His Words in Today's Context
“As this is in the order of nature, the order of Government must necessarily follow it, or Government will, as we see it does, degenerate into ignorance”
-Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
Isolation, an unwillingness to allow dissent, and a refusal to acknowledge realities that don’t line up with ideologies makes for ignorant governance.
“Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime”
-Thomas Paine
One crucial component of maintaining a free society and Democratic Republic is the sense of responsibility of the people to maintain their own civil freedom and that of the society at large. The responsibility to participate at some level and remain aware of what their government is doing in their name.
When we become ignorant of the actions of our government and subsequently come to find they have curtailed our freedoms and abused our rights, the crimes of the state become, if we fail to take action against them, crimes of the people as well. Ignorance is no excuse in a truly free society.
Where then, is the outrage?
“Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.”
-Thomas Paine, Common Sense
History is replete with immediacies that made oppression of human rights and dignity convenient. There is little in the best of American history that lends itself much to convenience, but instead from the determined striving of the human spirit.
The only way to preserve and defend the nation is to never forfeit the Constitution and the founding principals of America to the convenience of the day.
The idea of the supremacy of human rights is the key to the survival of a nation and every age would have its excuse to forego the harder road of protecting and advancing that idea.
Making it easy does not make it right.
“Among ridiculous things nothing is more ridiculous than ridiculous rage”
– Thomas Paine
Life is hard enough. In living from one day to the next, much of what comprises our outlook and general mood is entirely up to each one of us.
Every life is filled with, at a minimum, mild irritants, inconveniences, and disappointments.
How we choose to deal with not only the extraordinary circumstances we may encounter in a lifetime, but the daily visisitudes of our lives – the daily grind – that is, in large part, the measure of who we are.
Nobody wants to hang with anyone that’s pissed-off all the time.
“There is a general and striking difference between the genuine effects of truth itself, and the effects of falsehood believed to be truth. Truth is naturally benign; but false-hood believed to be truth is always furious. The former delights in serenity, is mild and persuasive, and seeks not the auxiliary aid of invention. The latter sticks at nothing. It has naturally no morals. Every lie is welcome that suits its purpose. It is the innate character of the thing to act in this manner, and the criterion by which it may be known, whether in politics or religion. When any thing is attempted to be supported by lying, it is presumptive evidence that the thing so supported is a lie also. The stock on which a lie can be grafted must be of the same species as the graft.”
-Thomas Paine, Letter to the People of the United States, FederalCity, Lovett’s Hotel, Nov. 26, 1802
The truth need not be coerced, forced, or threatened. The truth is not supported by manipulation, obfuscation, or deception. And the truth bears no allegiance to anything but itself.
If you have to force truth down too many people’s throats, then maybe it isn’t true.
“When it is laid down as a maxim, that a king can do no wrong, it places him in a state of similar security with that of idiots and persons insane, and responsibility is out of the question with respect to himself.”
Demanding blind loyalty and cronyism, shunning any criticism and persecuting the critic, allowing dogma, time after time, to trump reality, and using fear to enforce irrational doctrine and open contempt for the constraints of established law – and of congress…
Be it a King in the 18th century or a President in the 21st, it is madness to not hold those in power to account of their abuses and utter failure of power. As it was in the 18th century, then, so it is in the 21st: time to dislodge from power Mad King George.
“Taking it then for granted, that no person ought to be in a worse condition when born under what is called a state of civilization, than he would have been, had he been born in a state of nature, and that civilization ought to have made, and ought still to make, provision for that purpose, it can only be done by subtracting from property a portion equal in value to the natural inheritance it has absorbed.”
-Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice
We live, most of us, generally detached from nature, in what Paine calls here a “state of civilization”. For many this detachment provides food, warmth, and shelter from the vagaries of nature’s whim. But detachment comes with a price, and what is taken from nature in order to serve “civilization” must ultimately strike a balance.
Civilization – the built society – must not only take from nature, but also respect the natural world upon which it depends, and give back from whence it took.
Otherwise and increasing number in society will live neither a civilized or natural life. Until, one day, nature has wholly reclaimed what was taken from it, and the grand schemes of Man have withered back into the Earth.
“When the people fear the government, you have tyranny. When the government fears the people, you have freedom.”
Bastille Day can not pass without remembering the role Thomas Paine had in the French revolution. From Part II of Thomas Paine’s series of essays The Rights of Man, Paine wrote this in 1792, three years after the storming of the Bastille marking the beginning of the French revolution.
Fear remains the tool of the despot, the terrorist, the tyrant, and the oppressor.
Resisting fear is at once difficult and the first step toward freedom, for individuals and societies alike.
“It is not our belief or disbelief that can make or unmake the fact.”
-Thomas Paine, Age of Reason
When a belief defies readily available facts, it becomes a delusion. I may believe I have lots of money in the bank, but to hold onto that belief given the fact of my bank balance would prescribe me as delusional.
When a delusion precipitates and exacerbates an ongoing human tragedy, when the delusion is defended as messianic mission whereby no one can dare question it, when a country is left in ruins, then the delusion must end.
George Bush has been hailed by some as a man of right conviction. That is as what some would like to believe. Given the facts of the past seven years, continuing such belief is in itself a delusion.
No conviction, no belief, will ever unmake that fact.
“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”
-Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
On the Fourth of July it is good to remember that all we take so very much for granted was not always so. Freedom from political tyranny was very much a matter of the day-to-day world in which Thomas Paine lived and a radical idea indeed. A hard-won freedom that we must guard against losing, lest it slip quietly away from our distracted gaze.
It has been one year since I started this project, first under the auspices of World History.com with ThomasPaineBlogging.com (the site is still there, sometimes, if you’re lucky) and then here ThomasPaineBlog.org. It all started with an essay written on an idea I didn’t come up with, but one that interested me nonetheless, when considering Thomas Paine’s contribution to the American Revolution. That of Paine as the “first American blogger”, and the power of words in the fight for national independence, individual freedom, and human progress.
Thanks for being a part of the Thomas Paine Blog and the History Blog Project.
Here, once again, is that first essay:
Thomas Paine – The First American Blogger