Liberty and Equality: Adducing the Protests

It takes a lot to have a great nation.  It doesn't take much to tear it down.  However, like God said to Baruch, seek not great things for yourself.  That can be said of and to a nation too.  You can easily go down as a nation, and we are.  It's been ugly to watch.

A Frenchman with great yearnings for his own country, its having been torn asunder, Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831, taking extensive notes about what he saw.  Comparing what he observed with what he knew of France and its revolution, he wrote in 1835 to report his findings in his book called Democracy in America:

There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. 

But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.

Men want all the benefits of liberty without the requirements.  Nicholas Capaldi and Gordon Lloyd write in Liberty and Equality in Political Economy (p. 73):

What is problematic for Tocqueville is that love of equality rather than love of liberty is the ruling passion of modernity. . . . Humans in modernity prefer equality in slavery to inequality in liberty.  In short, equality and not liberty is the default position of modernity.  Thus, liberty is in constant need of being defended and equality is in constant need of being moderated.

Most people in this country don't even understand the opportunity they have been given.  They are not satisfied with opportunity.  They want equality of outcome.  They really want even more than that, as I observe America now.

If you are white, I don't think you can just be angry with black people.  White people caused this. They took advantage of the depraved taste of equality that almost everyone possesses. They couldn't guarantee a better life though, so many black people now are left in a state of hopelessness, followed by anger.  We see the anger. The history of African Americans in America is that they were brought here against their will and since then they have been used as political pawns by evil opportunists who pose as their saviors.

Why obey the law if you can't have a better life when you do?  People see what they don't have and they don't see a path to get there except through some form of government assistance.   They think that violent protests and kneeling during the anthem will get them there. They think that because there are white people and select black leaders who tell them they are right.  The media also rewards the behavior.  It is a losing, totally losing proposition.   It is absolutely the wrong message.

You cannot succeed against natural law.  The path to success follows a natural progression.  You can't skip the steps to getting there.  No amount of tilting the playing field will help.

De Tocqueville was brutal in his observations about both African Americans and American Indians.  He hated slavery, but he believed that, even though assimilation was best for both, it mainly would not occur.   He assessed that neither were people "democratic" enough to live in a democracy. They just wouldn't.  He predicted the extinction of the Indians in America, because they would be too proud to assimilate.

If I project myself backwards to De Tocqueville's time, I don't share his pessimism, proceeding from his underlying Roman Catholicism, because I believe God's Word.  I don't take the Hillary Clinton's, her basket of deplorable and unredeemable, view of the world. People can change through conversion.  God intervenes in depraved hearts.  They stop lusting for equality and accept liberty. However, they will not change without moral absolutes or absolute truth, a true gospel, and then careful and plain biblical preaching, none of which are even accepted any more in the United States.

Booker T. Washington had a plan at the turn of the 20th Century that was rejected by African Americans in general and the United States as a whole, his plan founded on the laws of nature and nature's God.  If implemented, it would have succeeded.  A depraved taste of equality impelled the weak to bring the strong down to their level, which summarized the lying vanities of W. E. B. Dubois.

Kneeling at a national anthem and violent street protests are the less significant symptoms of a depraved taste of equality.  They are but pawn movements on the board of massive political demagoguery.  Joining them among many others is economic punishment targeting a very miniscule moderation of transgenderism.

When rewards and punishments are not tied to merit according to principles of natural law and the revealed law of God, the opposite, what some have called, "learned helplessness," results.  People stop trying to succeed.  They want it handed to them.

Some would say they don't want a hand out, but a hand up.  The need a hand up:  college tuition, free medical, child care, and subsidized housing.  These are hand. outs.  They are learned helplessness, helplessness that isn't liberty; helplessness that is slavery.

The future isn't bright for a nation that doesn't respect the law, that offers even foreign neighbors an equality that is a lie.  Then police say, "Take your hands out of your pockets so I can see them," and the suspect doesn't have to do that.  Police say, "Kneel down," and he doesn't.  They don't think any longer that there is any merit, any value to doing what police say.  'It won't help you to listen, to submit to authority' is a lie.  The lawbreakers see little path to success.

If you walk back the anthem protests, you end at non violent protests.  Someone is right to protest injustice.  Injustice is wrong.  You aren't right to protest justice, and we do not have evidence of systemic police injustice.  You can go to statistics to prove that.  It isn't even close.  A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black person than any cop killing an unarmed black person. No evidence exists of unique police violence based upon racial discrimination.  It's a bigger and deeper issue though.

Every police shooting, whether just or not, produces extraordinarily imbalanced amounts of media attention and coverage.  The stories are slanted toward the victims of the shooting.  The overarching narrative is a lie.  Let me tell you the result.  Police will back away and more people will die.  When someone calls for help, he won't get it.  The people who suffer those results will get no media attention or coverage.  They will still die and mostly in anonymity.  Their mothers will not become celebrities.  They will not speak at a party presidential convention.  It won't matter to those who are really taking advantage of this situation, which are the subject of an entirely different post.

A man paid millions of dollars as a backup quarterback claims to speak for the voiceless victims.  His message is false.  He's free to protest something.  He's free to pose as a significant thinker, but he is only another pawn.  He isn't bringing liberty or equality.  He is leading a movement that will not end well for anyone.  He is encouraged to tell his little lies while the big truth is forbidden on a state school campus. Liberty loses.

Equality provides the motivation in America now, not liberty.  You can see that liberty doesn't result from anthem protests.  It rewards lawbreakers.  More lawbreaking ensues and people lose their freedom.  Worse, they lose their lives.  Their lives don't matter to those feeding this depraved taste of equality.