The Way I See It - The State

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Wed, Nov 04, 2009, 7:00 am  //  Ham Hayes

Rousseau in 1753, by Maurice Quentin de La Tour
Father of Statism?
Source: Wikipedia Few of us advocate for the suppression of the human spirit. In fact we would be shocked if others characterized us as miserly, mean spirited or oppressive. Yet today we find ourselves in a social, political and cultural dialog where in many quarters those characterizations are being directed toward those who hold different views. Sometimes the vocabulary reflects an “either/or” mentality and perhaps indicates a growing intolerance. One of our cherished American beliefs is that our country offers safe harbor to people who hold a wide range of differing beliefs and cultural practices. At this time, that may be more myth than truth. Control by the government appears to be increasing. And there is a corresponding decrease of influence from our religious and spiritual traditions.

The Religion of the State, or Statism, now dictates our society’s moral authority. For over 200 years, Western society has been undergoing a transformation. This transformation is marked by the systematic isolation and eradication of religious influence from the body politic. It is also marked by government, i.e. the State, providing the code of morality for society. Political and social revolutions, the rise of National Socialism, Fascism, Communism, and indeed modern western democratic societies can trace their genealogy back to 18th and 19th century philosophers and the basic premise that moral authority comes not from God, but man. The intention of those who advocate increased government control can be well meant. That’s what we wish to believe about our own government. Other 20th Century societies, Germany, Russia, China, and Cambodia among others, went another way, the way of genocide to eliminate opposition to the new priesthoods of those societies. And all of their State "priesthoods" believed they were morally justified in their actions.

Today, we can understand the reasons for the French Revolution and the overthrow of a monarchy backed by religious authority. One only has to visit Versailles, palace of the last French kings, to see the unparalleled decadence of the French monarchy. When built by Louis XIV, that palace cost France one-half of its gross domestic product. That is like our government spending 7 trillion dollars today on a really nice house for the President and his staff. In the evolution of humanity, we see the revolutionary events and the thinking behind them as part of a dynamic that breaks through the old toxic thought forms and opens the planet up to truly new thinking. In that era, Mankind needed to be freed from ego-based religious institutions. The corrupt human institutions that usurped control of access to God and authorized “divinity” to kings had to go.

Belief in the State is the ultimate political expression of rationalism. It is the political end of scientific thought. This dynamic has been running since the Renaissance. The dynamic was meant to break the worldly enslavement of the spiritual world by mankind’s ego. Recently, Statism has been somewhat successful in breaking this enslavement, but not completely. The “not completely” is due to the premise by Statism that there is no spiritual world at all, and science can be legitimately opposed or used for the State’s purposes. Where that leaves modern society and science is at the mercy of Statism’s relativistic moral authority. And having been almost completely marginalized by the State, spiritual wisdom traditions are now largely ignored if not harassed.

This is the source of stress in our political and social institutions. We have seen the rise of the State and had hope in its promises. What has actually happened over the last century has mostly resulted in broken promises, a continued inability to solve problems, and great harm done to our fellow Man. Some track record. And that record combined with marginalization of our spiritual traditions has left us with great uncertainty about what is right and wrong. We seem to have constant and challenging arguments with each other about the course of action we need to take to solve complex societal issues. Too often we seek to make the other person or group “wrong”, often because the only things we have to fall back on are discredited or non-relevant beliefs. The other results of this situation include the feeling of loss of power, a rise of cynicism and finally non-participation by many of us.

Continued separation between the State, Spirit and Science will not serve us. We will continue to wander in our political and social turbulence and continue to fail in solving pandemic addictions to everything from drugs to political power. In the past, we have relied on religious institutions, government and science to tell us what to do. That doesn’t work. The solution to our dilemma lies within us. We are capable of integrating the three principles, fusing the wisdom of each. What that will take from each of us is personal involvement and personal responsibility combined with the understanding that we are all connected. It is not "either-or" and we’ve got a lot to lose if we don’t.

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