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THE FREEDOM CYCLE
By Charlie Crumley
My studies, particularly
Washington's farewell address, tended to indicate that there was and is a cycle
of achieving freedom and then losing it , for any broad spectrum of peoples,
over time. Unlike sports for which we all have a continuing high level of
literacy, freedom becomes old hat and becomes assumed that it will go on
forever. Not so, according to my above graph.
The cycle starts with the people being subjects to somebody or something,
·
Excesses of those in control lead to conflict to
obtain freedom,
·
Freedom leads to self interest, factions, group
interest, political parties and internal conflict,
·
Internal conflict leads to chaos, which leads to the
desire to reduce the chaos with a single authority,
·
And this puts the people back to where they started -
as subjects.
As this was taking shape I
happened to run into some references to Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history
Professor at the University of Edinburgh who wrote on this same subject over 200
years ago.
- From bondage to
spiritual faith;
- From spiritual
faith to great courage;
- From courage to
liberty;
- From liberty to
abundance;
- From abundance to
complacency;
- From complacency
to apathy;
- From apathy to
dependency;
- From dependence
back to bondageĀ
"The average age of
the worlds civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200
years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the above
sequence."
"A Democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a
permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the
time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from
public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the
candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the
result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy,
which is always followed by a dictatorship."
(It has been said - by someone-- that if you rob Peter
to pay Paul, that you can always count on the support of Paul)
We are already deep in apathy and the dependency factor has reached the
proportions that we are currently being referred to as a Welfare Democracy. We
are rapidly becoming subject to our own government as the sovereign, i.e. - I am
told that there are 84,000 pages of law based matter regarding lettuce. How
could we possibly known anything about lettuce without our ubiquitous government
to protect our citizens from our larceny and stupidity.
So, again, HOW MUCH TIME DO WE HAVE? I don't have the foggiest. Undoubtedly
more than it should as the population has not yet awaken, but possibly less as
we have a great history of coming together and acting together in times of
emergences -- and this will become an emergency. It is unfortunate that we have
to have an emergency to come together, but if, as, or when we do, our sticking
together afterwards may be the only way to stop this cycle of gaining and then
losing our freedoms.
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