America’s Founders Gave Individuals Everywhere Their Priceless Possession – Moral Sanction
On July 4, 2020, President Donald Trump helped Americans all over the world celebrate the Declaration of Independence with these words,
We will state the truth in full without apology. We declare that the United States of America is the most just and exceptional nation ever to exist on earth. It is time to speak up loudly and strongly and powerfully and defend the integrity of our country.
At Center for Individualism, we invite all of you to join us for reading and discussing the moral principles to which our Founders pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor. To organize this, we have created a new Facebook group that will study the 2019 book, America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C. Bradley Thompson. In its Introduction, Thompson cites another author – Thomas Paine of Common Sense and his post Revolution letter to French cleric Abbe Reynal,
The American style and manner of thinking had undergone a revolution. We see with other eyes, we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts. Independence was accompanied by a moral theory, on the indefeasible rights of man.
Paine’s allusion to the human senses – the ones that experience sensations from the metaphysical world, perceive their attributes within the range of the senses’ own attributes, and use reason for integrating them into concepts, is no mistake. The alternative is to avoid reality. While misery induced by the mystics of church and state had been the lot for human beings during the Dark and Middle Ages, President Trump warned us almost five months ago of its resurgence,
The ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of social justice. But in truth, it would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance, and turn our free and inclusive society into a place of repression, domination and exclusion.
With the election season almost behind us, you can still hear the echoes spewing from the pie-holes of politicians of all stripes as they cry out for unity. Yet in her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, philosopher Ayn Rand had identified the problem and the solution, “They say it’s hard for men to agree. You’d be surprised how easy it is when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade.”
Of course, America’s founders had identified the problem and the solution 200 years earlier, and Thompson introduces their achievement to us again when he says,
This volume analyzes the mode of reasoning, habits of thinking, patterns of thought, and the moral and political principles that served American revolutionaries in their intellectual battle with Great Britain before 1776, and to create a new society after 1776.
This week we will embark on an intellectual journey – to explore and discuss the moral principles of Americanism, and the character and circumstances of the courageous political philosophers who defined and defended it for us. Our purpose is to know what Richard Salsman is talking about in his essay, Freedom is Indivisible. Which is Why All Types Are Now Eroding,
The principle that freedom is indivisible reflects the fact that humans are an integration of mind and body, spirit and matter, consciousness and existence. It implies humans must choose to exercise reason – unique to them – to grasp reality, live ethically, and flourish.
Please consider joining our Facebook group, and invite friends who enjoy freedom, Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind, to awaken your own revolutionary mind.
