Mostly because it is increasingly being transformed into a celebration of a unhinged president rather than a celebration of the principle of freedom, liberty and justice for all that gave birth to the American experiment. An experiment that has failed to achieve any one of the seven intentions in the U.S. Constitution's preamble.
"We the People" have failed to institute a republic
To form a more perfect Union
To establish Justice
To insure domestic Tranquility
To provide for the common defense
To promote the general Welfare
To secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves
and our Posterity
But the greater disappointment is that 250 years later, most Americans still misunderstand what we are celebrating. In our minds we are celebrating our "Independence". But that word and concept was never written into the profound 1776 Declaration. Its official title was The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America. Most importantly, its central message was not independence. It was freedom from tyranny and government without the consent of the governed.
We believe our “independence” is our nation's highest political virtue. Yet in reality independence is a delusion according to Albert Einstein.
Consider the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz and how this needless war affects prices in American stores and is causing a global hunger crisis. An Ebola outbreak in Africa threatens lives far beyond Africa as Measles is spreading in Texas. Extreme weather events and violent extremists ignore national borders as freely as cyberattacks. While the evolution of weapons, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology increasingly ties the fate of every nation to the fate of every other.
But long before Albert Einstein described our sense of separateness as an “optical delusion of consciousness” indigenous cultures understood that everything is connected, interdependent, changing, and vulnerable.
The founders could not have imagined a world in which a virus could circle the globe in days, a cyberattack could cripple infrastructure from thousands of miles away, or greenhouse gases emitted on one continent could alter the climate of another. Yet these are now practical realities that can and do disrupt every aspect of our lives.
The challenge of
our time is not learning how to become more independent. It is learning how to
manage our growing interdependence while preserving freedom, justice, security, prosperity, and posterity.
Whether we succeed or fail will depend on whether we finally recognize a fundamental Truth that is becoming impossible to ignore: our freedoms depend upon our virtuous responsibilities that extend beyond our political borders.
As we approach America’s 250th birthday, perhaps it is time to stop celebrating the myth of independence and start celebrating our reality of interdependence, plus working to abide by "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" and the "Truths" that we should all hold "to be self-evident". And finally keep our flag pledge of "liberty and justice for all".
Our future will be determined not by how successfully we separate ourselves from one another, but by how wisely we learn to live together on a small, connected, interdependent, and vulnerable planet. We have the money, the resources, and all the solutions needed. We only lack the political will to prioritize the health of people and nature. And to stop believing that everything we think - is worth killing and dying over. Freedom must be better armed than tyranny. But the greatest evils in the world and the most suffering, it believing things that just aren't true.
QUOTES as evidence.
“The sad truth...is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.” Hannah Arendt quoted in The Bulwork.
“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.” Rousseau
"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph." - Haile Selassie
"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." - Albert Einstein
"Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false." - Bertrand Russell
"We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger. And we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man ... far too little. His psyche should be studied -- because we are the origin of all coming evil." - C.G. Jung (this came from a 1959 BBC interview when he was asked about the possibility of a third world war.’ If you want the transcript which is even more concerning let me know chuck@igc.org)
"Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man." Friedrich Nietzsche
“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.” Martin Luther King
"In times such as these, people should recognize that evil knows no borders, knows no limits and knows no compassion. Those around the globe that value freedom must continue to persevere even in the darkest of times." - Michael C. Burgess
"The 20th century taught us how far unbridled evil can and will go when the world fails to confront it. It is time that we heed the lessons of the 20th century and stand up to these murderers. It is time that we end genocide in the 21st century." - Allyson Schwartz
"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil." -- Socrates (469-399 B.C.) Greek philosopher
Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty: Simone Weil
"Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil" -- Thomas Mann (1875-1955) German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, Nobel Prize in Literature (1929)
“...accordingly all Experience hath shown, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.” Declaration of Independence
"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one nation the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favorite nation, facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation." -- George Washington (1732-1799) Source: Washington's Farewell Address 1796.
“It is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.” Bill Joy, chief scientist and cofounder of Sun Micorsystems. March 2000
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution." -- John Adams (1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President Source: John Adams, Letter to Jonathan Jackson, October 1780
"But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint:" - Edmund Burke - Source: Reflections on the Revolution in France
"By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline." -- Thomas Jefferson
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections. – Lord Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays [1907]
“Not in the sky, nor in the middle of the ocean, nor in the cave of a mountain, nor anywhere else, is there a place, where one may escape from the consequences of an evil deed.” – Dhammapada, Verse 127
"If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Naziism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities." -- Paul Johnson American historian
"The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberative and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched." Justice Robert Jackson - Nuremberg address
The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.” Ludwig von Mises, Chapter III: Etatism
"When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago”
“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.” Simone Weil
"The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don’t adjust! Revolt against the reality!" -- Mordechai Anielewicz (1919-1943) Jewish resistance leader against Nazi oppression in Warsaw, Poland, 1943
"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only doing their duty, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil: George Orwell, London. UK. 1941
“Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but it is not only demand, it is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault.” – Milton Friedman, An Open Letter to Bill Bennett [September 7, 1989]
“(N)ot only will the United States impose preemptive, unilateral military force when and where it chooses, but the nation will also punish those who engage in terror and aggression and will work to impose a universal moral clarity between good and evil.” George Bush, 2002 West Point Commencement speech.
“The evils of government are directly proportional to the tolerance of the people.” Frank Kent
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) 7th US President Source: July 10, 1832, Veto of the Bank Bill
For my own part, I believe that our Constitution, with its absolute guarantees of individual rights, is the best hope for the aspirations of freedom which men share everywhere. I cannot agree with those who think of the Bill of Rights as an 18th Century straitjacket, unsuited for this age. It is old but not all old things are bad. The evils it guards against are not only old, they are with us now, they exist today .... – Hugo L. Black, "The Bill of Rights" [1960]
August 02, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - In the final years of his life, the increasingly radical Black Civil Rights, peace, and social justice leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke and wrote against what he called “the triple evils that are interrelated.” The first such evil was racism, deeply understood to mean not just prejudiced white sentiments and formal segregation in the U.S. South but the racially separate and unequal functioning of the nation’s basic institutions and social structures.”
The second evil was poverty and economic inequality – class injustice, which King rooted in capitalism. That system, King felt, “produces beggars” alongside luxuriant opulence, necessitating “the radical redistribution of economic and political power.”
The third evil was U.S. military imperialism – no mere afterthought in King’s critique of the American System. Explaining why he had turned openly against Washington’s monstrous war on Vietnam in 1967, King argued that conscience did not permit him to remain silent on the crimes the “strange [American] liberators” were committing in Southeast Asia. At the same time, he noted, his condemnation of America’s role as “the leading purveyor of violence in the world today” (a description that still rings true today) was strongly linked to his struggles against racial and economic disparity in the U.S.
Even of these evils would be resolved if the protection of human rights were made superior to the protection of the rights of governments, corporations and religions. There is one more evil MLK failed to mention. Our protection of the environment, which is essential to all our freedoms, security and prosperity.
"To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it." -Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers ... we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"The beginning of modern evil was when governments began again to intervene in the economic sphere. Every act of intervention turned man from his true purpose." – Garet Garrett, "The World That Might Have Been" [1945]
"Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word." Arnold Toynbee
"The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil." - Albert Einstein
The Root of All Evil? The God Delusion : Richard Dawkins
Video explores the unproven beliefs that are treated as factual by many religions and the extremes to which some followers have ... taken them.
"The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scripture ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws. All the miseries and evil men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible." -- Noah Webster (1758-1843) American patriot and scholar, author of the first dictionary of American English usage (1806) and the author of the 1828 edition of the dictionary that bears his name. 1833
"Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind." -- Henry Miller (1891-1980) American writer
“A new world must be born, a world that would justify the sacrifices offered by humanity. This new world must be a world in which there shall be no exploitation of the weak by the strong, of the good by the evil; where there will be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich; where the products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life, and not the individuals for achieving wealth. This new world shall not be a world of the downtrodden and humiliated, but of free men and free nations, equal in dignity and respect." - Inventor, Nikola Tesla
"Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause . . . True courage and manhood come from the consciousness of the right attitude toward the world, the faith in one's purpose, and the sufficiency of one's own approval as a justification for one's own acts." Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil
Once we start from this idea, accepted by all our political theorists [that] "The motive force of society is the government"; once men consider themselves as sentient, but passive, incapable of improving themselves morally or materially by their own intelligence and energy, and reduced to expecting everything from the law; in a word, when they admit that their relation to the state is that of a flock of sheep to the shepherd, it is clear that the responsibility of the government is immense. Good and evil, virtue and vice, equality and inequality, wealth and poverty, all proceed from it. It is entrusted with everything, it undertakes everything, it does everything; hence, it is responsible for everything. – Frederic Bastiat, "The Law" [1850]
"The ostensible supporters of the Constitution, like the ostensible supporters of most other governments, are made up of three classes, viz.:
1. Knaves, a numerous and active class, who see in the government an instrument which they can use for their own aggrandizement or wealth.
2. Dupes - a large class, no doubt - each of whom, because he is allowed one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and because he is permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving, and murdering others, that others have in robbing, enslaving, and murdering himself, is stupid enough to imagine that he is a "free man," a "sovereign"; that this is "a free government"; "a government of equal rights," "the best government on earth," and such like absurdities.
3. A class who have some appreciation of the evils of government, but either do not see how to get rid of them, or do not choose to so far sacrifice their private interests as to give themselves seriously and earnestly to the work of making a change." -- Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist Source: No Treason. No. VI The Constitution of no Authority, (Boston: Published by the Author, 1870).
"What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core." -- Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany Source: On Revolution (1963), ch. 2.
“A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good just because it’s accepted by a majority.” Author Unknown
"We have it in our power to begin the world over again." - Thomas Paine
Let us begin this new experiment following biology and the loving, cooperative, compassionate spirit of our social species. cw
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