It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [5]
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The second problem we need to confront when commencing an argument with truisms is the realization that many people are willfully blind even to the obvious. Thus, while the truism that “all Men are created equal” may have been self-evident to the Founders2, it surely was not self-evident to King George III or to the millions on the planet then and now to whom the divine right of kings provided and still provides a moral basis for tyranny. Moreover, it was not self-evident to the Founders themselves that “all Men are created equal” applied to all human beings, not solely to property-owning adult white males.
From the above we can conclude that not every person in every age is sufficiently exposed to the truth so as to recognize it. Because we are all fallen—that is, our human nature has inherited the imperfections of original sin—we do not always recognize a truism. This is so because the truth is often inconvenient, painful, and upsetting; and it requires rational thought, acceptance of revelation, and personal courage to pursue.
Jefferson’s remarkable, radical insistence that “all Men are created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator” with certain “unalienable Rights” and that among those rights are “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and all these principles are “self-evident . . . Truths,” was surely inconvenient, painful, and upsetting to many and hardly self-evident to the elites of his time. What about women, what about people of color, what about children, what about those without property: Why wasn’t the self-evident truth of their equality and their natural rights recognized? And if the king didn’t morally have all the power he claimed to have, how did the colonists come to occupy the land that he gave them via their predecessors? Even the most enlightened of men were blind to some truisms.
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What does it take to peel away errors of willful blindness? It takes intellect and free will. That we all possess the free will to pursue the truth, the intellect to recognize and accept it, and that its pursuit is the ultimate goal of human activity, is the ultimate truism. There are many self-evident truths that all rational persons recognize. Some come from human reason (the Sun rising, our needs for food, shelter, and clothing, as examples), and some come from revelation (we have the rights to life, liberty, property, and happiness; it is wrong to lie, cheat, steal, and murder, as examples). Some come from reason and revelation (government is essentially the negation of liberty; humans have free immortal souls while governments are finite and based on coercion and force). But the concept of self-evident truths—or truisms—is absolutely essential to freedom. Truisms reject moral relativism, and American exceptionalism. They compel an understanding of the laws of nature that animate and regulate all human beings at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances. And truisms equal freedom.
Once we recognize those human yearnings, we can begin to understand the evil of government commands which infringe upon those yearnings. The Third Reich provides a case study in how governments devise policies and institutions which trespass on just about every human yearning there is, and the human suffering which inevitably follows from those trespasses. It is wrong to detain, torture, and murder humans because they possess an inherent inclination to roam the world freely, to avoid pain, and to preserve their lives. Compulsory sterilization is wrong because humans possess a yearning to reproduce. Proscription of free speech is wrong because