USA blueprint of 5000years leap!
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Principle 1 - The only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law.
Natural law is God's law. There are certain laws which govern the entire universe, and just as Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence, there are laws which govern in the affairs of men which are "the laws of nature and of nature's God."
Principle 2 - A free people cannot survive under a republican constitution unless they remain virtuous and morally strong.
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." - Benjamin Franklin
Principle 3 - The most promising method of securing a virtuous people is to elect virtuous leaders.
"Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who ... will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man." - Samuel Adams
Principle 4 - Without religion the government of a free people cannot be maintained.
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.... And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion." - George Washington
Principle 5 - All things were created by God, therefore upon him all mankind are equally dependent, and to him they are equally responsible .
The American Founding Fathers considered the existence of the Creator as the most fundamental premise underlying all self-evident truth. They felt a person who boasted he or she was an atheist had just simply failed to apply his or her divine capacity for reason and observation.
Principle 6 - All mankind were created equal.
The Founders knew that in these three ways, all mankind are theoretically treated as:
1. Equal before God.
2. Equal before the law.
3. Equal in their rights.
Principle 7 - The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not provide equal things.
The Founders recognized that the people cannot delegate to their government any power except that which they have the lawful right to exercise themselves.
Principle 8 - Mankind are endowed by God with certain unalienable rights.
"Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as are life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal [or state] laws to be inviolable. On the contrary, no human legislation has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner [of the right] shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture." - William Blackstone
Principle 9 - To protect human rights, God has revealed a code of divine law.
"The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the Holy Scriptures. These precepts, when revealed, are found by comparison to be really a part of the original law of nature, as they tend in all their consequences to man's felicity." - William Blackstone
Principle 10 - The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people.
"The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of the consent of the people. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legislative authority." - Alexander Hamilton
Principle 11 - The majority of the people may alter or abolish a government which has become tyrannical.
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes ... but when a long train of abuses and usurpations ... evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security." - Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence
Principle 12 - The United States of Americashall be a republic.
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
And to the republic for which it stands...."Principle 13 - A Constitution should protect the people from the frailties of their rulers.
"If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.... [But lacking these] you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." - James Madison
Principle 14 - Life and liberty are secure only so long as the rights of property are secure .
John Locke reasoned that God gave the earth and everything in it to the whole human family as a gift. Therefore the land, the sea, the acorns in the forest, the deer feeding in the meadow belong to everyone "in common." However, the moment someone takes the trouble to change something from its original state of nature, that person has added his ingenuity or labor to make that change. Herein lies the secret to the origin of "property rights."
Principle 15 - The highest level of prosperity occurs when there is a free-market economy and a minimum of government regulations.
Prosperity depends upon a climate of wholesome stimulation with four basic freedoms in operation:
1. The Freedom to try.
2. The Freedom to buy.
3. The Freedom to sell.
4. The Freedom to fail.
Principle 16 - The government should be separated into three branches .
"I call you to witness that I was the first member of the Congress who ventured to come out in public, as I did in January 1776, in my Thoughts on Government ... in favor of a government with three branches and an independent judiciary. This pamphlet, you know, was very unpopular. No man appeared in public to support it but yourself." - John Adams
Principle 17 - A system of checks and balances should be adopted to prevent the abuse of power by the different branches of government.
"It will not be denied that power is of an encroaching nature and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it." - James Madison
Principle 18 - The unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written Constitution.
The structure of the American system is set forth in the Constitution of the United States and the only weaknesses which have appeared are those which were allowed to creep in despite the Constitution.
Principle 19 - Only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to government, all others being retained by the people.
The Tenth Amendment is the most widely violated provision of the bill of rights. If it had been respected and enforced America would be an amazingly different country than it is today. This amendment provides:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Principle 20 - Efficiency and dispatch require that the government operate according to the will of the majority, but constitutional provisions must be made to protect the rights of the minority.
"Every man, by consenting with others to make one body politic under one government, puts himself under an obligation to every one of that society to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded [bound] by it." - John Locke
Principle 21 - Strong local self-government is the keystone to preserving human freedom.
"The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent [to perform best]. - Thomas Jefferson
Principle 22 - A free people should be governed by law and not by the whims of men.
"The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence of others, which cannot be where there is no law." - John Locke
Principle 23 - A free society cannot survive as a republic without a broad program of general education.
"They made an early provision by law that every town consisting of so many families should be always furnished with a grammar school. They made it a crime for such a town to be destitute of a grammar schoolmaster for a few months, and subjected it to a heavy penalty. So that the education of all ranks of people was made the care and expense of the public, in a manner that I believe has been unknown to any other people, ancient or modern. The consequences of these establishments we see and feel every day [written in 1765]. A native of America who cannot read and write is as rare ... as a comet or an earthquake." John Adams
Principle 24 - A free people will not survive unless they stay strong.
"To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." - George Washington
Principle 25 - "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations -- entangling alliances with none."- Thomas Jefferson, given in his first inaugural address.
Principle 26 - The core unit which determines the strength of any society is the family; therefore the government should foster and protect its integrity.
"There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is more respected than in America , or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated." Alexis de Tocqueville
Principle 27 - The burden of debt is as destructive to human freedom as subjugation by conquest.
"We are bound to defray expenses [of the war] within our own time, and are unauthorized to burden posterity with them.... We shall all consider ourselves morally bound to pay them ourselves and consequently within the life [expectancy] of the majority." - Thomas Jefferson
Principle 28 - The United Stateshas a manifest destiny to eventually become a glorious example of God's law under a restored Constitution that will inspire the entire human race.
The Founders sensed from the very beginning that they were on a divine mission. Their great disappointment was that it didn't all come to pass in their day, but they knew that someday it would. John Adams wrote:
"I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth."
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Lots of what the founding fathers of America did seems common sense but as the saying goes common sense is not common
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Principle 26 - The core unit which determines the strength of any society is the family; therefore the government should foster and protect its integrity.
I don't agree with this principle.
And USA also now concentrates on individualism, so this principle of family is also lost.
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Guess if jefferson and the rest able to travel to present day america, they would be shocked to find porn, drugs and violence
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Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire
A work of breathtaking erudition and synthesis, DARK AGES AMERICA offers no hope for arresting America's career as a self-destructive global hegemon. While that's a difficult conclusion to swallow, Berman amply defends his thesis, drawing his supporting evidence from a variety of disciplines: history, cultural studies, polling data, economic analysis, sociology and social psychology. The possibility of America's turning away from its dark destiny, which in Mr. Berman's analysis is now clearly manifest, is made to seem remote, and, regrettably, convincingly so.
Particularly compelling is Mr. Berman's discussion of America's need for an enemy, an Other upon which to focus in order that we never turn our attention to the emptiness at the center of the American psyche: The Red Menace, the Cold War, the War on Drugs, The War on Terror. Each of these wars has served to diminish and even outlaw critical thinking about America's empiric career. In a constant state of emergency, history for Americans is a set of bullet points which are cynically served up as justification for the latest military adventure. Berman's anecdotes and survey findings paint an American populace that is self-absorbed, provincial, and willfully anti-intellectual, a people for whom bullet points more than suffice.
We watch television shows about tightly knit families and groups of friends, staving off the loneliness generated by the individualistic, devil-take-the-hindmost ethos that is America's real civil religion, Berman says. We turn away from the terror that we inflict on innocent people in order that we may claim their oil wealth and so keep this dwindling life-blood flowing in the veins of the American project of global empire. We pay no attention to the vast sums of money spent to prop up the energy-military-industrial complex. Instead we are distracted by cynical stories of welfare queens, wicked tax and spend liberals, evil dictators and axes of evil, our resentments kept well-stoked and smoldering.
On a personal note, landing at Kansas City International Airport the other day, my vision of America altered by my in-flight reading of Mr. Berman's remarkable work, I saw the landscape through new eyes, a landscape I now understood to have been systematically vandalized by the corporatocracy: big box stores, chain hotels and restaurants, strip malls and gas stations, a landscape everywhere repeated across the United States, a landscape we intend to impose upon the world in order to fulfill our destiny as bringer of freedom as expressed through consumption.
While this cookie-cutter landscape had always before aroused in me a sense of unease, an unease that had become in me clich? and so easily subdued, with the assistance of Berman's perspicacious vision, I became alive to the fact that this American landscape represents in physical form the ingenuity and monomania of America's new empiric form.
Empty of community, driven by the ethos of radical individualism, I saw an interlocking system of endless consumption in which we are all driven by the relentless stoking of our vanity and desire by clever marketers who have taught us to confuse social goods with economic goods, and by a political structure which mystifies cause and effect, which ruthlessly condemns anyone who has the temerity to question the course of this bleak, empty empire. -
One thing I want people to know is that Founding fathers of USA wanted a republic state not democratic state ..as one woman asked jefferson what kind of system he wanted the new born nation to go " A republic if we can keep it" he said
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Millions of years ago, even before men became human, they had a need for defence of the group, because it is perfectly obvious that men cannot live outside of groups. They can satisfy their needs only by cooperating within a group. But I'll go further than that, and return to it again in a moment: Men will not become men unless they grow up in communities. We will come back to that because it is the basis of my lecture tonight.
If you have a group, it must be defended against outsiders; that's military. Before men came out of the trees they had that need. If your needs are to be satisfied within some kind of group, you must have ways of settling disputes and arguments, and reconciling individual problems within the group; that's political. You must have organizational patterns for satisfying material needs, food, clothing, shelter: that's economic.
Then came two which have been largely been destroyed or frustrated in the last thousand years of Western Civilization. Men have social needs. They have a need for other people; they have a need to love and be loved. They have a need to be noticed.
Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy because no one had ever noticed him and he was determined that, from now on, someone would know he existed. In fact, most of these "motiveless" assassinations are of this type. Someone went up to the top of the University of Texas tower and shot something like seventeen people before they caught him. That was because no one had ever noticed him. People need other people. That's the social need. The basis of social relationships is reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others will cooperate with you.
The next is emotional need. Men must have emotional experiences. This is obtained in two ways that I can see: moment to moment relationships with other people--moment to moment-- and moment to moment relationships with nature. Our society has so cluttered up our lives with artefacts-- TV sets or automobiles or whatever-- and organizational structures that moment to moment with nature are almost impossible. Most people don't even know what the weather outside is like. Someone said recently that until September we had a great drought here in Washington, and four or five people standing there said, "That's ridiculous." We had a shortage of about eight inches of rain. Because they're in buildings, it doesn't matter to them whether it's raining or not.
The next is the religious. It became fashionable in Western Civilization, particularly in the last hundred years, to be scornful of religion. But it is a fact that human beings have religious needs. They have a need for a feeling of certitude in their minds about things they cannot control and they do not fully understand, and with humility, they will admit they do not understand them. When you destroy people's religious expression, they will establish secularised religions like Marxism.
Now, on the intellectual level: people have intellectual needs. I used to tell students that Marilyn Monroe had profound intellectual needs. And when no one would treat her as an intellect or even as a potential intellect, for obvious reasons, she was starved for intellectual experience. That's why she married a man like Arthur Miller: she thought he was an intellectual.
A community is made up of intimate relationships among diverse types of individuals--a kinship group, a local group, a neighbourhood, a village, a large family. Without communities, no infant will be sufficiently socialized. He may grow up to be forty years old, he may have made an extremely good living, he may have engendered half a dozen children, but he is still an infant unless he has been properly socialized and that occurs in the first four or five years of life.
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The basic entity we must understand is the civilization as a whole. Although I tell you I'm going to talk about the last thousand years, 976-1976, Western Civilization, of which we are a part, has been around for a considerably longer time than that. We might say Western Civilization began around 550, but there was no significant structure of public authority until almost 1050, with no state at all over the preceding two centuries, 850-1050.
Yet 950 is significant as the point at which our Western Civilization began the first of its three great Ages of Expansion, 970-1270. (The other two were 1440-1590 and 1770-1890). This first age of expansion applies to the core of Western Civilization, the area between the Rhine River and the Loire, the area which formed the core of the Carolingian Empire (687-887). This Empire was the earliest political structure of the new Western Civilization, one of four new civilizations which sprouted from the ruins of Classical Civilization after A.D. 500.
These four were Byzantine (330-1453), lslamic'(630-1922), Russian (800-?), and Western (550-?). Each of them modified the traditions it accepted from the ruins of Classical Civilization and created its own distinctive culture.
Another paradigm I want to establish is a difference between two kinds of civilizations, which means a difference between two kinds of governments in them.
Asiatic civilizations, which I call Class B Civilizations, generally do not attempt to deal with individuals or with the problems of individuals; they leave interpersonal relationships to the local or kinship community.
Class A Civilizations include Classical Civilization, our own Western Civilization, or the first Chinese or Sin¡c Civilization, whose dates are 1800 B. C. to 400 A. D. In Class A Civilizations, although the civilization begins as an area of common culture made up of communities, there is a long term trend to destroy and break down those communities.
The way I would like to express this would be —and I used to draw it on the blackboard —by saying that all civilizations start out as aggregations of communities. Those communities are generally of two types, either local, such as parishes, neighborhoods, villages or manors; or kinship communities, families, clans and so forth.
When a civilization begins with such communities, as ours did in 550, there is no state, and there are no atomized individuals. I will not go into the details of this, but in such communities, there are no written laws; all law is customary. Most controls on behavior are what I call internalized, that is, they are built into your hormones and your neurological responses.
You do what is necessary to remain a member of the community, because if you are not a member of the community, you would be nothing. You would not be a man. As you may know if you have ever studied linguistics, the names which many primitives and not-so-pr¡mitive peoples have for themselves is their word for man.
The communities from which Classical Civilization came were local villages and manors. Lucky civilizations, such as Chinese Civilization over the past 1500 years, generally have communities which are both kinship and local.
What happens in the course of Class A Civilization, over a thousand or more years, is that the fundamental communities are broken up and gradually disintegrate into smaller and smaller groups, and may end up simply as what we call nuclear families, a father and a mother, who eventually lose all discipline and control of their own children. The result of this process is a state which is not only sovereign but totalitarian, and it is filled with isolated individuals.
Of the four civilizations which came out of Classical Antiquity's wreckage, two, Islamic and Byzantine, clearly are Class B Civilizations, that is, they continued to work for communities. Their governments were governments of limited powers, of which the most important were raising money and recruiting soldiers. The finest example of such an Asiatic Despotism was the Mongolian Empire of Jenghiz Khan about A. D. 1250, but its origins go back to the Persian Empires of the Achaemenids and the Sassan¡ds.
Good examples of such a structure are the Chinese Civilization of 220-1949, the Byzantine Empire after 640, and the Islamic sultanates which eventually culminated in the Ottoman Empire.
The efforts of the Carolingian Franks to establish a similar empire in Western Civilization collapsed and led to the Dark Age of 860-970.
These eastern political traditions might be called Providential Empire or Providential Monarchy, and they are associated with the idea of a Providential Deity. To us today, who shove religion off into a corner and insist that it must have nothing to do with politics or business or many other things, it may be hard to grasp that one of the most potent things in establishing the structure of the state in any civilization has always been man's idea of the nature of deity. . . .
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Eh.. i don't really understand the connection between the title and what TS posted, can TS explain better?
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It is interesting that people are mentioning the role of religion in the establishment of civilization. The sad fact is that the contemporary ignorance prevalent in western civilization (or shall I say anglo-american empire) forces people who want to engage in any kind of useful public debate to act on a first principles basis, to put the idea of God aside, like a joke. I think this is in part because within the anglo-american context, religious institutional authority has failed to reconcile itself with the secular beliefs of Natural Law and vise versa, i.e. what the Church says that Jesus taught and what the scientists (the secular priests) says that Darwin taught don't mesh. To the point that all debate by people who fanatically accept the extreme views of either camp will invariably descend into chaos.
What then has happened is that secular life has become irreligious and downright immoral while religious life has become disconnected with reality. The fact is that it is altogether natural and normal for enlightened religion to be reconciled with what Mankind has observed of the universe. The failure today is due to the contesting power centres of the religious and secular institutions within anglo-american society. It can be said that the neo-conservative movement was an attempt at a new reformation but the catastrophic failures of the ongoing neo-conservative project shows that the people who man the helms of religious, secular and economic power centres are all lacking in any broad and progressive ideas. The failures are all very evident and I propose will continue to be compounded as long as the blind faith in what our anglo-american instructors tell us about religous, secular and economic life perpetuates.
The mistake of Islamic extremists is to diagnose that the cure to the problem is to destroy the entire anglo-american empire. This would mean plunging the world into chaos. I propose that what is actually needed is more meritocracy, in the truest sense of the word. Only in this way can good ideas take hold and do their good work.