The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World, Page 2
W. Cleon Skousen
In just 200 years, the human race made a 5,000-year leap!
Can we lose it?
Every generation feels it must re-invent the sociological wheel. If we were still taught these basics in school, maybe we could skip a few years of stupidity, but it’s too late for our generation. We have to pay our stupid tax.
For a hundred years, social and political experiments outside of the Constitution and prosperity principles have played havoc with our culture, and now we’re making the same dumb mistakes prior failed cultures have made.
So, we’ve got to ask: Are we really better off under the decay of freedom that we have today, than we were back when that nasty old Constitution dictated everything?
Dr. Skousen points out when it comes to the physical sciences, knowledge and discovery is added to the main body of knowledge as time passes—it builds on the lessons of the past.
But the same doesn’t happen with the social sciences.
Dr. Skousen warns us that when we don’t teach the rising generation those cultural and moral lessons that keep society healthy and safe, the people end up making all the same mistakes—and not just once, but half a dozen times or more. We’re doing it right now, he says, and muddle our lives with “drugs, riots, revolutions, and terrorism; predatory wars; unnatural sexual practices; merry-go-round marriages; organized crime; neglected and sometimes brutalized children; plateau intoxication; debt-ridden prosperity; and all the other ingredients of insanity which have shattered twenty mighty civilizations in the past.” And he made that list 30 years ago!
To that list I would add these other mistakes that are leading us down a dead-end road: the bailout “un-stimulus program,” nationalization of our banks and auto industry, the loss of secret balloting for union activities, taxation without representation, morally bankrupt standard bearers, tax cheats running government programs, pork-barrel spending, locking up natural resources, punishing the productive, rewarding the lazy, squelching opposing viewpoints, redistributing the wealth, creating an entitlement mentality, granting more rights to illegals than our own citizens, a fear of our fellow citizens and loss of pride in the greatness of this nation—and generally the ignoring of our Constitutional rights, privileges and opportunities.
The 28 Great Ideas That Helped Change the World
There is no reason why our American way of life should be drowning in the same mistakes of those failed empires of the past, except for perhaps this one—as a culture we’ve stopped teaching and practicing the true principles of prosperity.
There are 28 great ideas that helped change our world, and the funny thing is, the American Founding Fathers hardly invented a single one of them. But they did find them, and brought them all together in a single document that has blessed this great nation and the entire world.
These ideas didn’t all come together at once. After Jamestown, it took 180 years to pull these great concepts together so that true and lasting freedom was born.
It worked so well so fast that after just two years as a nation, George Washington was able to write, “The United States enjoy a scene of prosperity and tranquility under the new government that could hardly have been hoped for.” And the very next day in another letter he said, “Tranquility reigns among the people with that disposition towards the general government which is likely to preserve it….Our public credit stands on that [high] ground which three years ago it would have been considered as a species of madness to have foretold.” (The Writings of George Washington, Vol. 31: 316-317, 318-319)
It’s Time to Get Back to Basics
In some ways, during parts of 2007 and 2008 I experienced one of the most difficult periods of my life. There had been other times where I experienced financial and family troubles, but this was bigger. I had begun to lose hope. I began to see the massive problems that we – as a nation and as a people – were facing. It seemed like no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t come up with a way it could resolve itself. The more I looked, the more I wished I hadn’t looked. How can I hand this country to my children and grand children in better shape than it was given to me?
Without any answers, I spiraled into a sort of despair. How do you fix these problems? How do you fix the economic nightmare that is on its way caused by overspending, massive debt, and giant social programs? How do you protect your kids and country from a force that doesn’t have a uniform? What’s the right balance between security and liberty? How do you cure American’s lack of faith in their government when the political parties are intentionally dividing us?
Then one day in the spring, I was walking down the Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan and the answer came to me. It was so dramatic that it made me stop in the middle of the sidewalk and laugh out loud. The answer was obvious and best of all, the thinking and worrying had already been done for me. The questions that we face were foreseen by the greatest group of Americans to ever live; our Founding Fathers. They knew we would be grappling with issues like the ones we face today at some point, so they designed a ship that could withstand even the mightiest storm. They also knew that we would eventually lose our way and that we would need a beacon to lead our way back.
I often times have wondered why the constitution appears as it does. Why those three words “We the people,” are so large. After all, it’s not like James Madison wrote those three words then realized, “Oh shoot, I can’t use this sized font or we’ll run out of space!” They did it for a reason. The answer is not the government, it’s not a politician, it’s not a policy; it’s always, “We the people.”
Unfortunately, many of us have been so misinformed or suffer from such a high degree of apathy, that we have no idea who our founders really were. We don’t understand how they lived, what rights they were actually trying to protect, and what our responsibilities are to ensure that protection.
Within a couple of weeks after that revelation on the sidewalk a friend—without solicitation—sent me a copy of this book. He said, “Glenn, I don’t know if you’ve ever read this, but it’s the simplest, easiest way for Americans of all ages to understand the simple yet brilliant principles our founders based this country on.”
After reading it, I realized a couple of things. One, its author—was years ahead of his time. And secondly, our founders were thousands of years ahead of their time. My hope is that all Americans young and old will spend the time with this book to understand why we are who we are. The words of our Founding Fathers have a way of reaching across any political divide. They are words of wisdom that I can only describe as divinely inspired. They are here for us to help solve the unsolvable—and they are the reason why we have for so long been the greatest nation on earth. But most importantly, in these pages, you will find hope.
I know that I have.
I Want Your Solemn Promise
Right now, right this very moment, I want you to make me a promise.
Promise me you will read this book cover to cover in the next 30 days—sooner if you can. Promise me you will pass this book along to somebody else when you’re done. Commit them to read it in 30 days.
Promise me you will write down the 28 ideas and teach them to your children, your neighbors, your friends—Now is the time to get out of our comfort zone.
You, me, all of us were born for this day, to stand responsible before God and future generations to keep this torch of freedom lit, and bear it away from ruin. Twenty failed empires of the past give ample proof that no generation having tasted freedom and then lost it has ever tasted it again.
Do you remember our resolve on September 12, our promise to each other to link arms and face the coming storms together? Those storms are now boiling overhead—our Republic is at stake. You don’t have to be like Washington’s troops and track bloody footprints through the snow at Valley Forge, let’s pray to God we never have to go there again. To fight this battle you need to read, to understand. Learn these 28 ideas, make them your own, put them on the fridge, the bathroom mirror, on your forehead, I don�
�t care—just know them by heart, that’s all I ask. And yes—there will be a quiz, there’s always a quiz.
Remember those minutemen in the days of our Revolutionary War? Do you remember their job, to be ready to defend the encroachment of the Redcoats with a minute’s notice? If you were called upon to preserve our freedom, to save our Constitution, could you be ready—could you answer in a minute?
I want you to think of this—
One of my favorite Bible stories is Joshua and the battle of Jericho. Remember how they marched around the city and all at once blew their horns and the walls went tumbling down? That’s us all over the place. We are the troops. The truth is our trumpet. And the walls are those same old tired ideas forced on us today—ideas that didn’t work at Jamestown, and certainly won’t work now.
The power is ours to blast our horns and shake those rotted scales off our freedoms, shake them to rubble and get our country back.
Read this book and discover we’re a lot like Joshua—They don’t surround us, we surround Them!
But you’ve got to have your horn ready—now is the time.
Promise me.
—Glenn Beck, March 2009
Part I
The Founders' Monumental Task:
Structuring a Government with All Power in the People
The Founders' Political Spectrum
What Is Left? What Is Right?
The American Founding Fathers Used a More Accurate Yardstick
Ruler's Law
The Founders' Attraction to People's Law
Characteristics of Anglo-Saxon Common Law or People's Law
The Founders Note the Similarities Between Anglo-Saxon Common Law and the People's Law of Ancient Israel
Memorializing These Two Examples of People's Law on the U.S. Seal
The Founders' Struggle to Establish People's Law in the Balanced Center
The Founders' First Constitution Ends Up Too Close to Anarchy
The Genius of the Constitutional Convention in 1787
A Special Device Employed to Encourage Open Discussion
The Balanced Center
America's Three-Headed Eagle
The Two Wings of the Eagle
Thomas Jefferson Describes the Need for Balance
The Problem of Political Extremists
Jefferson's Conversation with Washington
Jefferson's Concern About the Radical Fringe Element in His Own Party
The Founders Warn Against the Drift Toward the Collectivist Left
The Need for an "Enlightened Electorate"
The Founders' Common Denominator of Basic Beliefs
Fundamental Principles
The Founders' Political Spectrum
The Constitutional Convention of 1787
Part of the genius of the Founding Fathers was their political spectrum or political frame of reference. It was a yardstick for the measuring of the political power in any particular system of government. They had a much better political yardstick than the one which is generally used today. If the Founders had used the modern yardstick of "Communism on the left" and "Fascism on the right," they never would have found the balanced center which they were seeking.
What Is Left? What Is Right?
It is extremely unfortunate that the writers on political philosophy today have undertaken to measure various issues in terms of political parties instead of political power. No doubt the American Founding Fathers would have considered this modern measuring stick most objectionable, even meaningless.
Today, as we mentioned, it is popular in the classroom as well as the press to refer to "Communism on the left," and "Fascism on the right." People and parties are often called "Leftist," or "Rightist." The public do not really understand what they are talking about.
These terms actually refer to the manner in which the various parties are seated in the parliaments of Europe. The radical revolutionaries (usually the Communists) occupy the far left and the military dictatorships (such as the Fascists) are on the far right. Other parties are located in between.
Measuring people and issues in terms of political parties has turned out to be philosophically fallacious if not totally misleading. This is because the platforms or positions of political parties are often superficial and structured on shifting sand. The platform of a political party of one generation can hardly be recognized by the next. Furthermore, Communism and Fascism turned out to be different names for approximately the same thing -- the police state. They are not opposite extremes but, for all practical purposes, are virtually identical.
The American Founding Fathers Used a More Accurate Yardstick
Government is defined in the dictionary as "a system of ruling or controlling," and therefore the American Founders measured political systems in terms of the amount of coercive power or systematic control which a particular system of government exercises over its people. In other words, the yardstick is not political parties, but political power.
Using this type of yardstick, the American Founders considered the two extremes to be anarchy on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. At the one extreme of anarchy there is no government, no law, no systematic control and no governmental power, while at the other extreme there is too much control, too much political oppression, too much government. Or, as the Founders called it, "tyranny."
The object of the Founders was to discover the "balanced center" between these two extremes. They recognized that under the chaotic confusion of anarchy there is "no law," whereas at the other extreme the law is totally dominated by the ruling power and is therefore "Ruler's Law." What they wanted to establish was a system of "People's Law," where the government is kept under the control of the people and political power is maintained at the balanced center with enough government to maintain security, justice, and good order, but not enough government to abuse the people.
The Founders' political spectrum might be graphically illustrated as follows:
Ruler's Law
The Founders seemed anxious that modern man recognize the subversive characteristics of oppressive Ruler's Law which they identified primarily with a tyrannical monarchy. Here are its basic characteristics:
1. Authority under Ruler's Law is nearly always established by force, violence, and conquest.
2. Therefore, all sovereign power is considered to be in the conqueror or his descendants.
3. The people are not equal, but are divided into classes and are all looked upon as "subjects" of the king.
4. The entire country is considered to be the property of the ruler. He speaks of it as his "realm."
5. The thrust of governmental power is from the top down, not from the people upward.
6. The people have no unalienable rights. The "king giveth and the king taketh away."
7. Government is by the whims of men, not by the fixed rule of law which the people need in order to govern their affairs with confidence.
8. The ruler issues edicts which are called "the law." He then interprets the law and enforces it, thus maintaining tyrannical control over the people.
9. Under Ruler's Law, problems are always solved by issuing more edicts or laws, setting up more bureaus, harassing the people with more regulators, and charging the people for these "services" by continually adding to their burden of taxes.
10. Freedom is never looked upon as a viable solution to anything.
11. The long history of Ruler's Law is one of blood and terror, both anciently and in modern times. Under it the people are stratified into an aristocracy of the ruler's retinue while the lot of the common people is one of perpetual poverty, excessive taxation, stringent regulations, and a continuous existence of misery.
The Founders' Attraction to People's Law
In direct contrast to the harsh oppression of Ruler's Law, the Founders, particularly Jefferson, admired the institutes of freedom under People's Law as originally practiced among the Anglo-Saxons. As one authority on Jefferson points out:
"Jefferson'
s great ambition at that time [1776] was to promote a renaissance of Anglo-Saxon primitive institutions on the new continent. Thus presented, the American Revolution was nothing but the reclamation of the Anglo-Saxon birthright of which the colonists had been deprived by a "long trend of abuses." Nor does it appear that there was anything in this theory which surprised or shocked his contemporaries; Adams apparently did not disapprove of it, and it would be easy to bring in many similar expressions of the same idea in documents of the time." 3
Characteristics of Anglo-Saxon Common Law or People's Law
Here are the principal points of People's Law as practiced by the Anglo-Saxons: 4
1. They considered themselves a commonwealth of freemen.
2. All decisions and the selection of leaders had to be with the consent of the people, preferably by full consensus, not just a majority.
3. The laws by which they were governed were considered natural laws given by divine dispensation, and were so well known by the people they did not have to be written down.
4. Power was dispersed among the people and never allowed to concentrate in any one person or group. Even in time of war, the authority granted to the leaders was temporary and the power of the people to remove them was direct and simple.
