How could a state with so much promise and such good intentions go so horribly wrong? The United States of America, if one discounts the subjugation and murder of its indigenous native population, was, from its beginning a treasure trove of resources and natural beauty that should have been the envy of the entire world. It still is, in large part, but that age is about to come to an end. With an ever widening abyss opening between the obscenely rich and the rest of the population, America (as it so arrogantly calls itself to the exclusion of the remainder of the countries in the hemisphere) is reaping the consequences of its illogical beginning. It would not have taken a Nostradamus to predict the coming social apocalypse – just a little bit of logical analysis.
At the base of the problem lies the preamble to the Declaration of Independence: “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.” One of the cornerstones of logic is the premise, and one of the most destructive errors in logic is the false premise. Far from being self evident, are the assertions that all men (sic) are created equal as well as the celestial endowment of ‘unalienable’ rights. Both of these assertions are not provable and, since so much of what flows from these assertions and forms the basis of the American ‘vision’ is dependent on their veracity, the entire argument and all its conclusions are called into question.
To illustrate the consequences that can spring from the fallacy of false premise, one needs to look no further than the female holocaust, the witch trials, that culminated in so much injustice and misery for so many. The premise of the witch trials was that witches exist and the rest flows logically from this false premise. If witches exist then they are different from the rest of us. Furthermore their difference is inherent in the fact that we serve the Lord and witches, being a diametric opposite, must serve Satan. Being diametrically opposite leads (logically) to: if people bleed then witches don’t, if people sink then witches don’t, etc., ergo the witch trials. Without the premise that witches exist, one cannot follow down the rest of this destructive path, although I’m sure the churches and the righteous would have found another way.
The false premise that ‘all men are created equal’ has similar logical offshoots (illogical because of the fallacy at their base). If all men are created equal, then the way they develop and achieve is, at least in part, due to their striving. The idea of the self-made-man or the stockroom-to-the-boardroom phenom of popular myth derives from this. Its logical culmination is in the Lexus commercial that states that you should buy their luxury car because “You’ve earned it” – the logical corollary being that the guy pushing the shopping cart has also earned his place in life. Men (and women) are not created equal because their creators (mothers and fathers) are not equal to other creators. Some are rich and some are poor, some are tall and some are short, some are of the dominant racial extraction and some are of a stigmatized racial extraction, some carry recessive genes for diseases and genetic anomalies and some don’t and on and on. The premise is also central to the idea that, "You can be anything you want to be". If I want to be a fighter pilot and have no arms am blind in one eye and have an I.Q. that is barely into double digits, that little illusion doesn't refer to me. But stuporous people love simplistic statements.
It is not ‘self evident’ that there is either a ‘creator’ or that he endowed anyone with rights, ‘inalienable’ or otherwise. Rights are arrived at by consensus, not because a group of patriarchs imbued with the metaphysics of the time says so; otherwise, when the God disappears, so do the rights. As American society has become increasingly secular (materialism will do that to you), the higher moral standard (in some areas) that prevailed at the signing of the DOI no longer provides the certitude and turgor that it once did. In this context, it is ironic that the political party of the extreme right swaddles itself in the cloak of religious devotion while espousing policies that are so contrary to the compassion and egalitarianism which lay at the heart of the drafting of America’s defining documents.
Given the current social and economic climate of the U. S. one cannot imagine the stabilization of its society without a total disintegration of its current structure. Once the Leaning Tower of Pisa passes a certain angle it will not survive, despite intervention to keep it upright. If the base of any structure, be it a building or an ideology or a government, is flawed, the eventual collapse of that structure is inevitable. In building a nation on a base of illogic, the founders of the American State guaranteed its eventual downfall; the current imbalance and the intervention of the military industrial complex have merely accelerated the collapse.
Maybe if they had put a colon after “inalienable rights” instead of a comma . . .
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