to even greater power and wealth and ever-growing bigness.  It doesn’t take much to discover that trend toward the support and alliance with big corporations on the part of our highly institutionalized federal government.

Bigness and the Personal Philosophy of Frank Lloyd Wright

As a set designer much of my life I have always had an interest in architecture.  Among those I’ve admired is Frank Lloyd Wright, having read his book entitled My Testament.  It is also a statement of his personal philosophy, some of which I will quote.

Wright believed in Democracy, of course, but not as some do. For instance, he considered the term “common man” to be derogatory. He believed that the “sovereignty of the individual” was an intrinsic part of Democracy. Conformity was never meant to be synonymous with Democracy. For instance, there were some who believed blond hair, blue eyes, and Volkswagens for everyone would be the optimum. And we all know whose idea that was.

To quote Wright from his book My Testament: “By attempts to keep man‑made law alive when by nature it is dead, the spirit in which the law was made is betrayed and so is law. My father taught me that a law is originally made to prevent or cure some timely, manifest evil; the law usually made by ‘experts.’ An expert?” Wright asks. “Generally, a man who has stopped thinking because he knows! So whenever court judgments continue to be based upon ‘the letter of the law’ long after the good intended by the letter goes out of it, judges defy its sense and betray justice. Justice then becomes, not a true servant of the humanities, but mere routine; and so we fail of democracy, robbed of our title to manhood. Again, the calamitous drift toward conformity. Again, fear instead of reverence for life as hoped by our forefathers. Again ‘bigness’ legally engendered, by standardizing human beings into ‘the common man.’’“

Wright’s reference is his way of explaining the consequences of institutionalizing our system of justice.  It is an excellent example of where institutions come from and how they lead to the corruption of power and the dehumanization of individuals.  Through our failure to educate ourselves and our children of the origins, history and ideals of what we still reference as “our way of life,” we have come to sacrifice that way of life to our own ignorance and the greed and corruption of power structures, from our own government to multinational corporations to the World Bank and all those other monstrous institutions that keep appearing like heads on the Hydra.

We're ruled by people who don't grant us minds of our own.  All the decisions are theirs to make, and we let them do that for us because we fear the consequences of our own decisions. We say we trust their wisdom, but the truth is we doubt our own. Ironically, when their wisdom fails us, we're still the ones to pay the consequences. But the consequences are only a figure on a piece of paper—a statistic to those we entrusted with it all. It may be a ruined life to someone, but not to the statisticians. They play games with our lives and keep score with our misery—from unemployment to war casualties. It's their game; we’re only the tally. 

We're ruled by “bigness,” like Wright said.  And as such, at the mercy of gargantuan institutions.  That rule is the product of law and policy carved a long time back in stone, non-applicable to the subtleties of human nature on an individual level of understanding.  Consequently we have big government, big corporations, big churches, big banks, big labor and bigness in every aspect of every enterprise, from entertainment to journalism to the food and energy we consume…big everything.  And it is all at the sacrifice of our individual sovereignty…the ability to rule our own lives or even plea to the mercy of own community.  It is the loss of our independence as free persons.  It is the beginning of a new kind of serfdom, a servitude to unapproachable corporations and cold and indifferent institutions.

The sum of our good intentions for the sovereignty of the individual and any hope for its restoration lies in the following words:

“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.”

That was borrowed, of course, from the second paragraph of our Declaration of Independence.  It was not just a declaration of independence of one government from another, but of individuals from government itself.  That is why we formed what was meant to be our government today.  It is the duty of that government to honor its reason for being created.  That reason is the continued protection of the most natural right of every individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It is failing us in its most basic reason to exist and is no longer deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.  It has been taken away from the governed that gave it life, and is now an all-powerful institution existing for its own sake and is in the irrevocable service of big business.

The worst of that is that we have been led to believe that that is the American way, the way it is meant to be.  Believing that, we are selling out our liberty to corporate serfdom, and all our righteous words and slogans—such as “liberty” itself—are only hollow words.  But hey, we’re content and compliant.  Maybe someday, maybe if circumstances keep worsening, or if the right people simply get pissed off with the way things went, maybe then we’ll find the spirit to do something about it.  But I will still argue it cannot restored if we do not educate ourselves and our children as to where we came from, what we were meant to be, and how it all went down hill.  If we get that wrong, any attempt at correction will only make it worse.