“No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.”
— Samuel Adams, 1775
So true. It was said in different ways by different founders of America. Some said that without morality, freedom was doomed. However you define morality, it includes a sense of self-responsibility and individualism whereby you respect the same in others. Morality and individualism go hand in hand, just like the Bill of Rights implies individualism, and vice-versa.
Over the last several generations especially, American culture has morphed from individualism into amorality, subjectivism, and the kind of “nonjudgmentalism” that inevitably seems to lead to heightened restrictions by government. The cultural experts start by saying: “Don’t worry about morality, anything goes,” and the government ends it all by saying, “Leave morality up to us. We’ll decide what’s right, and what’s wrong.” Because if people eschew the responsibility of objective judgment, then you better believe others will pick up the task for you.
You cannot live independently, and in freedom, without thinking. If you won’t think for yourself — well, you get the spectacle of Joe Biden and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and those shrews on The View doing your thinking for you. And having their idiocy codified into law.
Most of the people that most of us rely on today for intelligence, “expertise” and wisdom in the affairs of man have no remote grasp of what I just wrote. And they don’t wish for you to understand it, either. Because the moment you do understand the value and power of independent thinking, their whole enterprise is overthrown. But not a moment sooner.
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