FOUNDERS' WISDOM
DANGEROUS COCKTAIL: IGNORANT VOTERS & ROGUE GOV'T
Exclusive: Joshua Charles quotes Adams, 'License of the press is no proof of liberty'
In light of the continuing saga of the racial, class, gender and sexual animosities being encouraged in our country, as well as the continuing revelations about Hillary Clinton’s private email server, it seemed appropriate to provide an apt portion of my new book, “Liberty’s Secrets,” where the Founders discussed the dangers of an ignorant population, combined with an increasingly unaccountable government:
The Founders were certain that an ignorant people were incapable of being free, and at the same time, that a free people were perhaps the most prone to such ignorance. “Almost all mankind have lost their liberties through ignorance, inattention, and disunion,” Adams wrote sorrowfully. This made a nation ripe for tyranny. He warned his countrymen before the Revolution that “the jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out if possible to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.” And that was exactly what the British were attempting to do.
They hoped to distract the people from their attempts to tax them so they could fund more government offices and officials in America: “It seems very manifest … that a design is formed to strip us in a great measure of the means of knowledge by loading the press, the colleges, and even an almanac and a newspaper with restraints and duties, and to introduce the inequalities and dependences of the feudal system by taking from the poorer sort of people all their little subsistence and conferring it on a set of stamp officers, distributors, and their deputies.
The Founders were perhaps most concerned that, with a rise in ignorance, there would be a proportional rise in apathy toward public affairs. And if the people were unaware of, or kept from knowing what their elected officials were up to, fertile soil for corruption and tyranny would be tilled, as Jefferson warned:
“Withdrawn such a distance from the eye of their constituents, and these so dispersed as to be inaccessible to public information, and particularly to that of the conduct of their own representatives, they will form the most corrupt government on earth, if the means of their corruption be not prevented.”
“In a nation which is ignorant as well as democratic,” Tocqueville remarked, “there is soon bound to be a gigantic difference between the intellectual capacity of the sovereign power and that of each of its subjects.” As the knowledge gap increases between the masses and their rulers, “this completes the easy concentration of all power in its hands. The administrative function of the state constantly increases because the state alone is capable of administration.”
If such ignorance were to take root, the Founders worried that the people would gradually become less governable, and thereby require a stronger and stronger state. Hamilton warned,
“When the minds of these [the 'unthinking populace'] are loosened from their attachment to ancient establishments and courses, they seem to grow giddy and are apt more or less to run into anarchy.”
Perhaps most presciently, the Founders warned that the press could be made an instrument by which the freedom of speech was reduced, a very counterintuitive notion, but one that had been (and continues to be) proved by experience. Adams warned about collaboration between the government and a supposedly “free” press during the tense days of the Revolution: “License of the press is no proof of liberty,” he wrote.
“When a people is corrupted, the press may be made an engine to complete their ruin: and it is now notorious that the ministry [the British government] are daily employing it to increase and establish corruption, and to pluck up virtue by the roots.”
Similarly, Jefferson warned that the press could be made into an instrument by which the people were kept in ignorance, rather than informed and up-to-date on those matters most important to their national and civil life: “It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. …
I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time.”
Can the men who made such stunningly accurate observations be irrelevant?
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/08/dangerous-cocktail-ignorant-voters-rogue-govt/#kOcjqG58B4XKWtC3.99My comments: Americans have taken what the Founders gave them and THROWN IT AWAY in their APATHY. Christians have forgotten that their is an Enemy out to DEVOUR them, [1 Peter 5:8] and that to maintain FAITH is a constant VIGIL as the Scripture repeated tells us.
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