Republic of Conscience

We Are Asked to Recall the Days of National Commitment to the New Deal and Manhattan Project As Our Greatest Purpose and Neglect Our True Origins

Are we a democracy, a representative republic, a Technological Republic, as Palantir CEO Alex Sharp claims, or are we something fundamentally different? I propose that we are a Republic of Conscience, that our origins as a country are forged from a time when we strove to hone and use our rational abilities in accordance with our gifts. We had to, we didn’t have much of an alternative.

We have become accustomed to wealth, and whether that is the just results of hard labor as though some axiom dictates that hard effort always yields wealth as a result is not important. What is important is that we all have the right to rebuild and shape what we have. We’re not obligated to the Greater Good, we must be committed to strengthening our conscience, our reasoning abilities and our skills to enable us to flourish.

While life in the American colonies was rough and demanded that people work relentlessly to eek out a living, to provide their own food, and even educate themselves with the prize of one or two books, there was a level of prosperity that was eliminated during by Parliament and King George in the late 1760s. The right to be left alone to pursue what you needed to achieve in order to survive was subordinated to the desires of the Crown and Britain. Taxes, search and seizure, restrictions on what the colonist could buy and even make for themselves were imposed to such a degree that suffering arose. Steel had to be purchased from Britain, you could not forge it in the American colonies.

I think of this as I repair my home. If anything, America is about making repairs and life better based on your own efforts. Sure, these days networks of affiliation are crucial, specialization is emphasized to the point that being adept at many things is considered a waste of time - experts are those who have a narrow focus. And of course you outsource most your activities to others, that is the basis of the service economy after all. That may cause you to ignore some fundamental things

Sometimes we ignore a crack, yet there may be something lurking beneath that requires our attention. We don’t despair, we get to work. And yes, sometimes a crack grows larger as you start to examine it, but that is life’s gift of a challenge. On the Fourth of July we need to remember that. We accepted that challenge.

But what about the economy of Conscience? By that I mean what about the mission of taking things into your own hands, regardless of experts and specialists, and completing things on your own? That is at odds with the primacy of the Greater Good. The Greater Good may dictate that you forgo pursuing the tasks of making your immediate environment optimal for your needs, the Greater Good means you gather your food for the troops overseas, send off all your aluminum to the government and wait for FDR to set regulations on industry and agriculture while we patriotically line up for our rations. The Collective Greater Good is served if a rural farming town is forced by a judge to honor a contract made in secret by by their supposed representatives and now that town must harbor a lithium battery plant so that an entire state can ascend to its vaunted position as leader of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Actual choice is reserved for a very few in the name of democracy while your ability to make choices is removed and your are asked to abandon your rationality while ignoring what your eyes tell you as what will benefit your immediate community and family. Simply accept that a 70 mile swath of farm land must be yielded to eminent domain so that power lines from solar and wind farms can be erected to support data centers that most likely will be used to gather data on you.

“Sometimes I can’t believe what we are convinced we should fight for, look at the results. They don’t line up with what we truly believe,” said a very patriotic friend to me earlier this week.

That’s a technocracy thinly disguised as a technocratic republic. Wood Wilson ushered that in, it is an anathema to what we recognized 249 years ago on this day. But since we believe in merit, we assume that those selected and presented to us are the best and brightest. After all, the best and brightest got us to the moon, and gave us the atom bomb. So surely we have the same caliber of leaders who will lead, tend and maintain our republic for us.

Except that is not how our republic was envisioned to operate. And what does it say when the best and brightest, who achieved the moon landing, cannot preserve telemetry, recordings and other scientific artifacts from the greatest achievement of mankind? NASA, the most highly vaunted technocratic elite and high minded thinkers revealed that tapes of the Apollo landing were reused and the original recordings lost. The Great Good had better things to do that day. With great irony, CEOs in the Big Tech arena cite the moon landing as the best collective effort of mankind, yet they miss the fact that we don’t have the mindset to preserve some of its most important historical scientific heirlooms. We have spent so much time being siloed in process, never venturing outside the steps we are commanded to follow, we cannot exercise individual responsibility and place tapes in a vault, with a label “Apollo 11: Do Not Erase”, and preserve them for our future generations. We can spend billions on combating climate change by cutting down foliage for solar farms, but we can’t bring ourselves to digitize vital elements from our “highest achievement” as human beings. America of the 20th Century distinguishes itself for being the society who achieved what no other nation could, yet we let evidence for the future generations be destroyed. Perhaps that is also why we don’t ask the question why we can escape the Earth’s gravity, navigate the Van Allen Belt and land on the moon with far inferior technology in the 1960s and we can’t do the same today. With arguably far superior understanding of material science, computing and energy generation.

The Republic of Conscience requires that we exercise our freewill and ask questions. We are granted a gift of conscience and rational thought.

[Whereas] Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power

Thomas Jefferson

The Right To Answer The Questions We Pose Ourselves

If our own will is diminished on an individual basis, how can our national will be considered healthy? We are told that we must forge something new, we must tear our cultural heritage and forgo repairing what we have, mending cracks and giving new life to long forgotten corners of our lives that we have been forced to ignore. Is the health of our society measured by achievement of the goals the elite set out for us, or on what we ourselves tend to, not because we are selfish, but because we love our families and those in our immediate communities we can encourage and support?

The New York Times has a different priority, one that must be forged. That means replacing old values, not accepting voices of dissent.

The world has changed, so the way that we think about what it means to become American must too. But one thing remains the same: A cohesive and inclusive American identity won’t just create itself. It must be forged. And it’s a project that we must all participate in, adapting the successes and avoiding the missteps of the past.

It’s a serious task that calls for sweeping solutions. A sharp across-the-board reduction in legal immigration - paired with a generous amnesty program for those undocumented and unauthorized immigrants who are established in America - might help America regain its balance and compose a new harmony out of its profuse cacophony.

Note that this is not a call to honor what we asserted in the Declaration of Independence, those are old ideals. Also note that our tradition of a nation of laws, not men, should be discarded in favor of those who broke the law over those who have expressed a willingness to adhere to our laws and petition to join our society.

This is elite, again, telling you that your ability to reason based on your traditions is not sufficient. A profuse cacophony is what arises from you exercising your rationality and charting your own course, and in order to address a crisis, you must submit to a new vision.

For the use of … reason… every one is responsible to the God who has planted it in his breast, as a light for his guidance, and that, by which alone he will be judged,”

Thomas Jefferson

Sometimes things are born from great imperfection, and are the result of not seeking perfection but by simply working to make them better. If we say to ourselves “Why tend to things, they will just get dirty again, they will just fall into disrepair, we don’t have time” we forget the importance of self directed action. Cleaning, mending and cobbling together repairs on the fly produce improvements in our surroundings, but also in ourselves. But they are our choices, the fruits our hard efforts. That truly is the pursuit of happiness, operating to the best ability of your talents to make our own improvements. And I cannot decide what the best destiny is for others. Truly Neil Peart put it more succinctly and poetically than I could ever hope.

Don't ask me
I'm just improvising
My illusion of careless flight
Can't you see
My temperature's rising
I radiate more heat than light

A Republic of Conscience is where you MUST write the chapters in your own book of your life. If you are not focused on that and perhaps more focused on the fact that I am not aligned with the Greater Good, I do have a problem on your adjudication should you interfere with my pursuits. I can’t advise you, and you surely shouldn’t have time to deter me.

A Tattered Flag Demonstrates Service and Sacrifice

In those moments when we were fighting for our freedom, our flag, though tattered, represented our resilience while we shed of our blood and sacrificed to obtain liberty. The goal of liberty is ultimately to be able to obtain justice when it is required. Stewardship is when we forgo comfort to take responsibility to maintain for our next generations. That is far different from relenting to the Great Good. The torn flag, still moving in the wind, represents our will, what still persists beneath the cracks. We do need to mend and repair, but we are not broken. We choose to preserve. This is a rational response, not a mere reaction. If practiced enough that response becomes instinctive, but it is something we have forged for ourselves, not as the result of a scientific study and a program from a central government that for acts, acts as a benefactor.

“‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’, so don’t be paralyzed, do as the elite guide us, we will come out on top” is this what we are asked to adopt. You stopping to ask questions isn’t merely you exercising your rights, it is a sign of fear. That is how you are and will be cajoled or derided when there are moments that require sweeping solutions or a New Deal. If the Chinese or Russia or country of evil achieves superiority in AI one second earlier than the US, all is lost, so stop wasting time. We will reset your thinking, and together we will move forward and build something better because your old ideals of individual choice, ingenuity and cunning prohibit our collective safety. For the good of the country, act now and set aside your questions, which are really fears, which are akin to superstitions.

The Republic of Conscience rejects that concept.

Before You Go, There Are More Articles on the Origins of Our Liberty