On the 3^rd of November 2023 Elon Musk’s “xAI Team” announced that as of this memorable day, “Grok” will be the name of “an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, a science fiction novel created during the late 1970s by English author and screenwriter Douglas Noel Adams. In this book, a certain Arthur Dent hitchhikes through the universe following the destruction of Earth by a race of nasty aliens called Vogons. Dent discovers that the Earth was actually a giant supercomputer created by Deep Thought, an even bigger computer. [i] In xAI Team’s “artifictional” wonderworld its Grok AI is “intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!” […] It was “designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!” Let Grok be your guide when you hitchhike to the galaxy, have some fun and, in case you’d get bored or run out of questions, just ask xAI’s “machine-based system” what question you should ask.

Understanding the Universe

True to its word, the xAI Team doesn’t shy away from offering galactic visions on Grok’s website. After all, its mission statement is: “Understand the Universe“. And so, “AI’s knowledge should be all-encompassing and as far-reaching as possible.” In any case, I guess, as far reaching as the outer bounderies of the Universe. To assist all earthlings in understanding the universe, the Team advocates Grok as an “AI specifically to advance human comprehension and capabilities”. Under the header “Reasoning from First Principles“, the xAI Team boasts that it “challenges conventional thinking by breaking down problems to their fundamental truths, grounded in logic.” This should make Grok “your truth-seeking AI companion for unfiltered answers with advanced capabilities in reasoning, coding, and visual processing”. Should all these sophisticated terms escape your comprehension, don’t worry, because “[a] unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform”. Let Grok seek and it will find. To the one who knocks on Grok’s door, that door will be opened.

Grokked, grokking, grocks

Without a doubt, when the xAI Team decided that “Grok” would be the name for its “machine-based system”, it was aware of the fact that “to grok” is a verb that was coined by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein and first used in 1961 in his science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. In the book, the term “grok” is used by Martians to indicate that you cannot understand, fear, hate or appreciate something “unless you grok it”, i.e. “understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you”. “The Martian,” so Heinlein in his novel, “seems to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that observer acts with observed through the process of observation. Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed — to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. […] ‘Grok’ means ‘identically equal.’ […] It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man.” Today, any dictionary will tell you that “to grok” means “to understand profoundly through intuition or empathy” and “to communicate sympathetically”. [ii]

Grokking Grok

Of course, picking Grok as the name that distinguishes your AI system from the ones designed by your competitors does have consequences. Meaning that in order to assist the users of Grok in understanding the Universe and finding truth, this “AI-companion” must above all be capable of grokking not only the Universe but truth as well. Grok must become part of ‒ “grok” ‒ what it observes, it must merge with “the observed” to the point where “the observed” merges with and becomes identically equal to Grok. The system must not only duplicate “the observed”, but understand it as well. Only then will Grok be able to deliver what it promises and share what it grokked ‒ thoroughly understood ‒ with its human “companions”. But then, the big question is: who’s to say whether Grok succeeded in grokking ‒ completely merging with ‒ and understanding ‒ knowing ‒ whatever it was asked to grok. To verify whether “truth-seeking” Grok truly grokked what it was supposed to grok, the verifier must grok it as well to determine whether Grok found and delivered what it promised to seek: truth.

Let’s ask the Martians

According to Heinlein in Stranger in a strange land, grokking is an ability that was mastered by Martians. So, I’d say that only Martians will be able to determine whether Elon Musk’s Grok will pass the grok-exam cum laude. In this regard, we seem to be in luck since Musk’s SpaceX program aims at building a City on Mars. According to the SpaceX website, Mars is “one of Earth’s closest habitable neighbors”. [iii] The red planet is located “about half again as far from the Sun as Earth is”. It “still has decent sunlight”, yet it’s “a little cold, but we can warm it up. Its atmosphere is primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, which means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere. Gravity on Mars is about 38% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around. Furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth.” And, allow me to suggest, once we’re hopping around in Musk’s City on Mars, let’s ask the local Martians to grok Grok and let us know if Grok is able to grok like Martians. But then, …, even if the Martians would give Grok a pass, why on earth would we place our trust in Martians or in Grok instead of letting our own human intuition, empathy and intelligence be our guide to the galaxy. After all, aren’t we the ones who were created in God’s image !

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[i] https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/summary/

[ii] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/grok

[iii] https://www.spacex.com/humanspaceflight/mars

In a recent conversation with Tucker Carlson, the German economist Richard Werner explained how banks are able to “create money from nothing”. [i] In 2014, Werner had already published two articles on this enigma: “Can banks individually create money out of nothing?” and “How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same?” In these articles Werner presents an overview of the well known theories of “money creation” and concisely described an experiment he conducted in cooperation with an established German bank to bring to light another monetary practice that had never before received any attention in mainstream economic/financial publications. [ii] iii] Briefly put, Werner demonstrated that banks can and do create money by making credit available to borrowers without disbursing the loan but, instead, keeping customer deposits in their own balance sheet.

Uniquely exempt from accounting rules

According to Werner, banks get away with keeping customers’ deposits, also known as “money”, in their own balance sheet not because they combine lending and deposit taking activities under one roof, but because the necessary and sufficient condition for being able to create credit and money is that banks are uniquely exempt from the accounting rules that provide that firms that do not have a banking autorisation must hold client deposits/money in segregated escrow (trust or third-party) accounts so that these deposits remain “off-balance” for the firm. In the simplest of terms, the exemption makes that the money you hold in “your” bank account remains on the bank’s own balance sheets.

The crucial accounting change

This Commentary is not the place to elaborate on Werner’s findings and evaluate whether they conclusively answer the question how banks create money from nothing. But in case you’re interested in the technicalities involved in creating money from nothing, read on. If not, just skip this and the following paragraphs and continue reading at Money, money, money. According to Werner, money creation is accomplished “through the one, small but crucial accounting change that does take place on the liability side of the bank’s balance sheet […]; the bank reduces its ‘account payable’ item by the loan amount, acting as if the money had been disbursed to the customer, and at the same time it presents the customer with a statement that identifies this same obligation of the bank to the borrower, but now simply reclassified as a ‘customer deposit’ of the borrower with the bank.” (emphasis added)

Banks are not financial intermediaries

The borrower is given the false impression that funds have been made available to him/her/it while in fact, due to this accounting change, no transfer of money has actually taken place. “There is,” so Werner, “no equal reduction in the balance of another account to defray the borrower. Instead, the bank simply re-classified its liabilities, changing the ‘accounts payable’ obligation arising from the bank loan contract to another liability category called ‘customer deposits’. Werner concludes that “banks are not financial intermediaries, but creators of the money supply, whereby the act of creating money is contingent on banks maintaining customer deposit accounts, because the money is invented in the form of fictitious customer deposits that are actually re-classified ‘accounts payable’ liabilities emanating from loan contracts.”

Money, money, money …

Evidently, money created from something existed long before bankers figured out how to create it from nothing. The Romans created money by stamping metal to make coins. Money comes from the Latin word “moneta”, which not only means “mint” or “minter”, i.e. a “place for coining money”, but also the result of minting: “coined money, money, coinage”. In Old English a “mynetere”, from Latin “monetarius”, was someone who “stamps coins to create money”. In this monetary tradition, money wasn’t created from nothing, but from metals. Had Tucker Carlson asked a “myneter” whether it is possible to create money from nothing, the latter would have laughed in Tucker’s face and shrugged him off as a complete idiot. Yet, here we are, watching Carlson and Werner discussing how banks create “money” from nothing.

The illusion of money

Solving this conundrum is actually quite simple. Banks do not create money from nothing. What  banks do is create the illusion of money from nothing. This is the reason why money is sometimes called “an idea backed up by confidence”. Bankers act like con artists. They are “illusionists”, skilled in the art of creating “money” from nothing by giving borrowers the false impression that the deposits placed in bank accounts have come from somewhere, while in fact, due to an accounting trick that remains unseen for the actual client, no transfer of money has taken place. As Werner explained, there is no equal reduction in the balance of another account to defray the borrower. The bank’s clients are left unaware of the fact that their deposits were created from nothing and that their money is added by the bank to the total amount of money that is in circulation and that this is the one and only cause of inflation. They have no idea that by accepting loans from banks they are instrumental in reducing the purchasing power of owners of previously existing “money” and that all future borrowers of new money created from nothing will inevitably reduce their own purchasing power.

What about CASH … ?

Does using cash solve the problem? Not really. Except that the use of cash takes place outside the control of the bank and, in a larger context, outside what’s called the “control grid”, cash is as illusionary as “money” held in bank deposits. Cash is no more than printed paper (banknotes) or coined metal of little or no value. Without its official marks and imprints, cash isn’t worth a dime. It gives the “money illusion” a glow of credibility because you can keep it in your pocket, money box or safe. Yet, all cash is issued by federal, national or reserve banks. To obtain it, the first user must withdraw “money” from his/her/its commercial bank account. Just like “money” held in bank deposits, cash is created from nothing, be it that it takes paper, metal, a printing press and a “mint” to create it.

Creation out of nothing ?

Richard Werner has been critisized for presenting a limited and one-sided explanation of “banking” and for rejecting “other theories” of money creation. In “Richard Werner’s Credit Creation ‘Experiment’: How Do Banks Create Money?“, an article published on the website of the Mises Institute on 14 August 2025, Jonathan Newman writes that Werner’s “favored theory, interpreted charitably, isn’t incorrect but it narrowly focuses on one loan by a fractional reserve bank.” [iv] Well, I leave it to the scholars, pundits and bankers to agree or disagree on how exactly banks manage to create money from nothing. Not because I think that the matter isn’t of importance, which it most certainly is, but because the word that is left unexplored in these discussions is ….. “nothing”.

Creation ex nihilo

Creation out of nothing, in Latin: ex nihilo, is commonly understood as an act that only God is capable of. In fact, creating ex nihilo is what defines God. The crux of the matter is, of course, to be found in the words “ex nihilo”, which makes creation out of nothing an act that takes place at a level of existence where nothing exists except the ability to create. Creation ex nihilo implies creating a creation from its very beginning, de novo. Before a creation’s beginning there was nothing, except of course the potentiality to come into existence as Creator.

Ex nihilo out of nowhere …

I doubt whether the monetary experts who offer explanations as to how bankers create money out of nothing are aware of the fact that the combination of the words create and out of nothing does have profound implications. Of course, we all think we understand what is meant by creating money from nothing. Without giving “nothing” any further thought our attention is primarily fixed on that precious “something” that, in spite of having been created out of nothing, still seems to make the world go round and round. The point is that, strictly speaking, creation from nothing must take place out of the nowhere where there is nothing, the nowhere that “was” before The Beginning. In this nowhere there were no heavens, no earth, no mankind, no Adam, no Eve, no plants, no fish, no beasts, no things, no objects, no …. money.

The Creator of Man

There was, however, a Creator Who, in the course of the human events that took place after The Beginning, made Himself known to Man as “I am” (“IAWEH”). Those of us who dismiss this as superstititon or baloney might consider that without “I am” they wouldn’t be here. Whatever the case may be, the Men who signed the American Declaration of Independence on behalf of their States held that the Creator of Man not only creates all Men “equal”, but also endows everyone of us with the unalienable rights called Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Anyone who thinks, suggests or insists that substituting money created from something for the illusionary money created by bankers “out of nothing” will be helpful in the pursuit of happiness, should seriously check how this promise impacts everyone’s Life and Liberty.

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[i] Richard Werner Exposes the Evils of the Fed & the Link Between Banking, War, and the CIA; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StTKHskg5Tg

[ii] Can banks individually create money out of nothing? — The theories and the empirical evidence. Richard A. Werner; International Review of Financial Analysis; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.irfa.2014.07.015; 1057-5219/© 2014 Published by Elsevier Inc.

[iii] How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same?An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking. Richard A. Werner; International Review of Financial Analysis; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.irfa.2014.10.013; 1057-5219/© 2014 Published by Elsevier Inc.

[iv] Richard Werner’s Credit Creation “Experiment”: How Do Banks Create Money?; Jonathan Newman; Mises wire, 14 August 2025; https://mises.org/mises-wire/richard-werners-credit-creation-experiment-how-do-banks-create-money

In July, the White House published Winning the AI race / AMERICA’s AI ACTION PLAN. According to the Plan’s authors, AI high-priests Michael J. Kratsios (Assistant to the U.S. President for Science and Technology) and David O. Sacks (Special Advisor for AI and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Marco Rubio, there’s a renaissance afoot, be it that this renaissance depends on “winning the AI race”. There won’t be “a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people”, unless the AI race is won. AI is the digital technology that “will enable Americans to discover new materials, synthesize new chemicals, manufacture new drugs, and develop new methods to harness energy—an industrial revolution. It will enable radically new forms of education, media, and communication—an information revolution. And it will enable altogether new intellectual achievements: unraveling ancient scrolls once thought unreadable, making breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical theory, and creating new kinds of digital and physical art—a renaissance.”

A RENAISSANCE ….. ???

In 1486, the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola published “On the Dignity of Man.” This book is considered to be the “Manifesto” of The Renaissance. Although The Renaissance was “humanist” in nature in that it emphasized and celebrated “Man’s greatness”, the Renaissance’s humanists of the 14^th-15^th-16^th centuries were Christians, who sought to renew Christianity by exploring the works of the philosophers of Greek antiquity. In his Introduction to “On the Dignity of Man”, philosopher Paul J.W. Miller writes that della Mirandola held that “Man is the metaphysical center of the universe, standing between the physical world of nature and the spiritual world of angels and God. … [T]he root of Man’s excellence and dignity lies in the fact that Man is the maker of his own nature. Man may be what he wishes to be: he makes himself what he chooses. … This does not mean that Man is an absolute creator of himself, for the making activity of man operates upon potencies which are already given. … The context of Pico’s affirmation of man’s freedom shows that he is thinking above all of moral freedom, the ability to give oneself the character or set of moral habits that one chooses.” According to della Mirandola, “the end of Man is to return to his first cause, God, where our knowledge is perfected.” His philosophy “expresses the fundamentally religious spirit of the Renaissance”. (i)

AI SCIENCE

The AI triumvirate Kratsios, Sacks and Rubio promises “an industrial revolution, an information revolution, and a renaissance—all at once. This is the potential that AI presents”. The problem is that these American visionaries don’t spend one single word on “a renaissance” in their AI Action Plan. They leave it to the reader to guess or use AI to discover how AI is going to “enable altogether new intellectual achievements by unraveling ancient scrolls, making breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical theory, and creating new kinds of digital and physical art.” Admittedly, they do show an interest in “science”, but only in “AI-Enabled Science”. This is because “AI systems can already generate models of protein structures, novel materials, and much else. Increasingly powerful general-purpose [computer language] models show promise in formulating hypotheses and designing experiments. These nascent capabilities promise to accelerate scientific advancement.”

Of Allies, Partners and Adversaries

The visionaries’ problem … ? America is fighting an AI War. “Other countries, including our adversaries, have raced ahead of us in amassing vast troves of scientific data.” The solution … ? “Prioritize investment in theoretical, computational, and experimental research to preserve America’s leadership in discovering new and transformative paradigms that advance the capabilities of AI, […].” Other than improving AI’s capabilities, America’s AI Action Plan is mainly focused on: “Accelerating AI Adoption in Government” to “deliver the highly responsive government the American people expect and deserve”; “aggressively adopting AI within its Armed Forces if it is to maintain its global military preeminence …”; “[e]xporting Big Tech’s American AI to Allies and Partners” because “a failure to meet this demand would be an unforced error, causing these countries to turn to our rivals” and because “the distribution and diffusion of American technology will stop our strategic rivals from making our allies dependent on foreign adversary technology.”

Intelligentia

According to Paul Miller, “[t]he Italian Renaissance witnessed a renewal in interest in man and his intellectual activities.” (emphasis added) This perfectly fits the fact that “intelligence” is commonly understood as the “highest faculty of the human mind” and as Man‘s “inherent, natural, capacity for comprehending general truths”. Intelligence is Man‘s “faculty of understanding, comprehension”. It is the ability to perceive, retain, distinguish, and align data in order to reach conclusions to solve problems. Intelligence is from Latin intelligentia or intellegentia: “understanding, knowledge, power of discerning; art, skill, taste”. Intelligentia is derived from intellegens which is the gerund form of the Latin verb intellego (to understand), meaning that it expresses the doingness of using the mind to understand and grasp meaning. Intellego is a combination of the words inter (“between”) +‎ legō (“to select”, “collect,” “pick”, “bring together”, “align”. Lego also means “to read”, not just in the sense of examining and grasping the meaning of written or printed characters, words, or sentences, but also in the broader sense of discerning or anticipating through examination or observation. This is how lego means reading the lines as well as reading “between the lines”.

AI & Big Government

Reading America’s AI Action Plan, it’s glaringly obvious that it has nothing to do with a renewal of Man’s intellectual activities. What the Plan comes down to is merging AI systems with Big Government and America’s imperial quest for strengthening its efforts to maintain and solidify what is left of its geopolitical power. In this regard, it’s not a “renaissance” of America’s domestic and foreign policies, but nothing other than old, stale, wine in new AI-designed wineskins. Still, with regard to improving Americans’ intellectual capacities, the Action Plan does spend a few lines on the use of AI in learning and education: “The Trump Administration has already taken significant steps to lead on this front, including the April 2025 Executive Order […] ‘Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth’.” However, this push for AI Education is not aimed at boosting America’s youth’s intellectual capacities. It forms part of the Administration’s “worker-first AI agenda” and rests on the assumption that “AI can help America build an economy that delivers more pathways to economic opportunity for American workers.” In addition to this, “it will also transform how work gets done across all industries and occupations, demanding a serious workforce response to help workers navigate that transition.”

From Kindergarten to 12^th Grade

To effectively transform America’s workforce into an AI-driven workforce, AI Education must begin while the future workforce is still in its infant stage. In Section 1 of said AI Education EO, we read that “[e]arly learning and exposure to AI concepts not only demystifies this powerful technology but also sparks curiosity and creativity, preparing students to become active and responsible participants in the workforce of the future and nurturing the next generation of American AI innovators to propel our Nation to new heights of scientific and economic achievement.” Still, “while AI education in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) is critical, our Nation must also make resources available for lifelong learners to develop new skills for a changing workforce.” This is how the US Government intends to “ensure that every American has the opportunity to learn about AI from the earliest stages of their educational journey through postsecondary education, fostering a culture of innovation and critical thinking that will solidify our Nation’s leadership in the AI-driven future.” Public-private partnerships with leading AI industry organizations, academic institutions, nonprofit entities, and other organizations with expertise in AI and computer science education must be set up “to collaboratively develop online resources focused on teaching K-12 students foundational AI literacy and critical thinking skills”.

Use of AI causes “cognitive atrophy”

There is just one tiny little problem that stands in the way of boosting a “culture of innovation and critical thinking”. That problem’s name is: AI. Artificial Intelligence doesn’t boost critical thinking but impairs it. That’s the outcome of scientific research that took place at one of America’s most prestigious academic institutions: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A couple of weeks before the Trump Adminstration unleashed its AI Action Plan, a group of scientists working at MIT published “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task“. (ii) In their publication, the researchers note that the reason they undertook their study stemmed from the fact that “emerging research raises critical concerns about the cognitive implications of extensive LLM [Large Learning Models such as ChatGPT] usage. Studies indicate that while these systems reduce immediate cognitive load, they may simultaneously diminish critical thinking capabilities and lead to decreased engagement in deep analytical processes. This phenomenon is particularly concerning in educational contexts, where the development of robust cognitive skills is paramount. The integration of LLMs into learning environments presents a complex duality: while they enhance accessibility and personalization of education, they may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy through excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions. Prior research points out that there is a strong negative correlation between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, with younger users exhibiting higher dependence on AI tools and consequently lower cognitive performance scores. […] Unlike conventional search engines that present diverse viewpoints for user evaluation, LLMs provide synthesized, singular responses that may inadvertently discourage lateral thinking and independent judgment. This shift from active information seeking to passive consumption of AI-generated content can have profound implications for how current and future generations process and evaluate information.” (emphases added)

Brains Only versus ChatGPT

In their study, the MIT group explored “the cognitive cost of using an LLM while performing the task of writing an essay”. The researchers chose essay writing “as it is a cognitively complex task that engages multiple mental processes while being used as a common tool in schools and in standardized tests of a student’s skills. Essay writing places significant demands on working memory, requiring simultaneous management of multiple cognitive processes. A person writing an essay must juggle both macro-level tasks (organizing ideas, structuring arguments), and micro-level tasks (word choice, grammar, syntax).” To check the impact of using ChatGPT, the MIT-team split the participants into a “Brain-only” and an LLM group. It found that “[t]he use of LLM had a measurable impact on participants, and while the benefits were initially apparent, […], the LLM group’s participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring.”

Diminished sense of cognitive agency

Compared with the “Use your Brains Only” group, the ChatGPT group scored sigificantly lower in terms of the ability to quote one’s own essay. “[N]ot only was memory encoding shallow, but the semantic content itself may not have been fully internalized.” The ChatGPT group also scored lower in terms of “Essay Ownership and Cognitive Agency”. The responses “suggest a diminished sense of cognitive agency. […] AI tools, while valuable for supporting performance, may unintentionally hinder deep cognitive processing, retention, and authentic engagement with written material. If users rely heavily on AI tools, they may achieve superficial fluency but fail to internalize the knowledge or feel a sense of ownership over it.”

The multi-billion dollar question

In light of the MIT study, the unavoidable question is: When the Assistant to the U.S. President for Science and Technology, the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs wrote their “Essay” on how to win the AI Race, did they use their brains only or did they follow the recommendations laid down in their AI Action Plan. In other words, to help “accelerate AI Adoption in Government” and “deliver the highly responsive government the American people expect and deserve”, did they use ChatGPT or some other LLM in writing their AI Action Plan?  I’d say that, as true believers in and proselytizers of AI, these high-ranking members of the US Government’s workforce should have acted responsibly and ask ChatGPT to help them write America’s AI Action Plan. In this case, I guess that these AI-“Faithful” took great pride in sacrificing a bit of their own cognitive agency, their ability to fully quote their own “Essay” and a good part of their ownership of the text when they resorted to ChatGPT to do “their” thinking and writing. Or …. could it be that the more likely answer to the multi-billion dollar question is that the authors of the AI Action Plan did use their brains and nothing else to compose it. In that case, an even bigger question is: why must Americans be stopped from doing what the AI Planners did when they put their Plan down in writing … ?

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[i] On the Dignity of Man; Pico della Mirandola; Introduction by Paul J.W. Miller; Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., Indianapolis/Cambridhe; Reprinted 1998.

[ii] Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task; Nataliya Kosmyna et al; June 10, 2025; MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

The classical liberalism propounded by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Murray Rothbard is pivoted on the concept of liberty. More in particular, and especially so within the framework of the Austrian School of Economics, the great libertarian minds place liberty in the setting of human economic interaction, for which von Mises coined the term praxeology. In this setting, liberty runs the risk of being understood as a secular and human affair. Yet, in the context of what Thomas Jefferson described as “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the American Declaration of Independence, together with Life and the Pursuit of Happiness, Liberty is to be understood as one of the unalienable rights endowed to Man by his Creator. This ‘truth’ has enormous implications, since it defines Man as a spiritual being and places the God-given right called Liberty in the heart of Man who lives in partnership with God and as such in partnership with other Men.

The libido liberandi

In my book Liberating liberty, I explore this unique perspective on the Divine origin of Man and Man’s unalienable rights and describe what happens when Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are intentionally and systematically unmoored from their true origin, the Creator of Man. In this regard, the American Declaration of Independence must be seen as the expression of the American Founders’ deep-seated libido liberandi, the urge to liberate liberty and to keep liberty liberated by defending it against the libido dominandi, the Will to Power. In this regard, the Preamble of the Declaration of Indepence is in full alignment with classical liberalism: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Check your premises

As Ayn Rand wrote in her novel Atlas Shrugged: “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.” While few libertarians will contradict the truth that the securement of Man’s unalienable rights concerns the institution of “just” Governments by the “governed”, it is doubtful whether all contemporary libertarians will unconditionally accept the truth that Governments are instituted to secure liberty as an endowment coming from the Creator of Man. The latter truth contradicts the modern “truth” that God is dead, buried and forgotten and that in our day and age all problems that concern rights, law, politics and economics must and can be solved by placing them within the strict confines of human action. But if God is dead, who or what is at the origin of rights such as Liberty? Nature? Government? Other men? So, if contradictions don’t exist, and more in particular in light of the fact that the Declaration of Independence is a seminal document in the field of Liberty, it might not be a bad idea for libertarians to check their premises. After all, the notion that God is dead creates an inner contradiction in the Preamble on which the entire Declaration rests. If God is really dead, the Declaration is reduced to no more than an enumeration of some of the most pressing reasons for declaring political independence from the British Commonwealth.

Metanoia

Other than this, if the Creator of Man really died some time after 1776, His death also profoundly alters the meaning of the word happiness and what its pursuit shall entail. In the classical traditions of the philosophy of law and politics, Man is a speech- or Logos-enabled being, whose happiness can only be thought of in terms of the classical idea of the highest good, of eudaimomia. Those traditions invariably turned to the relations between the human and the divine without losing sight of the relations between human and brute nature. Man – i.e. every human being – exists in the “Great In-between” that connects the secular World and the Divine Ground of Being. Plato called this In-Between the “metaxy” (in Greek “μεταξύ“, between, in between).

The revolt against reality

The metaxy is thought to engender a gravitational interaction between its poles, a ‘pulling’ and ‘thrusting’ force, the orientation of which steers Man’s pursuit of happiness as eudaimonia, his search for order and meaning, in the direction of his very Beginning, his Genesis at the Divine Ground of Being. But, the metaxy becomes dangerous ground when the failure, incapacity or plain resistance to discover this divine source as the essential and indispensable element in the articulation of order and meaning brings the metaxic search to a halt. However, the thrusting force oriented towards God won’t go away or wither, so that it will now ignite and feed a revolt against reality. However, the revolt cannot resolve the tensions of existence that come with living in the Great In-Between.

Second Realities

The revolt against reality often leads to the creation of all sorts of “second realities”, which are really Ersatz or pseudo-realities, imaginary concepts construed by individuals who, instead of confronting and dealing with existential insecurities seek to attain happiness by creating an imaginary self, ego or identity that – as they imagine it – is the sole creator of a reality of their own making. Man thus assumes the identity of Übermensch. But because Second Realities are always utopian in nature, their justification, pursuit and realization inevitably energizes the utopists’ Will to Power, which brings about the use of force, coercion and suppression of “dissent” and “dissenters” who live and act in First Reality. In this struggle the Creator of Man is the enemy Who is feared most by the Übermensch, which is why He must be declared dead and buried.

The Apostles of Freedom

In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek, wrote: “To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached. The new [socialist / utopian] freedom promised, however, was to be the freedom from necessity; release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us, although for some very much more than for others. Before man could be truly free, the ‘despotism of physical want’ had to be broken, the ‘restraints of the economic system’ relaxed. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth. […].”

The promise of greater freedom

Regarding “power”, Von Hayek remarked: “The characteristic confusion of freedom with power … [is] as old as socialism itself. It is so closely allied with it that almost seventy years ago a French scholar, discussing its Saint-Simonian origins, was led to say that this theory of liberty ‘est à elle seule tout le socialisme’ [‘is all by itself all there is to socialism’].” Von Hayek explained how the socialists and progressives subtly redefined the word freedom so that the term that once served as an unmistakable road sign at the Freedom-Serfdom bifurcation would now redirect those in search of genuine freedom towards serfdom. “There can be no doubt”, so Von Hayek, “that the promise of greater freedom has become one of the most effective weapons of socialist propaganda and that the belief that socialism would bring freedom is genuine and sincere. […] Unquestionably, the promise of more freedom was responsible for luring more and more liberals along the socialist road, for blinding them to the conflict which exists between the basic principles of socialism and liberalism, and for often enabling socialists to usurp the very name of the old party of freedom. Socialism was embraced by the greater part of the intelligentsia as the apparent heir of the liberal tradition: therefore it is not surprising that to them the idea of socialism’s leading to the opposite of liberty should appear inconceivable.” The classical liberty and freedom were surreptitiously substituted for the socialists’ fraudulent version of liberty which would open the door for “willing into reality” all kinds of “second realities”, Utopias and dreamworlds.

Freedom for me, but not for you

“Free will” is the “will” of Man’s higher self, of the spiritual being who is aware of himself. This freedom seeks expression in society, politics, culture, art, economics, in the “life of Man” in the broadest sense of the word. Pure freedom always remains spiritual – ethereal – in nature. It is the bread of life in each human soul. Hence, all efforts made to use freedom for ends other than the production, establishment, maintenance and protection of freedom, will suffer shipwreck on the cliffs erected by Man’s fellows who use false versions of freedom for ends serving their particular needs. Whoever is capable of wielding the most force will reap the fruits of the freedom that he permitted himself but denied others. In this regard, those who promise freedom as an instrument in the establishment of some unselfish and altruistic Utopia are to be feared most of all. Their moral arguments and reasonable intentions serve no other end than feeding their unsatiable libido dominandi, their uncontrollable Will to Power for no other reason than satisfying this particular libido. Their freedom shall mean another Man’s prison. A prison that has written “Freedom from Want and Necessity” above its entrance, and where the slogan hides the fact that all inmates will be equally poor. They will own nothing, but they will be happy. Likewise, all attempts of worldly Man to transform himself to Übermensch will falter and lead to disappointment, frustration and antipathy towards God.

Freedom is … God

In Das Evangelium, the German pastor Emil Bock wrote that Man is most unfree when he receives his freedom from an external giver of freedom, such givers including an external God, a God Who hands out or withholds freedom in accordance with His proprietary rules of predestination and election. Genuine freedom, though, is not given or received. Which implies that the Liberty endowed to Man by his Creator, for it to be genuine Liberty, was not a freedom given by an external “party”. If that were the case, our Liberty would be contingent, which it isn’t because it arises at the level of being where all externalities have disappeared and where “Oneness” of Man and his Creator of Man is fulfilled and consummated. “Freedom”, so wrote Bock, “is one of the subtlest notions that we can encounter in our thinking. This is the realm of paradoxes, such as are found anywhere where we find ourselves at the borderline between the physical-mental and the spiritual. The earlier interpretations were correct that substantive freedom, the Son taking up his place within man, are never engendered by man himself, but can only ever be bestowed on man through grace, that is the free devotion of spiritual powers. The free human being is no longer merely man. As long as man is ‘merely man’, he remains unfree at the very foundations of his being. True freedom can only come to life where something Higher, something Divine, has a place in man. Freedom is God.”

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In May of this year, the Mathias Corvinum College published a detailed report that describes the “EU-funded war against free speech.” (i) In the report, which is titled “Manufacturing misinformation”, British researcher Dr. Norman Lewis exposes “a covert campaign conducted by the European Commission to regulate the boundaries of legitimate public debate in Europe”. Lewis discovered how the European Commission “has funded hundreds of unaccountable non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and universities to carry out 349 projects related to countering ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’ to the tune of almost €650 million. Taxpayers’ money has been consciously used to fund an Orwellian disinformation complex to dictate and control the language of public debate. […] The EU is engaged in a silent war to regulate language and, through this, the de-legitimisation of alternative narratives, like the rising tide of populist opposition. This is a battle over language and the legitimacy to dictate the terms of public communications. It is a top-down, authoritarian, curated consensus, where expression is free only when it speaks the language of compliance established by the Commission.”

The “hands of the State”

Some time ago, in 1848 to be precise, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels declared in their Manifesto of the Communist Party that “the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; […].” Which is to say that in communism, the State is the Vicary of the proletariat presumably organised as the ruling class. One of the 10 “measures” that “will be pretty generally applicable” to establish communism “in most advanced countries”, was formulated as follows: “Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.”

An “ever closer union”

In the year 2000, the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission jointly presented in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union their version of the process of centralisation of the political power of the several “peoples of Europe” in the hands of the European State. (ii) In the opening phrase of the Charter’s Preamble, the Eurocrats declared that “The peoples of Europe, in creating an ever closer union among them, are resolved to share a peaceful future based on common values.” While it is quite likely that most if not all European peoples wish to share a peaceful future, this doesn’t necessarily mean that such a future must be based on holding “values” in common. Neither is it so that this so called “resolve” spontaneously arose in the hearts of the peoples of Europe who got caught  up in a historic process of “creating an ever closer union among them”.

Fundamental Rights

The European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) defines Fundamental Rights as “the basic rights and freedoms that belong to everyone in the EU. They are the same no matter where you’re from, what you believe or how you live. These rights enforce important principles like dignity, fairness, respect and equality. They set standards for how we live and work in Europe today.” The FRA described the Charter of Fundamental rights as “the European Union’s bill of human rights” whose “50 articles bring together the rights and freedoms belonging to everyone in the EU.” (iii) So, it’s no wonder that the EU picked the Charter of Fundamental Rights as the venue to infuse in the minds of everyone in the EU to whom these rights basically ‒ i.e. naturally ‒ belong the fallacious narrative that the quest for the centralisation of power in the hands of the European State, is to be understood as their quest.

The peoples of Europe as “social class”

In the Introduction to his work Human Action, Ludwig von Mises wrote that “Marxism asserts that a man’s thinking is determined by his class affiliation. Every social class has a logic of its own. The product of thought cannot be anything else than an ‘ideological disguise’ of the selfish class interests of the thinker.” Human action must not be understood as action by individuals but as the action of the collective. The Eurocrats used the Charter to one-sidedly lay down in writing the false premise that the peoples of Europe must be regarded as a collective, i.e. as a “social class” whose members must inevitably produce the thought of “closer union among them,” just because that thought must of necessity be the logical expression of the particular interest of “Europeans”.

The Manifesto of the European Union

In light of Mises’ observation, the Charter might very well be read as the Manifesto of the European Union in which the authors proclaim, to paraphrase the words of Marx and Engels, that in creating an ever closer union among them, the European peoples will use their political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all instruments of political power from their own national governments, in order to centralise these powers in the hands of the European State, i.e. the European peoples organised as the ruling class. Since the Charter’s fundamental rights “set the standards for how we live and work in Europe today”, their enjoyment and defense are supposed to spontaneously energize and necessitate the historically inevitable process of the centralisation of all instruments of political power in the hands of the European State. In Marxist terms, this is how fundamental rights play a key role in establishing and solidifying the European Union as the Vicary of the peoples of Europe “organised as the ruling class”.

EUtopia

In reality, the European Union, is definitely not the product that was “thought into being” by the peoples of Europe. It is definitely not “the peoples of Europe organised as the ruling class.” It was not instituted among the several peoples of Europe but above them by the EUtopists as the instrument to wrest from them their national identity, their independence and their national sovereignty by inducing, enforcing and controlling the European peoples’ political unification. In the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, the Union’s unelected bureaucracy reassures its “proletariat” that, in spite of its despotic structure, the Union is “[c]onscious of its spiritual and moral heritage” and that it is “founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity.” Yet, in this EUtopia, the long standing national and patriotic values that define the diverse cultures of the Member States have no place. They are to be deleted from reality and replaced by “the citizenship of the Union” in the counter-image of reality wherein the Union can now “place[s] the individual at the heart of its activities”.

Despotic inroads

Yes indeed, the establishment and institutionalization of the European Union bears all the hallmarks of a utopian project. As with all such projects, the utopists involved have no other option than to obtain by sleight of hand the position of “ruling class” and resort to coercion and suppression to realize their Utopias. In their Manifesto, Marx and Engels openly declared that “in the beginning” the realization of the Communist State “cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production”. Likewise, the realization of the European State cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the various rights and freedoms traditionally belonging to and enjoyed by the ‘natives’ of the European countries. To forcefully place these inviduals “at the heart” of the Union’s activities, countries located in the geographic part of the globe called Europe were turned into Member States of the European Union. Their citizens were to be marked as European citizens, so that their fundamental rights and freedoms could be usurped and rebranded by the European State as its values. Everyone’s thinking is now determined by his/her purported affiliation to the social class that the Eurocrats dreamed up to legitimize their dominant role in realizing EUtopia.

An “area of freedom, security and justice”

This is why these rights were infused into the EUtopian project in the form of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Rather than simply affirming the fundamental rights that already existed in the several European countries as basically belonging to everyone in those jurisdictions, the infusion serves the goal of installing the European Union as the supreme creator and guarantor of “an area of freedom, security and justice” where those rights can blossom and be enjoyed. More in particular, regarding the freedom of speech, the Union solemnly proclaims in Article 11 of said Charter that every individual “has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” Concerning what Marx and Engels defined as “the means of communication”, the same Article provides that “[t]he freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.”

Responsibilities and duties

Utopists, however, are not in the habit of tolerating opinions, information and ideas that might be contrary to, threaten or stand in the way of realizing their Utopias. So, although the Union “recognises the rights, freedoms and principles set out” in its Charter, it did insert a proviso in the Charter’s Preamble which stipulates that the “[e]njoyment of these rights entails responsibilities and duties with regard to other persons, to the human community and to future generations.” The Charter itself does not explicate this point. Instead, in Article 52, it briefly provides: “In so far as this Charter contains rights which correspond to rights guaranteed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the meaning and scope of those rights shall be the same as those laid down by the said Convention.”

“Greater unity”

Said Convention was signed in 1950 by the 12 Governments that, at the time, were the members of the Council of Europe. In the Convention’s Preamble, the Council considered that its “aim … is the achievement of greater unity between its members and that one of the methods by which that aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realisation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.” (iv) Apparently, the Council was mainly interested in pursuing the maintenance and further realisation of Human Rights and Fundamental freedoms because it served the aim of achieving greater unity between its Members. In this regard, the Council foresaw that the “right to freedom of expression [which] shall include the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas, without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers” ‒ laid down in the Convention’s Article 10.1 ‒ could very well threaten or impair the achievement of greater unity when exercized by people who opposed or questioned the endeavour. (emphasis added)

Formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties

To handle this potential problem, the Council determined in the Convention’s Article 10.2 that “[t]he exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.” This opened the door to prescribe “by law” the “formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties” designed to realize EUtopia.

The Harmonisation of Digital Services

In 2022, the EU prescribed by law the formalities, conditions, restrictions and penalties to which the use of the World Wide Web in the European Union shall be subjected. In Recital 3 of the Regulation on a Single Market For Digital Services, it declared digital information open to censorship by the providers of such services since “[r]esponsible and diligent behaviour by providers of intermediary services is essential for a safe, predictable and trustworthy online environment and for allowing Union citizens and other persons to exercise their fundamental rights guaranteed in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (the ‘Charter’), in particular the freedom of expression and of information, the freedom to conduct a business, the right to non-discrimination and the attainment of a high level of consumer protection.” (v) This approach rests on the misleading Marxist/Socialist promise that coercion and censorship are necessary because, in this case, the “sum of freedom” in European society will increase when individual freedom is constrained. There will be more freedom to a wider group when the freedom of expression is taken away from the group’s members. Obviously, the EU’s nomenklatura will decide which freedom(s) must be taken to produce more freedom for all.

Freedom of speech becomes freedom from speech

By law, digital service providers were turned into censors of the communication that “Union citizens” impart or receive when they exercise their fundamental “right to freedom of expression”. As private owners of online “means of communication”, the service providers are forced to demonstrate “responsible and diligent behavior” by assessing whether the freedom of expression and the freedom to conduct a business of users of their “means of communication” must be curtailed in case a piece of information or idea might possibly upset the right to non-discrimination, the attainment of a high level of consumer protection or any other fundamental right enumerated in the Charter. The Digital Services Regulation enables the European State to centralize the online means of communication in its hands by creating, formulating and reformulating the types of information that “Trusted Flaggers” and anyone else who does the EU’s bidding must report to the service providers as “illegal” or as “disinformation or other content” the online dissemination of which may generate a “societal risk”, so that “fundamental rights enshrined in the Charter are effectively protected and innovation is facilitated.”

The hands of the EU

The Digital Services Regulation forms the visible aspect of the operation that Norman Lewis describes as the EU’s “carefully created machinery of speech policing, supported by a vast system of public financing. […] Imbued with the authority of hundreds of covertly funded NGOs and academics, the covertly funded ‘Trusted Flaggers’, “the EU is even able to claim that it polices speech in order to ‘protect democracy’.” Lewis concludes that the EU Commission “rightly understands that controlling the language of communications means it can dictate what is information and disinformation, truth or lies, what is legitimate or illegitimate speech, and who can speak or not.” Language, i.e. the spoken or written word, is Man’s fundamental means of communication. Without having to revert to the burning of books and blunt censorship, words can now be kneaded by the hands of the EU so that they no longer mean what they were originally meant to mean. War is peace, slavery is freedom, ignorance is strength, autocracy is democracy, citizens of the several European nations are citizens of the EU. The voices of the peoples of Europe shall sing in an ever closer harmony to the tune of the unelected Eurocrats. Welcome to EUtopia ! Bye bye to freedom of speech.

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[i] Manufacturing misinformation: The EU-funded propaganda war against free speech; Dr Norman Lewis; Mathias Corvinum Collegium / MCC Brussels; May 2025; https://brussels.mcc.hu/uploads/default/0001/01/9fcfc904bd2e930bef107b7725b7f3ff9d0779d0.pdf

[ii] Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union; 2000; https://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf

[iii] What are fundamental rights? EUFRA; https://fra.europa.eu/en/about-fundamental-rights

[iv] European Convention on Human Rights; Drafted 1950 / Entered into force 1953; https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/convention_ENG

[v] Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act; https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32022R2065

In my previous Commentary, I quoted Catherine Austin Fitts as saying: “I believe [that] freedom can prevail and there’s many things we can do to help that happen. But ultimately this is a spiritual war and you have to call on God, you have to call on the Divine, and that’s where the battle is ultimately gonna be decided, …” Her words reminded me of what the political philosopher Eric Voegelin wrote in 1938, while he was still teaching in Vienna, and, not insignificantly so, just before he and his wife fled to Switzerland making their way to the United States to escape from the Nazis who had managed to bring Austria “heim ins Reich” during the beginning of that year.

Religious forces

In the Epilogue to his essay The Political Religions, Voegelin then wrote: “The life of people in political community, cannot be defined as a profane realm, in which we are concerned only with legal questions and the organization of power. A community is also a realm of religious order, and the knowledge of a political condition will be incomplete with respect to a decisive point, firstly, if it does not take into account the religious forces inherent in a society and the symbols through which these are expressed or, secondly, if it does include the religious forces but does not recognize them as such and translates them into areligious categories.” Meaning that knowledge of the political condition of a community will only be complete when we take into account the fact that “[h]umans live in political society with all traits of their being, from the physical to the spiritual and religious traits.” (i)

Integrating world and God in human experience

Voegelin had come to the conclusion that “[t]he political community is always integrated in the overall context of human experience of world and God, irrespective of whether the political sphere occupies a subordinate level in the divine order of the hierarchy of being or whether it is deified itself.” This integration of world and God in the human experience makes that “[t]he language of politics is always interspersed with the ecstasies of religiosity and, thus, becomes a symbol in the concise sense by letting experiences concerned with the contents of the world be permeated with transcendental-divine experiences. Elements of the symbolic expressive forms that we have worked out on the basis of the Mediterranean and European examples can be found in all very advanced civilizations: the hierarchy, in which the sacral substance branches out from a transcendent God to the community of creatures; the ecclesia as the sacral communal substance; the apocalypse as the revelation of the empire; the holy kings as God’s mediators and personality carriers of the community.”

The profane realm

Voegelin saw it as his mission to unravel and clarify how the various “modern” forms of human-political organization are integrated in the order of being and what happens when, simply put, this process of integration doesn’t take place in accordance with the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Now, 87 years after he wrote The political Religions, we may very well conclude that a strictly secular human-political organization is all that’s left of the order of being. What I mean is that, with the almost complete politicization of every aspect of society and the churches and religions under fierce and relentless assault, there seems to be no “order of being” left outside human-political organization. Inside of it, all traces of a “world & God” order of being have been meticulously and effectively erased. We’ve come to live in a profane realm, in which, now that also the Courts and the legal system have been fully integrated into that secular organization of power, we are left with nothing but that organization of power.

The abandonment of God

Surely, the religious forces are still present, but they have been translated into areligious categories. Voegelin defined this phenomenon as “innerworldly religiosity”, which, when it is “experienced by the collective body ‒ be it humanity, the people, the class, the race, or the state ‒ as the realissimum”, as the penultimate reality, comes down to the “abandonment of God”. (emphasis added) Voegelin proffered that “the belief that man is the source of good and of improvement of the world, as it is held by the Enlightenment, and the belief that the collective body is a mysterious, divine substance, which has been spreading since the nineteenth century, is anti-Christian renunciation.” In the context of what Voegelin describes as “the wealth of the stages extending from nature to God”, the inner-worldly religiosity and its areligious symbolism “conceal the most essential parts of reality”. They block “the path to the reality of God” and distort “the circumstances of the levels of being subordinate to God.” Instead they energize utopian activism and the concomitant Will to Power.

The “digital Reich“

Austin Fitts stresses that she is primarily “interested in freedom” and that she believes that “the only way we can be free is through a culture that embraces the divine and build true wealth, enduring wealth and living wealth, not just financial wealth.” To attain true wealth “you need Christianity”. Indeed, it was Jesus Christ Who taught that “true wealth” remains imperfect unless it includes the Divine Oneness between Man and his Creator. Pursuing that Oneness as Man’s ultimate Telos requires first of all the change of mind that He called “Metanoia”. In my book Liberating Liberty, I describe in great detail how the various “murderers of God” sought and, to a large degree, succeeded in obstructing Man’s pursuit of his Divine Telos by redirecting the search from the eternal to the temporal, from God to Man. In our age of technocracy, the redirecting has reached an unprecedented level of efficiency because, technically speaking, it can quite easily be finetuned to misguide, coerce and influence each person who is digitally connected to the “control grid”. In this “digital Reich”, Divine Intelligence was replaced by Artificial Intelligence. Of necessity, it must block the Metanoia that opens the door to what Voegelin called “the reality of God”. If it didn’t, it would self-destruct.

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(i) Epilogue to his essay The Political Religions, published in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin; Volume 5; Modernity without Restraint; University of Missouri Press; 2000.

In a conversation with Tucker Carlson, former Bush administration official and founder of the Solari company, Catherine Austin Fitts lays bare in great detail how America’s leaders gave up on the country in the 1990s, began stealing trillions and set in motion the organisation of a digital prison to control the population. (i) She also tells Carlson that, in spite of all the doom and gloom, she refuses to let “the devil have her joy” and destroy her “state of amusement”. That emotion is, quite visibly, the dominant one in her life. She admits that it’s not always easy to deal with pure evil and that you’re always “gonna be shocked by it”, especially when, “if you understand love, you can’t fathom why anyone would reject that and embrace evil.”

Call on the Divine

Most of the issues addressed in the conversation concern concealed flows of vast amounts of money, the scheming and shenanigans of Central Bankers, and the “digital concentration camp” in which “Mr. Global” is trying to lock us up. Nonetheless, Austin Fitts reveals that she sees the “battle” for freedom as a spiritual one. “I believe,” she said, that “ultimately, freedom can prevail and there’s many things we can do to help that happen. But ultimately this is a spiritual war and you have to call on God, you have to call on the Divine, and that’s where the battle is ultimately gonna be decided, and that means, literally, I believe this is true, the divine intelligence cannot go to work unless we’re willing to face it, you know, we have to look at it, we have to pray, we have to ask for help and we have to deal with it. The real solutions will be cultural. There will be millions of people acting in their own life refusing to be controlled individually.” (at 29:00)

Christianity

Austin Fitts stresses that she is primarily “interested in freedom” and that she believes that “the only way we can be free is through a culture that embraces the divine”. Only this will allow us to “build true wealth, enduring wealth and living wealth, not just financial wealth.” (at 1:11:00) To attain true wealth “you need Christianity”. As she explained in a recent video on her own Solari website, “if you’re a Christian, you have a different pricing mode in your head. There are things that can be priced in a market place and there are some things that can’t be priced, cause they are invaluable, they are not to be traded … and you’re not going to sell your immortal soul for a quick profit.” (ii)

Relationship with your Creator

In her meeting with Carlson, she explained: “If you’re gonna be part of a project that is longer than a lifetime, then you have to understand that this is about, you know, at the root, this is about your immortal soul. Your soul is immortal and that triggers a different way of looking at the world and a different way of thinking and then you have to be able to collaborate accross time and space in very powerful ways … that takes trust and faith.” (at 1:04:00) This worldview is clearly reflected in the mission statement that is posted on the website of her Solari company: “to help you live a free and inspired life. This includes building wealth in ways that build real wealth in the wider economy. We believe that personal and family wealth is a critical ingredient of both individual freedom and community health and well-being.” Discussing the work of Solari, she tells Carlson that the first “Pillar” on which its mission rests holds that if you have a goal, the key to reach it is acknowledging and accepting that “you have a relationship with your Creator.”

Divine Happiness

I assume that Austin Fitts won’t mind if I interpret her and Solari’s mission as helping people in exercising their unalienable right to pursue happiness. As the authors of the American Declaration of Independence so firmly held and declared, this unalienable right was endowed to Man by his Creator. Considering the fact that the Creator of Man is commonly understood as being the God of Genesis, the Happiness mentioned in the Declaration cannot be understood as anything other than Divine Happiness or “eudaimonia”. And because it is also written in Genesis that God created Man in His image, and that God’s Name and His Whole Beingness may be summed up in the words “I am”, the pursuit of Divine Happiness must of necessity entail Man’s pursuit of attaining “Oneness” with his Creator, with God, in the Divine state of being “I am”. And this, of course, is only possible when, in the words of Austin Fitts, “you have a relationship with your creator.”

Man’s ultimate Telos

Jesus Christ spoke of the Divine Oneness as Man’s ultimate Telos and how its pursuit requires first of all the change of mind that He called “Metanoia”. Plato had described Man’s turning around from the temporal to the eternal, from one’s shadow to the light that causes it, as “periagoge”. In my book Liberating Liberty, I describe how the various “murderers of God” sought and, to a large degree, succeeded in obstructing Man’s pursuit of his Divine Telos by redirecting the search from the eternal to the temporal, from God to Man. In our age of technocracy, the redirecting has reached an unprecedented level of efficiency because, technically speaking, it can quite easily be finetuned to misguide, coerce and influence each person who is digitally connected to the “control grid”. For the “millions of people acting in their own life refusing to be controlled individually”, Austin Fitts’ message is clear and simple. Keep your eye on the ball. You will be successful only when you realize that you’re fighting a war that is spiritual. And, above all, while fighting this war, do not lose your state of amusement and do not let the devil have your joy.

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[i] Tucker Carlson Network; Conversation between Tucker Carlson and Catherine Austin Fitts; Published: 29 April 2025; https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-catherine-fitts

[ii] Conversation with Daniel Broudy; Human sovereignty and agency in the age of technocracy – a dialogue with Catherine Austin Fitts; Published: 24 April 2025; https://tube.solari.com/videos/human-sovereignty-and-agency-in-the-age-of-technocracy-a-dialogue-with-catherine-austin-fitts/

In his Inaugural Address, President Trump stated that he strongly believes that his life was saved for a reason. “I was saved by God to make America great again.” Several weeks later, on February 15, the President wrote on Truth Social: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Putting 2 and 2 together, the current President of the United States of America believes that he was saved by God to save his country and that in saving his country he does not violate any law. While it may be up for discussion whether the act of saving one’s country does or doesn’t entail a violation of any law, the President’s words give rise to the interesting question whether there may be laws that must be followed by he who wishes to save his country, more in particular by he who believes that he was saved by God to do so.

The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God

The answer to this question can be found in the Declaration that led to America’s independence. In 1776, the thirteen united States of America unanimously declared: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Presumably, these same Laws do apply when people seek to save their country if it is on its way to lose or has already lost its separate and equal station. Likewise, these are the very Laws that entitle a people to alter or abolish their country’s Government when the latter has become destructive of the ends of securing the unalienable rights endowed to Man by his Creator, Who is also known as Nature’s God.

Violating arbitrary “laws”

In other words, according to the peoples of the thirteen States that formed the beginning of that unified “separate and equal station” that the President likes to refer to as “America”, any savior of America, most certainly a savior who believes that he was saved by God to save it, is bound to obey the Laws that entitled the American peoples to assume their stations among the powers of the earth and lay the foundations of the united States of America. Of necessity, applying these Laws unavoidably leads to the “violation” of any of the discretionary and arbitrary “laws”, rules and regulations that obstruct, alter, undermine, twist, fringe upon or in any way violate the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.

The natural right of lawful defense

What this means in “the course of human events” was explained in 1850 by the French writer, economist and politician Frédéric Bastiat, who defined “the Law” ‒ La Loi ‒ as “the organization of the natural right of lawful defense; it is the substitution of collective for individual forces, for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have a right to act, of doing what they have a right to do, to secure persons, liberties, and properties, and to maintain each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over all.” Bastiat also explained that the Law is perverted when, “under the pretense of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement”, it “may take from one party in order to give to another, draw from the wealth acquired by all the classes to add it to that of one class; whether that of farmers or that of manufacturers, merchants, ship owners, artists, comedians.”

The battlefield of everybody’s dreams

If the Law is turned into an instrument of power, “then certainly”, so Bastiat, “there is no class which may not try, and with reason, to place its hand upon the Law, that would not demand with fury its right of election and eligibility, and that would rather overturn society than not obtain it.” Bastiat’s warning was clear: “… make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, industrial, literary, artistic, and you will be lost in vagueness and uncertainty; you will be upon unknown ground, in a forced Utopia, or, what is worse, in the midst of a multitude of contending Utopias, each striving to gain possession of the law, and to impose it upon you; for fraternity and philanthropy have no fixed limits, as justice has.” Legislation will thus become a “battlefield for everybody’s dreams and everybody’s covetousness.”

Distinguishing Laws from “laws”

Whatever President Trump had in mind when he wrote “He who saves his country does not violate any Law”, in light of the unique history of his country, his personal beliefs and what he seeks to accomplish in his second term, his words become meaningful only when we make a clear distinction between the Laws that he must obey ‒ the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God ‒ and the “laws” that he must “violate” because they were crafted for the purpose of  realizing utopian dreams, satisfying covetousness, and, most of all, substituting collective for individual forces and overturning society. Whether President Trump will show himself worthy of the entitlement he claims to have received from God in order to save the country that was founded in accordance with the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, is something that lies between him and his Savior.

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Speaking on February 15, 2025, at the Munich Security Conference, America’s Vice President, James David Vance, took the moral highground by provocatively asking the political leaders of European countries: “What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?” From his pulpit, Vance made the thunderstruck audience part of his personal belief that “there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people.” He then lashed the stunned Europeans by informing them of the fact that “[i]f you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.”

The Sacred Principle

Stating the obvious, the Vice President told his European colleagues: “You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail, whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like who gets to be a part of our shared society.” […] “What no democracy, American, German, or European, will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered. Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.”

The NATO Treaty’s Preamble

By making the Europeans acutely aware of the fact that the Trump administration is set on upholding this “sacred principle”, the Americans made it crystal clear that currently there is no joint “positive vision” that “animates” the security compact between the United States and the member countries of the European Union that refuse to uphold it. To be sure, the NATO Compact’s short preamble does state that the parties “are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”. If we are to believe the Vice President, the Trump administration holds the view that, now that the U.S. has begun to “domestically” uphold these principles, all the parties to the Treaty are obligated to follow suit.

EU’s phony democracies

Vice President Vance then hinted at the fact that, as a consequence, the failure to uphold the principles means that the Treaty must be deemed null and void. Surely, European pundits, politicians and governments won’t hesitate to define their countries as “democracies”. They will even go as far as claiming that “firewalling” opponents is absolutely necessary to save democracy, that silencing the voice of the people is very necessary to save the freedom of speech and that depriving people of their liberty is the best way to save individual liberty. But, as clarified by the Vice President, the Americans are no longer interested in continuing a security alliance with the leaders of such phony “democracies”.

Just Powers, Safety and Happiness

Constitutionally speaking, the American “democracy” isn’t a democracy but a Republic that was, indeed, founded on the sacred principle that the “voice of the people” matters. This was the voice that ignited the separation between the united States and the “European” political praxis. According to the 13 American peoples that signed their Declaration of Independence in 1776, the “voice of the people” is the only thing that matters when it comes to being governed. They held as truth that it is by speaking their voices that people shall make it known to their Government that it derives its just powers from the consent of the governed and that it is instituted among Men for the sole purpose of securing the unalienable rights endowed to each of them by the Creator of Man: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. It is this unique voice that also messages that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them [the people] shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Acts that may define a Tyrant

In 1776, the American colonists concluded in their Declaration of Independence that a “Prince” ‒ King George III of Great Britain ‒ whose character is marked by answering humble petitions to end his oppressions with repeating the injury and committing “acts which may define a Tyrant”, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. The Americans also blamed their British brethren for having been “deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity”. […] “We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold [you], as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.” In 2025, America’s Vice President took aim at the current European “Princes” whose acts mark the character of a Tyrant. He told them that, should they wish to save the NATO security compact, they’d better start listening to the “humble petitions” of their peoples and stop repeating the injury of suppressing their voices. If they don’t, so he warned, the Americans will once again declare their independence and leave their European “friends” to their fate.

What about Europe’s peoples?

Laudable as his speech may be, the key issue that Vice President Vance left unaddressed is: what can and what will America do for the Europe’s unfree peoples? Where does America’s current “positive vision” leave them? Unlike the late 18^th century Americans, people in Europe are not in a position to fight a war of independence with their “Tyrants” to “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”. Their only realistic option is to try to alter or abolish the Governments that suppress their voices by dissolving the political bands which connect them with their “Princes” and institute new Governments by electing leaders whose character is marked by the preparedness and willingness to lay their Governments’ foundation on such principles and organizing their powers in such form, as to them, i.e. the peoples, shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The Uphill Battle

Given the deep-seated and incurable antisocial character of Europe’s modern “Tyrants”, many of whom comfortably reside in the European Union’s institutions, there’s no chance whatsoever that they would consider, let alone positively respond to the American Vice President’s admonishment. They hate and fear rather than respect and love their peoples. The threat to make the NATO security compact contingent on the unconditional and wholehearted acceptance of the sacred principles embedded in America’s Declaration of Independence, will not change these “Princes'” character. On the contrary, it will only energize the libido dominandi that defines and dominates their character. Incapable of resisting and overcoming the “voice” of their Will to Power, they will double down the injuries of oppressing, firewalling and chasing their opponents. More than ever will they try to silence rather than listen to the voices of their peoples. In other words, for the European peoples, the effect of Vice President Vance’s Munich speech may be quite counterproductive. In light of the fact that the Trump administration is intent on Making America Great Again and that it chose to bluntly and publicly tell the leading European “Princes” in their faces that the acts of most of them define those of a Tyrant, the Vice President left European people whose voices are silenced pretty much out in the cold. They’re on their own in their uphill battle to institute just Governments that are prepared to defend and secure their unalienable rights.

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Photo/ Courtesy MSC / Vice President Vance addressing Munich Security Conference / 15 February 2025

On September 23, 2019, President Donald Trump spoke at the United Nations about his government’s plans to dedicate 25 million US dollars to support religious freedom around the world. He illustrated the need for this initiative by pointing out that “the United States is founded on the principle that our rights do not come from government, they come from God. This immortal truth is proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence and enshrined in our First Amendment to our Constitution, [the] Bill of Rights. Our Founders”, so Trump, “understood that no right is more fundamental to a peaceful and prosperous and virtuous society, than the right to follow one’s religious convictions.” [i] No need to say that the right to follow one’s own religious convictions is commonly known as the freedom of religion.

Saved by God

On January 20, 2025, the same President said in his Inaugural Address: “Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.” [ii] If America’s greatness culminates in a “peaceful, prosperous and virtuous society”, and, if no right is more fundamental to such a society than the right to follow one’s religious convictions, then the most fundamental and most urgent task for which President Trump believes he was destined by God is the protection and defense of religious freedom.

The most exceptional nation

On the 4^th of July of 2019, speaking at Lincoln Memorial, President Trump opened his Salute to America speech by stating: “On this day, 243 years ago, our Founding Fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to declare independence and defend our God-given rights. […] That same American spirit that emboldened our founders,” the President said, “has kept us strong throughout our history. To this day, that spirit runs through the veins of every American patriot. It lives on in each and every one of you here today. It is the spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love that built this country into the most exceptional nation in the history of the world, and our nation is stronger today than it ever was before.” [iii]

The rights of all Men

In their Declaration of Independence, the 13 brandnew Free and Independent American States declared that they held as self-evident truths that in order to secure the unalienable rights endowed to Man by his Creator, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”, and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” This, and nothing other than this, is what defined the united States’ “exceptionality”. To be sure, the Founders were referring to the unalienable rights of Man, i.e. of all Men. So, when President Trump said that the United States “is founded on the principle that our rights do not come from government, they come from God”, the word “our” doesn’t mean that Americans are unique in having been endowed with these rights by the Creator of Man.

Independence and immortal truths

What makes Americans unique and exceptional is that, of all Men, they were the ones who proclaimed this immortal truth in their Founding Document. They were the ones who declared that Governments are instituted among Men to secure these rights and that Governments may be abolished and replaced by new ones when they become destructive of these ends. While the Declaration exclusively pertains to the united States of America where it specifically concerns declaring their independence, its Preamble’s immortal and self-evident truths do pertain to all men. In other words, it is not its political and military independence and strength that makes America great and exceptional, but its openly declared adherence to immortal truths.

Foreign affairs

Yet, nowhere in the Declaration did the young united States declare that their Governments ‒ i.e. the Governments of the States ‒ would or should involve themselves in struggles between foreign peoples and their governments in case the latter would become destructive to these universal ends or miserably fail to secure them. When it comes to foreign affairs, all that the Declaration could possibly imply is that when foreign governments or peoples intentionally interfere with American (State) Governments’ independence or impede, weaken or threaten the latters’ capacity or determination to secure the God-given rights ‒ in casu the religious freedom ‒ of their governed, American governments might decide to take defensive actions. If they fail to do so, it is the right of the People to abolish them and institute new ones. When it comes to America’s Federal Government, if the Declaration of Independence is indeed the manifestation of the “American spirit that emboldened our founders” and which “to this day … runs through the veins of every American patriot”, that Federal Government is also bound not to interfere with the affairs of foreign countries and peoples unless it could be proven that the latter were intentionally and actively impeding, weakening or threatening its independence and/or capacity or readiness to secure the God-given rights ‒ in casu the religious freedom ‒ of American citizens.

Fly-over and Battle Hymn

In 2019, President Trump ended his Salute to America by framing America’s exceptionality in terms of its military strength. While the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was played with a “fly-over”, he said “God bless you.  God bless the military.  And God bless America. Happy Fourth of July.” If, 249 years ago, the united States of America firmly secured their independence from the British Empire and all other “powers of the earth” to defend their citizens’ God-given rights, one wonders why, today, in a blatant showing of rabid “exceptionality”, the “most exceptional nation in the history of the world” spends ‒ “spends” as in deficit spending ‒ an exceptional amount of money to maintain its “stronger than ever before” military operations around the globe. Currently, the costs of keeping up and exporting America’s “exceptionality” by military means far exceeds 1 trillion US dollars per year.

The most fundamental right

President Trump’s first administration vowed to spend 25 million US dollars on the protection of religious freedom, religious sites and relics. In addition, it would form “a coalition of US businesses for the protection of religious freedom”. Laudable as this initiative may have been, this amount is a negligible fraction (0,000024 %) of the one trillion dollars the U.S.A. spends on offensive warfare, “colour revolutions”, counterterror operations and associated overt and covert practices outside its own jurisdiction. If it isn’t political, military and constitutional independence but religious freedom that is the most fundamental right to establish and maintain a peaceful, prosperous and virtuous society, and, if this is what defines a sovereign and independent country’s greatnes and exceptionality, then wouldn’t it be a great idea if the U.S.A. would stop interfering militarily with foreign nations’ independence, drastically reduce its defense budget and use the freed up dollars to promote and support worldwide recognition and defense of the self-evident truths enshrined in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence ?!

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[i] https://ml.usembassy.gov/remarks-by-president-trump-at-the-united-nations-event-on-religious-freedom-new-york-ny/

[ii] https://www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/01/the-inaugural-address/

[iii] https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-salute-america/

“Dear Mr. President,

You opened your 2nd Inaugural Address with the words: ‘From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world’. ‘America’, so you said, ‘will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before’. Most likely, you are aware of the fact that exactly 249 years ago, in the month of January 1776, that memorable year when the united States of America declared their independence, it was Thomas Paine, one of your most prominent Founding Fathers, who wrote: ‘The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind’. Now that the world has become aware of what the ‘America’ of our times means by making its imperial cause the cause of all mankind, it behooves mankind to politely and respectfully ask you: What do you mean by ‘America’ when you tell the world that you want to Make ‘America’ Great Again? Whether your country will deserve respect all over the world will entirely depend upon the measure in which America’s cause is truly in alignment with that of ‘all mankind’.

Checking some premises

Perhaps, the question – ‘What do you mean by ‘America’ – may sound stupid. After all, isn’t it so that ‘everyone knows’ that ‘America’ stands for the 50 United States of America represented as stars on your American Flag! And that this is the Flag that not only symbolizes today’s U.S.A. as a poltical entity, but which also defines that specific entity’s alleged greatness. In that regard, you know that in the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, the greatness of the U.S.A. is defined as ‘the Republic for which it stands’ and as ‘one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all’. But, with all due respect, if this truly the ‘America’ you seek to make great again, allow me to suggest that there may be some premises you may wish to check first.

‘America’s’ greatness as an idea

“You see, if this is the ‘America’ that must be made great again, the logical question is: did it ever exist or has it always been a utopian fiction, an ‘idea’? A vision, that was conceived and promoted by some of your fellow-‘Americans’ soon after the ‘American’ colonies, represented as the 13 horizontal stripes on the Flag, had declared their independence. In other words, ín your opinion, was ‘America’s’ greatness ever fully realized and, if so, was it then lost, wherefore it must be realized again? Or, absent its realization, would you agree  with me that the idea of ‘America’s’ greatness has always remained an ideal? If so, how did that idea come to be ‘unmade’? And, must it be brought to life again, so that, once fully rekindled, you will organize its realization?”

No indivisible nation

“Without a doubt, you know more about ‘America’s’ history than this ‘Dutchman of old’. But, having studied a considerable body of ‘America’s’ historical records, I guess that we can both agree that ‘America’ as it is defined in the Pledge of Allegiance never really existed. For one thing ‒ and, to my mind, this is the key point ‒, there never was nor is there today one indivisible American Nation. As noted by political scientist James Piereson in ‘The idea of an American nation – On the genesis of the American nation-state’, an essay published in 2020 in The New Criterion review, the United States seems headed ‘toward pluralism without consensus […] and towards animus among racial, religious, regional, and national groups’ . [i] In light of these developments, Piereson defines the U.S.A. as ‘nation-state without a national idea’, which, if I may say so, leaves the reader with the inevitable conclusion that, lacking a ‘national idea’ and an indivisible nation, ‘America’ isn’t a ‘nation-state’ but a ‘state’ held together by enforced Federal power. On the rhetorical question whether it is ‘still possible to restore the ideal of a single American nation?’, Piereson answers: ‘That remains to be seen’.” (emphases added)

The 10^th Amendment

“So, if, as Piereson contends, an ‘American nation’ was and still is an ideal that must be restored, that, in your words, must be made great again, it must have somehow shrunk, shrivelled or atrophied some time ago. If it’s still alive, it must be given sufficient amounts of attention and support for it to become great again. If the Pledge of Allegiance is to be your guide in making ‘America’ great again, your task at hand is to turn it’s several definitions of ‘America’ into a unifying thread that all ‘Americans’ will accept and endorse: a Republic for which it stands, one indivisible Nation under God, liberty and justice for all. Apart from the fact that it seems inconceivable that all Americans will wholeheartedly accept and endorse such a unifying thread, you are well aware of the fact that the 10^th Amendment of the Constitution, that you pledged to support, defend and bear true faith and allegiance to,  provides that: ‘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’. If ‘nation’ means what it means and not something else, one indivisible ‘American’ nation can only become a reality when the States unconditionally and irrevocably relinquish their ‘reserved’ powers and hand them over to a truly National Government. Although ideas do have consequences, the idea that the States would unmock themselves for the purpose ‘nationalizing’ the U.S.A. will probably remain a utopian one forever and ever.”

A wise and frugal Government

“Permit me to proffer that there was a time when ‘America’s’ true greatness wasn’t just an idea, but that it was a ‘palpable’ reality that did exist in real life. I’m referring to the period when the United States still had a Federal government that was limited and respectful of the Constitution, which specifically defines the definite powers that Government may exercize only for certain well defined special purposes, while leaving the delegating States in full control of what Thomas Jefferson described as ‘the residuary mass of right to their own self-government’. [ii] This is the ‘America’ that was still great when, on 4 March 1801, in his First Inaugural Address, President Jefferson stated: “Still one thing more, fellow-citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.” If, Mr. President, you would succeed in making and keeping the ‘American’ Government ‘wise and frugal’ again, you will not only make ‘America’ but also the Cause of America great again, and, in doing so, worthy of becoming the Cause of all Mankind … again. And thus, your ‘good Government’ will be able to close the circle of all mankind’s felicities.”

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[i] https://newcriterion.com/article/the-idea-of-an-american-nation/

[ii] See: The Kentucky Resolution; Thomas Jefferson, 1798. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-30-02-0370-0002

If happiness is something that you have a right to pursue and not something that you have a right to, then, be aware of the fact that wishing someone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year does imply that you hope and trust that the recipient of your wish will make a serious effort to pursue happiness. If this is indeed your intention, you might do well to accompany your New Year’s wish with a hint as to how that pursuit of happiness might bear fruit. Quite miraculously, that hint can be found in the very word happiness, be it that we first have to translate it into French.

Bonheur

While he served as United States Minister to France from 1785 until 1789, Thomas Jefferson translated into French the Declaration of which he was the principal author: The Declaration of Independence. In his translation, Jefferson, who was well versed in the French language, chose the word “bonheur” for “happiness”. This is how the key part of the Declaration’s Preamble …

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

came to read in French as follows …

“Nous tenons pour évidentes pour elles-mêmes les vérités suivantes: tous les hommes sont créés égaux; ils sont doués par le Créateur de certains droits inaliénables; parmi ces droits se trouvent la vie, la liberté et la recherche du bonheur.”

Celestial beatitude

While, in the simplest of terms, “bonheur” means “good fortune” and “good luck”, according to the Académie française, it also means a state of perfect internal satisfaction (“état de parfaite satisfaction intérieure”), “supreme and eternal happiness” (“le bonheur suprême, le bonheur éternel”) and even celestial beatitude (“la béatitude céleste”). Given the fact that, at least according to Jefferson and his fellow Founders, the unalienable right to pursue “bonheur” was endowed to Man by his Creator, it’s safe to say that the Latter had celestial beatitude or eudaimonia in mind when He endowed the former with this right.

The Great Between

This explains why, inevitably, the pursuit must take place in the reality that has always existed between Man and God, between the World’s Genesis and the Beyond, between the Mundane and the Divine Ground of Being, between the “plain” and the “mountain”, between death and immortality, between the finite and the infinite. Philosophers conscious of this “Great Between” named it metaxy. The metaxy, so they said, engenders a gravitational interaction  between its poles, a “pulling” and “thrusting” force whose natural orientation steers Men’s search for order and meaning in the direction of their own Beginning and their Genesis at the Divine Ground of Being.

Pursuing eudaimonia

How then, one may ask, does Man pursue eudaimonia? The answer to this question can be found in the very word “bonheur”, which is composed of “bon” and “heur”. “Heur” comes from Latin “augurium” (augury), which means a divination based on the close observation of signs and omens, and, by extension, a prediction, foreboding or prophecy. A “bon heur” thus means a good prediction. This is how the word bonheur not only defines eudaimonia as the goal of the pursuit, but also provides guidance as to how the pursuit can be successfully accomplished. Man was endowed by his Creator with the unalienable right to pay close attention to those signs in the metaxy that show the way to the encounter with his Creator as his eternal Partner in the search for his Genesis at the Divine Ground of Being.

Overcoming challenges …

Admittedly, the metaxy is not the Garden of Eden. It is the playground where the raw physical and the ethereal metaphysical worlds meet and intertwine, where human meets human and divine. So it is that any truthful and honest metaxic search inevitably engenders an immediately perceivable and experiential ‘First Reality’ that necessarily involves the tensions that the sometimes challenging and unhappy clashes between the incompatible aspects of that reality will entail. In fact, the tensions and challenges become an integral and configurative part of that reality. These tensions, and the opposing elements of reality that cause them, must be confronted, defined and made intelligible for them to be dealt with, overcome and resolved, so that, eventually, eudaimonia, Happiness, Bonheur will befall.

I wish that your New Year will be filled with …. BONHEUR !!!

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Nowadays, a lot of speech is spent on why it is very very necessary to abridge the freedom of speech. In their efforts to control communication, the “abridgers” face the problem that they must overcome the fact that in what is called “the free world”, the freedom of speech is held to be a fundamental human right that is enshrined as such in various Constitutions, Declarations, Conventions and Charters. In the United States of America, “abridgers” of various sorts are particularly bothered by the fact that since 1789 its Constitution contains a simple and unequivocally worded declaratory and restrictive clause which provides that Congress, its legislative body, “shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”.

Ulysses Pact

If “no” means what it means and not something else, and if the Constitution is still deemed worthy of respect, the USA is a country where, under no circumstance, “makers of laws” may interfere with speech that is uttered or received, no matter how seditious, offensive, “hateful”, “dis-“ or “mis-informative” that speech might be. Since the legislators themselves agreed with and enacted this restrictive clause, it can be characterized as a genuine Ulysses Pact by way of which the representatives of the “body politic” bound themselves to the mast of the Ship of State when it sails the “waters” of speech. While this may be so, this doesn’t mean that “abridgers”, don’t have unlawful ways and means to silence opponents, but, that’s another story.

Freedom of speech in the EU ? 

In 2012, the European Union’s Parliament, Council and Commission “solemly proclaimed” in a Charter of Fundamental Rights that “everyone has the right to freedom of expression” and that “this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” In addition to this, the Charter provides that “the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.” Do these lofty words mean that the EU’s legislative body shall make no law interfering with this fundamental right? Not unexpectedly, the answer is: no. At the end of the Charter’s Preamble, its authors also proclaimed that the “enjoyment of these rights entails responsibilities and duties with regard to other persons, to the human community and to future generations.” The Charter itself does not explicate this point. Instead, it simply refers to a “meaning and scope” provision that was laid down in a similar Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and that strictly regulates the enjoyment of the right to freedom of expression.

“Meaning and scope” …?

In that Convention, which was enacted in 1950 by the Members of the Council of Europe, the exercise of the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas, “since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.” (emphasis added)

Right or Entitlement ?

So, when it comes to the freedom of speech, in the USA, the legislative body placed a total and absolute restraint on itself not to abridge it, irrespective of everyone’s “duties and responsibilities” carried with its exercise. In the EU, the makers of laws made the exercise of the freedom of expression contingent on everyone’s “duties and responsibilities” in a number of enumerated domains of private and public life. By leaving these “duties and responsibilities” undefined in the Charter as well as in the Convention, the EU’s legislators opened the door to prescribe by law what they mean by everyone’s duties and responsibilities in what comes down to practically every relevant sphere of life. In other words, in the USA, the freedom of speech is regarded as a politically untouchable freedom that forms part and parcel of the unalienable God-given right called Liberty. In the EU, on the other hand, the “right” to the “freedom” of expression was turned into an entitlement which, although it is defined as “fundamental”, can be taken away, abridged or gauged by law that is formulated on the basis of the prevalent ideas and opinions of the sitting legislature concerning what is and what isn’t a desirable outcome when “everyone” exercises the entitlement.

Where do Human Rights come from … ?

Other than referring in its Charter on Human Rights to the EU’s “spiritual and moral heritage”, the Union remains silent about the origin of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. In its Convention, the EU Council referred to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the source of human rights. Yet, in that Declaration, there’s not a word about the origin of Human Rights. All that we can learn from the Declaration is that these rights exist and that the “… recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. Other than this, the Universal Declaration provides that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Somehow, our rights and our freedom are “inherent” in all members of the “human family”. Most likely because they’re defined as … “human”.

… they come from the Creator of Man !

In the USA, the origin of Man’s unalienable rights is clearly worded in its seminal Founding Document, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Moreover, when it comes to defining the role that Government must play in defending these rights, the Declaration provides that Governments are instituted among Men for the very purpose of securing these rights. This clarifies why the American Constitution contains the restrictive clause that no law shall be made abridging the freedom of speech that is embedded in the right called Liberty. What Government must do on behalf of the governed is secure their freedom of speech, even when, in the case of seditious or rebellious speech, this would be to its own detriment.

The origin of unalienable rights is transcendental

Freedom of speech and all the other unalienable rights and fundamental freedoms can only survive in a world that recognizes, acknowledges, affirms and declares that their origin is transcendental. It doesn’t really matter what other name is given or what “identity” is attributed to what the Founders described as the “Creator of Man”. The point is that Man’s unalienable rights, although they are inherent in Man, are not “Man-made”. They did not somehow come into being or arise “in the world”. Besides this, Man isn’t free because he was born free and equal”, but because he was created free and equal.

Free speech and democratic health

Activist “abridgers” never stop finding, creating, seeking, inventing and conjuring arguments and reasons why free speech must be constrained and why Governments must control communication. In this whirl of anti-free-speech speech, defenders of the freedom of speech are inclined to formulate the value of this unalienable right in terms of its utility for society, more in particular for democracy. In The Left’s Reversal on Free Speech, an article published on the 18^th of November 2024 on Liberty Fund’s Law and Liberty website, Professor of Law Patrick M. Garry, ([i]) proffers that free speech is “a necessary condition for the attainment of truth” and, in that regard, that it is also the preferred way for a “society to discover the truth necessary to govern itself as a democracy”. According to Garry, “Americans have always believed that free speech and democratic health are intimately connected. As Supreme Court’s Justice Holmes argued [in the Abrams v. United States case], one cannot value speech if one does not value democracy. And if one does not value democracy, one will never protect free speech.” Moreover, so Garry, the “worth and staying power” of free speech depend upon its “ability to gain approval in the social marketplace of ideas”. ([ii])

Power replaces truth

It’s curious that, when it comes to defining free speech in terms of its democratic utility, the European law-makers reached the opposite conclusion. They feel that everyone’s unrestrained exercise of the freedom of expression is unuseful because it may threaten democracy rather than enhance it, wherefore it “may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society”. Apparently, free speech as the “necessary condition for the attainment of truth” that is necessary for a society to “govern itself as a democracy” is a condition that is to be feared in a “democracy” that, instead of letting it govern itself, is governed by a clique of unelected law-makers who prefer power over truth.

When truth is self-evident

Utility arguments are unhelpful and even counterproductive when it comes to establishing the “worth and staying power” of free speech because in an exchange of arguments between defenders and “abridgers” in “the social marketplace of ideas”, the latter will categorically refuse to allow this freedom its “ability to gain approval”. The signatories to the Declaration of Independence held that the worth and staying power of free speech is to be found in the self-evidency of the truth that all Men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Axiomatic truths like this don’t require “proof” to establish their eternal “staying power”. They don’t require the help of utility arguments. Their power doesn’t stem from their “ability to gain approval in the social marketplace of ideas”, but from their intrinsic self-evidency. The Founders didn’t conclude that free speech is a condition that is necessary to “attain truth”. They never considered that the truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence were the result of free speech. They held that, being self-evident, these truths inherently entail free speech as an endowment made to Man by his Creator.

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[i] Patrick M. Garry is Professor of Law at the University of South Dakota School of Law and a Senior Fellow at The Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. He is the author, most recently, of Limited Government and the Bill of Rights and has published widely on the First Amendment.

[ii] The Left’s Reversal on Free Speech; Patrick M. Garry, Liberty Fund / Law and Liberty website; 18 November 2024. https://lawliberty.org/the-lefts-reversal-on-free-speech/

Each year, on the 2^nd of November, we celabrate All Souls’ Day. “We”, i.e. those of us who still know, believe, hold or hope that Man “has” a soul, a timeless entity that exists at the transcendent side of daily life and that is to be understood as the spiritual core of the human being. On this day, we pray that the souls that passed away may continue to exist in a state of “rest” that has no beginning and no end: ”requies eterna”. And so, the introitus of the traditional Requiem Mass opens with: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis”. “Lord, give them everlasting rest and let eternal light shine onto them.”

A rest that is eternal

Because the Requiem Mass is a “Mass for repose of the soul of the dead”, its celebration signifies the expression of the age-old notion that the human soul survives the death of the human body. After its passing away, the soul “takes a rest” as it withdraws into the quietness that has no beginning and no end. In that absolute stillness there is no time, simply because there is no action whatsoever. Just to be sure, the soul’s rest is not the “at rest situation” that exists “in time” when opposing forces have reached a state of stand-still and balance while time goes on. It is a “rest” that is eternal in that it transcends the beginning and the end of the “cycle of action” that marks Man’s life between conception (beginning) and death (end).

The Divine Ground of Being

If the soul is indeed what remains after the death of the body, we may very well assume that the soul was also present and actively involved during the body’s lifetime. In any case, the soul must be assumed as present in “the living” who invoke God as the Giver of the soul’s “requiem eternam”. So, for the living as well as for the dead, “eternal rest” is the transcendental repose where the soul just “is”. This is the “Divine Ground of Being” that the soul shares “outside time” with its “Giver”, with the Lord, with God. The soul that passed away “enters time” again when it decides to involve itself with the world as a new human being.

The Great “In-Between”

Upon its “entering of time”, the soul creates what the philosopers called the Great “In-Between”, the  metaxy, which is the apparency of distance between the quietness of the ground of pure being and the world where Man is active as a human being. What remains of the “eternal rest” in this “In-Between” is, at best, a faint afterglow of Man’s spiritual origin, or, at worst, a nothingness that has become a complete meaningless void. Whatever may be the case, the soul, being the soul that it is, can’t totally abandon its divine ground and “undo” its beingness. It “haunts” Man with the idea that there’s “more between heaven and earth” and that there’s a Beyond, a divine reality, that surpasses all understanding but that can nevertheless be experienced. The soul’s presence thus induces in Man a drive to locate his divine ground as something in relation to the things of this world in which it is present, though it is not one of them. The effort may very well create an existential tension, which, curiously enough, reaches its climax when Man, unable to experience his divine ground, concludes that divine reality is a delusion and that all there is to Man is one human lifetime that must be spent in the physical universe between conception and death.

Faith and Intellect

Yet, even those of us who are absolutely sure that the the soul is a fiction and that a “requies eterna”, a Divine Ground of Being, doesn’t exist because not too long ago God was declared dead, find it difficult to describe precisely what it is that doesn’t exist. They run into the problem that they must, of necessity, define God as an entity with properties about which one can only advance propositions of the kind that apply to things in the external world. But because God does not belong to and can’t be found in their secular “external world”, this circular explanation of the structure of reality bites its own tail because it a priori excludes God and divinity. If, on the other hand, we enter into a genuine search for the structure of a reality that includes divinity, we are faced with the problem of an inquiry into something experienced as real before the intellectual inquiry into the structure of its reality has begun. Our intellect, intellectus, finds itself in quest of our faith,  fides, while our faith is simultaneously in quest of our intellect. (1)

All Souls

In addition to this, the inquiry gets more complicated by the fact that Man will find that he is an active participant in the Great “In-Between” and that this in itself influences the inquiry. Man, the homo sapiens, can’t distance himself from the metaxy and observe it from an objective vantage point. For this, Man, as he struggles in his search for the structure of a reality that includes divinity, will have to assume the viewpoint of the soul. In other words, Man will have to open himself to experience his soul as real before he begins his inquiry. This requires fides, faith, trust in himself as a spiritual being, such in spite of his intellectus warning him to be very careful when it comes to unconditionally trusting his fides. In this regard, All Souls’ Day is an expression of the fides that we trust that the requies eterna is the Divine Ground of Beingness of all souls, meaning those of the dead as well as those of the living who sing “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis”.

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(1) The concept of fides in search of intellectus was put forward by Eric Voegelin in his last (spoken) Essay, titled Quod Deus dicitur (What God is said to be) (a). The key paragraph of this essay is: ““We are not facing God as a thing but as a partner in a questing search that moves within a reality formed by participatory language. Moreover, we ourselves are part of the questioned reality that we are linguistically intending as if it were an external object about which we could talk as if we were cognitive subjects facing objects of cognition. The noetic search for the structure of a reality that includes divinity is itself an event within the reality we are questioning. Hence, at every point in the process, we are faced with the problem of an inquiry into something experienced as real before the inquiry into the structure of its reality has begun. The process of our intellectus in quest of our fides, a process that also can be formulated as our fides in quest of our intellectus, is a primary event.” (Italics in the original text)

(a) Quod Deus Dicitur; Eric Voegelin; Collected Works – Volume 12; Published Essays 1966 – 1985; Louisiana State University Press; 1990.

In the U.S., the “pro choice” advocates who used to hold that voluntary abortion was a matter of choice that had to be placed exclusively in the hands of pregnant women, have now made their own choice and decided that abortion is no longer a matter of choice. The politically correct choice is now unreservedly framed as: “pro abortion”. This shift shows that the “pro choice” movement was never about choice, but about the promotion and stimulation of abortion all along. This “pro-choice”-to-“pro-abortion” move places the “pro abortion” crowd in direct opposition to the unborn. And because abortus provocatus means the ending of Life in its most pristine and fragile form, this shift also puts pro-abortionism in flagrant opposition to that unalienable Right that was defined in the American Declaration of Independence as … LIFE.

Life in the womb

In that Declaration, the new American nations made it known that they held as self-evident truths that “all men are created equal” and “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Properly understood, these words not only mean that Life is what makes it possible for Man to manifest himself and participate in “the world” as Man, but also that Life is a right to protect and defend what constitutes the foundation of his very existence. Does this apply to “life in the womb”? Well, when it comes to the existence of life in the womb, there can’t be any question that a human embryo that isn’t dead or was aborted is obviously alive. The very word “embryo” is from Greek “embruon”, a combination of “en” (in) & “bruein” (swell, ripen, become full, flower). Hence, embryo means “young one”, “that which grows within”, or “fruit of the womb”. Moreover, there can’t arise any question whether a human embryo belongs to the species called Man. All obstetricians will unreservedly agree with the fact that, without having to perform a DNA test, an embryo who lives in the womb of a pregnant woman specifically belongs to the human species. As a consequence, Life as Life and Life as unalienable Right are coincidental. And so, a human embryo who is alive is per se to be regarded as having been endowed by his Creator with the unalienable Right to protect and defend his or her Life.

“… in His own Image”

If we are to take the words of the Declaration serious, aborting a human embryo thus comes down to the elimination of a specimen of the human race as well as a breach of this embryo’s foremost right to exist as a living being. Even though an embryo is incapable of exercising its unalienable right to defend its Life, this doesn’t mean that it somehow waived this right and that eliminating him or her shall remain inconsequential. After all, we’re dealing here with a fundamental human right that was endowed to Man by his Creator when, as Moses wrote in Genesis 1:26-27, “God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; […] So, God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female He created them.”

The embryo’s natural custodian

Most likely, this is the God Who plays the leading role in the Declaration of Independence as the Creator of Man. Since He is the One Who endows Man with Life, we may safely conclude that Life finds its origin at the Divine Ground of Being and that this is why Man has the inherent and unalienable right to defend and protect it against annihilation. Evidently, lacking any means of defense against obliteration, the earliest manifestations of the human organism, from embryo to newborn child, are entirely dependent for their protection on their natural host, the mother who carries them. Like her mother, she is the irreplacable custodian and guardian of the embryo’s rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, which, at this stage of its development, means the right to oxygen, food, shelter, protection, respect and affection.

What is Life ?

In 1972, one of the great scientists of the 20th century, the Hungarian Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893 – 1986), wrote in his book The Living State, “[t]hough I do not know what life is, I have no doubt as to whether my dog is alive or dead. We know life by the existence of things for which there is no direct physical reason and, which even seem contrary to the rules of physics. Life appears to be a revolt against the rules of Nature. […] Life is a paradox. It is easy to understand why man always divided his world into ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, anima meaning a soul, the presence of which had to explain queer behaviour. The most basic rule of inanimate nature is that it tends toward equilibrium which is at the maximum of entropy and the minimum of free energy. As shown so delightfully by [Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Erwin] Schrödinger in his little book, What is Life (1945), the main characteristic of life is that it tends to decrease its entropy. It also tends to increase its free energy. Maximum entropy means complete randomness, disorder. Life is made possible by order, structure, a pattern, which is the opposite of entropy. This pattern is our chief possession, it was developed over billions of years. The main aim of our individual existence is its conservation and transmission.”

A slap in the face

Anyone who has no more than a faint inkling of the complexity of a new human being must be impressed and baffled by the awesome development of order and structure in the pattern that actively “configurates” Man. A pattern that can already be observed during the earliest stages of his or her efforts to overcome entropy and increase free energy and conserve and eventually transmit this pattern to a future generation. Even those of us who think that Man is an accidental event in Evolution, who are convinced that the words laid down in the Declaration of Independence’s Preamble have become meaningless and who believe that the Creator of Man is just a delusion, must agree with the fact that every child, born and unborn alike, is the astounding living proof of the fact that it possesses this archetypical pattern that evolved over billions of years. In this “evolutionary” context, abortion comes down to depriving a new human being of what Erwin Schrödinger defined as his or her “chief possession” and making the conservation and transmission of that pattern impossible. This constitutes a total negation and nullification of “the aim of our individual existence”. Simply put: abortion dehumanizes Man. For those of us who do agree with what the Founding Fathers wrote in that famous Preamble and who accept the premise that Man is a spiritual being, the abortion of an unborn child isn’t merely an assault against Life and Man’s unalienable rights, it is also a “slap in the face” of the Creator Who made Man in His image. And that is exactly what Life got to do with abortion

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In 1835, a wise, observant and foreseeing Frenchman wrote …

“… I think that the type of oppression threatening democracies will not be like anything there has been in the world before; our contemporaries would not be able to find any example of it in their memories. I, too, am having difficulty finding a word which will exactly convey the whole idea I have formed; the old words despotism and tyranny are not suitable. This is a new phenomenon which I must, therefore, attempt to define since I can find no name for it.

I wish to imagine under what new features despotism might appear in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, living apart, is almost unaware of the destiny of all the rest. His children and personal friends are for him the whole of the human race; as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he stands alongside them but does not see them; he touches them without feeling them; he exists only in himself and for himself; if he still retains his family circle, at any rate he may be said to have lost his country.

Above these men stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny. It is absolute, meticulous, ordered, provident, and kindly disposed. It would be like a fatherly authority, if, fatherlike, its aim were to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks only to keep them in perpetual childhood; it prefers its citizens to enjoy themselves provided they have only enjoyment in mind. It works readily for their happiness but it wishes to be the only provider and judge of it. It provides their security, anticipates and guarantees their needs, supplies their pleasures, directs their principal concerns, manages their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances. Why can it not remove from them entirely the bother of thinking and the troubles of life?

Thus, it reduces daily the value and frequency of the exercise of free choice; it restricts the activity of free will within a narrower range and gradually removes autonomy itself from each citizen. Equality has prepared men for all this, inclining them to tolerate all these things and often even to see them as a blessing. Thus, the ruling power, having taken each citizen one by one into its powerful grasp and having molded him to its own liking, spreads its arms over the whole of society, covering the surface of social life with a network of petty, complicated, detailed, and uniform rules through which even the most original minds and the most energetic of spirits cannot reach the light in order to rise above the crowd. It does not break men’s wills but it does soften, bend, and control them; rarely does it force men to act but it constantly opposes what actions they perform; it does not destroy the start of anything but it stands in its way; it does not tyrannize but it inhibits, represses, drains, snuffs out, dulls so much effort that finally it reduces each nation to nothing more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as shepherd.

I have always believed that this type of organized, gentle, and peaceful enslavement just described could link up more easily than imagined with some of the external forms of freedom and that it would not be impossible for it to take hold in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are ceaselessly agitated by two conflict­ ing passions: they feel the need to be directed as well as the desire to remain free. Since they are unable to blot out either of these hostilefeelings, they strive to satisfy both of them together. They conceive a single, protective, and all-powerful government but one elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with the sovereignty of the people. That gives them some respite. They derive consolation from being supervised by thinking that they have chosen their supervisors. Every individual tolerates being tied down because he sees that it is not another man nor a class of people holding the end of the chain but society itself.”

With these foreboding words, Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, closed his historic and influential treatise in which he laid down what he had experienced during a lengthy journey around the early American Republic: Democracy in America.

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On the 24^th of September 2024, Javier Milei, the President of the Argentinian Republic, told the General Assemblee of the United Nations in New York: “I want to be clear about something, so that there are no misinterpretations: Argentina, which is undergoing a profound process of change, has decided to embrace the ideas of freedom; those ideas that say that all citizens are born free and equal before the law, that we have inalienable rights granted by the Creator, among which are the right to life, liberty and property. Those principles, which guide the process of change that we are carrying out in Argentina, are also the principles that will guide our international conduct from now on.”

Not a politician

“… for those who do not know”, Milei said, “I am not a politician, I am an economist, a libertarian liberal economist, who has never had the ambition to be a politician … and who was honored with the position of President of the Argentine Republic, in the face of the resounding failure of more than a century of collectivist policies … that destroyed our country.” In spite of being an economist and not a politician, Milei stressed that the restoration of his wrecked country doesn’t just require a change in economic and financial policies, but that it cannot be achieved without a fundamental change in the world view underlying them.

Unalienable rights

I leave the answer to the question whether President Milei is indeed a libertarian liberal economist to those who consider themselves schooled in libertarian liberal economy. But when it comes to Milei’s concept of Man’s unalienable rights, the Argentinian President shows that he is, indeed, an economist who couldn’t help himself substituting the right to property for that classic God-given right that was defined as the Pursuit of Happiness in the Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence. When it comes to defining Man’s unalienable rights, this Preamble stands as the seminal and fundamental hallmark. Without a doubt, Milei is familiar with the text. He knows that Thomas Jefferson and his co-authors did not declare that the Creator of Man granted Men the right to property. No. They declared that the Creator endowed Man with the Pursuit of Happiness which they defined as one of Man’s unalienable rights.

The Declaration’s Preamble says it all

On the 4^th of July 1776, in Philadelphia, not far from where Javier Milei addressed the UN Assemblee, the representatives of the 13 brandnew American States, while they were assembled in Congress, unanimously declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Belief or holding self-evident truths

In his UN-speech, President Milei emphatically declared that Argentinians now “believe in the defense of life for all; … in the defense of property for all; … in freedom of speech for all; … in freedom of worship for all; … in freedom of commerce for all; and … in limited governments, all of them.” No matter how commendable these words and Milei’s intentions may be, the late 18^th century Americans did not believe in all these lofty principles. No. They held as self-evident truth that just Governments are limited because they are instituted to serve no other purpose than to secure certain unalienable rights and that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That’s it.

A Bill of Rights

To underscore the limited nature of their newly established Federal Government, the Americans enumerated freedom of speech, freedom of worship, the principle of habeas corpus, etc., in various “declaratory and restrictive clauses” which, on December 15, 1791, they ratified and added to the Constitution as the 10 Amendments that became known as the Bill of Rights. [i] This was done to precisely delimit the powers of their Federal Government by expressly prohibiting it from meddling with the enumerated rights and freedoms by way of “misconstruction or abuse of its powers” and “as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government” in order to “best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution”. In fact, by amending the Constitution, Congress bound itself to unconditionally respect the rights enumerated in the Bill. It was a Ulysses pact.

Property differs from Life and Liberty

It was in that Bill of Rights that the American Founders brought up the right to property. In what became the Constitution’s 5^th Amendment, the First Congress of the United States had laid down that “no person … shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” By defining property as something that may not be taken without just compensation, the Founders distinguished property from Life and Liberty in the sense that, while property can be taken without or with just compensation, there can’t be any just or unjust compensation when Life and/or Liberty are “taken”. Neither can there be any compensation when that other unallienable right, the Pursuit of Happiness, is “taken”. Why not? Because Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are rights that are unalienable, wherefore they can neither be given nor taken. And so, it follows axiomatically, that when things can’t be alienated, matters of compensation simply can’t be of concern. Besides this, since all Men were endowed with these rights by the Creator, there’s no need to give or take what everyone is already endowed with. It took the genius of Thomas Jefferson to formulate this so simply, clearly and unequivocally in the Declaration’s Preamble.

The “unalienable” Right to Property

Does this mean that Governments are incapable of constraining and suppressing Life, Liberty and/or the Pursuit of Happiness? No. It is precisely because Governments, and the UN for that matter, tend to suppress Man’s unalienable rights that the Preamble was inserted into the Declaration of Independence. Likewise, this is precisely the reason why President Milei is trying to repair what he described as Argentina’s “poverty, brutalization, anarchy and a fatal absence of freedom” by rekindling Man’s unalienable rights. When placed in the perspective of the American Declaration of Independence, President Milei’s speech is meaningful only because he acknowledgded and expressly confirmed that the source of our unalienable rights is Man’s Creator. And, who knows, perhaps he figured that even though the Americans “of old” didn’t think that the Creator granted us the right to property, it would be a great idea to embrace and hold as truth that He did. In this embrace Milei lifted the source of this right from the secular world of Man to the Divine Ground of Beingness. Instead of wresting the right to property from the hands of the collectivists as if it were an alienable entitlement, Milei just placed it out of their reach by defining it as unalienable and granted by the Creator.

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[i] On September 25, 1789, the First Congress of the United States proposed 12 amendments to the Constitution. The 1789 Joint Resolution of Congress proposing the amendments is on display in the Rotunda in the National Archives Museum. Ten of the proposed 12 amendments were ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures on December 15, 1791. The ratified Articles (Articles 3–12) constitute the first 10 amendments of the Constitution, or the U.S. Bill of Rights. In 1992, 203 years after it was proposed, Article 2 was ratified as the 27th Amendment to the Constitution. Article 1 was never ratified.

On Debate and Existence

People who live in a world where facts, rational arguments, open conversation, honest disagreement and respect for the freedom of speech still matter often wonder why it is that they are being attacked, ridiculed, deplatformed, debanked, threatened, bullied, censored, smeared and vilified by those with whom they try to communicate on the basis of facts and reality. The former wonder why it is that the latter seem to experience exposure to facts and reason as an existential threat. In his essay “On Debate and Existence”, Eric Voegelin (1901 – 1985), one of the 20^th Century’s most inspiring and original political philosophers, unravels this mystery by explaining to the reader that in such instances, the “exchange of argument” is “disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence—with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God.”

Second Reality

When Worlds are so apart, rational argument, so Voegelin, no longer prevails “because the partner to the discussion [does] not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that [the Austrian essayist] Robert Musil has called the Second Reality.” No matter how rational, the argument does not achieve results. It doesn’t even reach its intended recipient, because “behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurk[s] the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.” Very true, but this still doesn’t explain why people who live in a Second Reality react with such violence toward people who expose them to First Reality.

The Metaxy

First Reality … ? That is the “world” that precisely reflects the totality of the realm that has always existed between Man and God, between the World’s Genesis and the Beyond, between the Mundane and the Divine Ground of Being, between the “plain” and the “mountain”, between death and immortality, between the finite and the infinite. Philosophers conscious of this Great Between named it metaxy. The metaxy, so they said, engenders a gravitational interaction between its poles, a “pulling” and “thrusting” force whose natural orientation steers Men’s search for order and meaning in the direction of their own Beginning and their Genesis at the Divine Ground of Being. Most certainly, the metaxy is not the Garden of Eden. It is the playground where the raw physical and the ethereal metaphysical worlds meet and intertwine, where human meets human and divine. It is First Reality because in terms of order and hierarchy, it is the reality that is “first in rank” since it reflects all the interactions and movements that take place in the metaxy. It is superior to all Second Realities because the latter merely reflect disturbed, fragmented, truncated and adulterated versions of the metaxy.

“Second Selves”

Second Realities are self-created dreamworlds whereby the dreamer not only seeks to replace First Reality but wherein he or she becomes meaningful and finds him- or herself at ease, worthy of respect and in constant contact with his or her will to generate and apply coercive powers. These dreamworlds form the fake “reality” that surrounds what one might call an  imaginary “Second Self”, which is the fake Self that was conjured to replace the original First Self. Once a Second Reality has taken shape it informs the necessary ideology or world view that serves to present it as the Supreme Reality that must not only annihilate First Reality but opposing or competing ideologies and world views as well. At their very core, Second Realities and Second Selves are the result of Man’s revolt against the tensions that are inherent to conscious existence in First Reality. In terms of consciousness, Second Realities are states of self-inflicted unconsciousness.

The Krankheit des Geistes

People who are unable to step out of their Second Realities because they are convinced that they are “real”, suffer from the spritual aberration that was quite accurately described as the disease of the soul, as “pneuma-pathology”. Cicero called it the morbus animi. Voegelin defined it as “Krankheit des Geistes”, as a condition of alienation, of deformed and closed existence in which the ability to make contact with reality is heavily disturbed. The pneumapath thus lives in a strange self-created blend of the categorically and ontologically different First and Second Reality. Instead of confronting First Reality in its entirety, it is truncated by blanking out its undesirable and inconvenient aspects, whereafter the blanks are neatly and seamlessly filled with the core elements of the utopian dreamworld of the pneumapath’s preference. This in itself need not worry us, but the “blending” inevitably engenders in the “blender” the Will to Power that is required to forcibly realize a Second Reality and efface First Reality. So it is that in all Second Realities combat, strife, coercion, war and the Will to Power become the dominant aspects of human behaviour.

Avoiding the tensions of the metaxy

In Eric Voegelin and the Politics of Spiritual Revolt, Associate Professor of Political Science at Loyola College in Baltimore, Michael Franz, expert interpreter and one of the keepers of Voegelin’s intellectual legacy, explained why facts and reason no longer play a role in communicating with “Second Selves” and why this makes the effort to communicate with such Selves completely useless and in many cases counterproductive. According to Franz, since “genuine ideological consciousness within a Second Reality like Marxism or positivism is less a result of the intellectual attractiveness of the doctrine than of its capacity for dulling the tensions of open existence, a rational critique of the particulars of the doctrine is likely to be of no avail in such cases. […] Voegelin’s analysis suggests that the provision of a plausible account of the world is only a secondary project within the construction of an ideological Second Reality, and by the same token it would appear that adherence to an ideology is first a matter of faith ‒ followed by a more or less elaborate project of circumventing the dissonance between the First and Second Realities.” The basic problem, according to Franz, can be stated simply: “exposure to the ‘healthy’ tension of balanced consciousness in the metaxy is not likely to reorient the closed soul, for it was exposure to precisely this tension that first prompted pneumapathological closure.” As a result, “a reintroduction to the tension of the metaxy will bring but another, perhaps stronger, dose of the same.”

Turning the tables

The ultimate trick of the pneumapath is to install in the minds of his opponents the notion that God is Dead, that there is no Divine Ground of Being, that Man is not a spiritual being, that the human Soul ‒ the pneuma ‒ is a delusional fiction. This will desecrate the metaxy as the “playing field” where Man meets God as a partner in his quest for truth and meaning. More in particular, when Man lacks pneuma, pneumapathology and pneumapaths don’t exist. In this secularized “reality” the diagnosis of pneumapathology is not only impossible, it is automatically and inherently disqualified as offensive, insulting and as a sign of mental dysfunction and intellectual incompetence on the part of the one who makes the diagnosis. This is how the pneumapath turns the tables on his opponent and manages to shift debate and rational argument to a contest between moral values. Assuming the “moral highground” in that contest enables the pneumapath to disqualify the realist as a morally inferior human being who does not deserve standing and should be distrusted and silenced.

Detecting the dreams

Pneumapaths mostly go undetected because, as explained by Voegelin, their Second Realities are clever structures designed “to eclipse our image of reality by a counterimage that will furnish a plausible basis for the action he calls for”. In order to serve this purpose, the  counterimage “must fulfill two conditions: it must cover the structure of reality with sufficient comprehensiveness to appear, by the standard prevailing at the time, debatable as a true image; and it must be analytically obscure enough not to reveal its character of a dream image at first glance.” Of course, the dream “is never acknowledged as a dream but, in the context of the oeuvre it informs, it is meant to be the theoretical core of a true image of reality.” This is how the dream that is stealthily implanted in the counterimage of reality perverts and blurs the true image of First Reality. Hence, what pneumapaths fear the most is that the dreams they “pasted” into their counterimages of reality are detected as … dreams. As Voegelin put it, “[o]nce the dream is disengaged from its context, its conflict with reality is practically a matter of self-declaration”, and, if I may add, of the implosion and self-destruction of the Second Reality. While pneumapaths may succeed in turning the tables on their opponents, they can’t prevent the latters’ First Reality from turning the tables on the dreamworlds they wove into their counterimages of reality.

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Freedom and Society’s “moral Substance”

One might wonder how it is that people like Mrs Clinton can freely and honestly combine their intense hatred of your freedoms with their great affinity for it without contradicting themselves and being diagnosed as stark-staring mad and pathologically dishonest. Apparently, there’s more to this than just answering the question whether our fundamental freedoms come from God or from Government. The answer to this puzzle is actually quite simple and obvious. In the hands of Clinton-type people, freedom can be used as a very effective weapon to undermine, debase and destroy what they hate most of all: the “moral substance” of society. When the moral substance of a society can be molded, adulterated and obliterated, practices such as euthanasia, enforced sterilization, elective abortion and gender-affirming surgery and medication can be introduced into law as rights or interests by embedding them in the person’s fundamental freedoms and right to privacy. When taken to their extremes, in a morally debased society that lacks ethical standards, these permissive “rights” will invite, if not stimulate, a person to abolish all morality and perform immoral/unethical acts without any strings attached, i.e. without running the risk of being punished. When a crime is no longer a crime, anything goes.

Conscience is our “most sacred of all property”

How this works was explained by one of the United States’ prominent Founders, James Madison. On 29 March 1792, Madison declared that a Man’s “conscience”, which undoubtedly forms the lynchpin of a society’s moral substance, “is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a manʼs house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a manʼs conscience which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.”

An Excess of Liberty

Madison firmly acknowledged that “government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” Property is “that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.” Madison not only warned that “no man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions” when and where “an excess of power prevails” and “property of no sort is duly respected.” He also stressed that “where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho’ from an opposite cause.” ([i]) In other words, a society can be effectively destroyed by simultaneously exposing its people to an excess of power and an excess of liberty. The effect, “tho’ from opposite causes”, will be a “double whammy”.

The “heart of liberty”

What “excess of liberty” actually means in this day and age became manifest when, on 29 June 1992, in its Opinion rendered in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the U.S. Supreme Court constitutionalized such an excess of liberty by stating that “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define oneʼs own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.” ([ii]) In this case, the Court specifically affirmed a woman’s “freedom” to end her pregnancy as a “right” that can be found in this “heart of liberty”. In order to  avoid having to define “abortion” as the cruel ending of the life of a new human being, the Court rephrased the act as the ending of a pregnancy. By implication, the Court showed to be in full agreement with the notion that an unborn child plays no role in the “mystery of life” since it lacks any attributes of personhood. Had it not deprived the unborn child of a place in the “mystery of life“, the Court might very well have been accused of granting pregnant women and their physicians a plain license to kill. To circumvent having to  address these moral and existential issues, the Court conjured the “heart of liberty” and infused it with what Madison described as an excess of liberty. However, this sleight of hand does not efface the fact that per the American Heritage^® Dictionary of the English Language, “being pregnant” is still synonymous with “being with child“,

“Libertad liberal”

What this means in terms of “moral substance”, was very well explained by Professor of Cultural and Political Science Danilo Castellano in his essay “Qué es el Liberalismo”, where he described excessive liberty as “the liberty exercised with liberty as its sole criterion.” This “libertad liberal” is, so Castellano, “essentially a vindication of independence from the order of things, that is, from the ontological ‘datum’ of creation and, in the final analysis, independence from itself. It, therefore, claims consistently, although absurdly, the sovereignty of the will, whether that relates to the individual, society or the State. It always seeks to affirm freedom from God and liberation from His law with the intention of affirming the will and power without criteria and, as fully as possible, admitting those criteria and only those that they derive from it, and that ‒ when depending on it ‒ are not properly criteria. This leads to a vindication of the so-called ‘concrete’ freedoms: freedom from thinking as opposed to freedom of thought, freedom from religion as opposed to freedom of religion, freedom from our conscience as opposed to freedom of conscience, etc.” ([iii]) (emphasis added) And, as we know since Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche published “Der Wille zur Macht” (The Will to Power), the unconditional veneration of the Sovereignty of the Will will inevitably energize the Will to Power, the Libido dominandi.

Deconstructing society’s moral substance

In the end, promoting liberal liberty as a Constitutionally protected human right boils down to empowering unlimited liberty and the sovereignty of the will. It is a Luciferian trick aimed at seducing women, and men for that matter, to accept that in what the Court defined as their “zone of conscience and belief” there lives a heart of untrammeled liberty. The effect being that, when that heart is given unlimited power, it will disrupt and eventually destroy the very “zone” in which it beats. This is the zone in which the moral substance of society is rooted. Once detached from the natural order of things and the ontological “datum” of creation, that “zone” will become arid ground and, as a result, a society’s moral substance will wither and die. In the Casey case, the Court supported its attack on morality by disqualifying pregnancy as a burdensome period of suffering, of anxieties, physical constraints and sacrifice. And so, the unique bond between a mother and her infant may be destroyed at the drop of a hat because “the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition.” To grant a woman the liberty to abort her unborn child when that liberty is alledgedly “at stake”, the Court unmoored liberty from its anchors in the woman’s zone of conscience and belief and so affirmed and gave free rein to an excess of liberty.

The excess of liberty is returned to the people

Admittedly, in June 2022, in the case of Dobbs v Jackson, the Court decided that “[t]he Constitution does not confer a right to abortion” and “returned” the authority to regulate abortion “to the people and their elected representatives”. However, the Dobbs Court carefully refrained from assessing the strength of the “heart of liberty” argument on which its Casey decision was based. And so, the Court returned to the people the right to freely exercise the excess of liberty that Madison defined as having the same maleficiant effect as an excess of power, “tho’ from an opposite cause”, and that Danilo Castellano defined as the absolute “sovereignty of the will”.

The prohibition of judgment

Eventually, in this world of unbridled self-assertion, any concept that is selfishly and egocentrically developed as “one’s own” is now as good as anyone else’s “own” concept. What’s more, because the excessive freedom to define one’s own concepts of existence, meaning, the universe, the mystery of life and, ultimately, of reality, is a legally enforceable right that was inserted into the “heart of the American Constitution”, the excess of liberty must inevitably lead to the concomitant excess of power that is required to validate and uphold such self-conceived concepts as “real” and worthy of respect. This is not accomplished by evaluating the concepts on the basis of their intrinsic accuracy, truthfulness, consistency and merits (if any), but by forcefully restraining anyone from exposing them to inspection, debate, scrutiny, rational assessment and/or moral judgment. In fact, it provides legal protection to any concept formed in the “heart of liberty” against any kind of judgment. In the end, the enforced prohibition of free and honest judgment signals the death of a society’s moral substance.

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[i] The Papers of James Madison. Edited by William T. Hutchinson et al. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962–77 (vols. 1–10); Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977–(vols. 11–).

[ii] Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (Nos. 91-744, 91-902); decided 29 June 1992; Opinion of the Court delivered by Justices OʼConnor, Kennedy and Souter.

[iii] Qué es el Liberalismo; Danilo Castellano; Verbo, núm. 489-490 (2010), 729-740.

The history of Liberating liberty commenced in 2014, when, in September 2014, in Cambridge (Maryland), I had the honor and privilege of giving a keynote address to a large audience celebrating the Sacred Fire of Liberty event organized by Constitutional lawyer Jonathan Emord’s law firm Emord & Associates on the occasion of its 20th Anniversary. Now, 10 years later, and after 18 months of campaigning for the U.S. Senate to “save Virginia and save America”, Jonathan Emord will again move to the courts his fight to keep the “Sacred Fire of Liberty” burning by resuming his work as managing principal of his law firm and his constitutional law practice. In addition to this, Emord also accepted his appointment as member of the Alliance for Natural Health‘s (ANH/USA) Board of Directors and as the organization’s new General Counsel. In the latter capacity, he will “spearhead litigation for the group against federal government agencies that deprive Americans of their rights to health freedom”. ([i])

Liberty Education

Broaching the work at hand in an hour-long video-conversation, Emord explained to ANH’s founder, Executive & Scientific Director, Robert Verkerk that fighting and winning legal battles won’t be enough to defend our unalienable rights and fundamental freedoms against suppression. ([ii]) While affirming that these rights “come from God”, Emord stated that “the approach” to effectively protect them against being suppressed by what he defines as “Authoritarians” is “in one part an education … that used to be based on the Founding Principles.” […] “At root,” so Emord, “people need to understand that in order for us to evolve, innovate, have a better standard of living and overcome new challenges like new disease, there is only one way that is possible and that is through a wide open, robust, free speech environment in which all individuals who have anything to contribute, or think they do, are given an opportunity to communicate and are allowed to participate in an unrestricted environment of debate and that [this] in term leads to discovering hidden secrets that are the answers to most of these problems. We can always overcome obstacles that confront us if we’re free enough to do it.”

Accepting self-evident truths as … true

If, as Jonathan Emord so strongly suggests, Liberty Education must again be based on the Founding Principles, then the first and foremost “lesson” of that curriculum must inevitably concern the concisely worded Principles laid down in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is precisely what, “at root”, people need to understand and … unconditionally accept as self-evident truths. All knowledge gained in Liberty Education will eventually “fall by the wayside” unless the “student” agrees without any reservation that it is true that God does exist and that, as a consequence, it is equally true that He, the Creator of Man, is the source of Man’s unalienable rights. If this truth is not acknowledged and understood as truth, i.e. if rights do not come from God, they will automatically come from …. Men, and in that case, rights become bones of contention in the ensuing “war of all against all”.

Liberty is a sacred right

In other words, before engaging in the study of all the legal, political and societal issues that must be addressed in keeping Man’s unalienable rights safe from being suppressed by governments and their acolytes, the “student” who wants to learn Liberating Liberty must first of all succeed in becoming aware of the truth that Man is a spiritual being, who was endowed with Liberty by his Creator as He created Man in His own Image. This concept rests upon the self-evident truth that Liberty as such cannot be “shared” as if it were an alienable “good”. It is a right that cannot be endowed by one Man to another Man, for the simple reason that it already belongs to each and every Man. It’s unalienability stems from the fact that all Men already partake in the infinite and divine Liberty that “permitted” their Creation and that is now required to pursue Happiness by overcoming obstacles in an “unrestricted environment of debate”. Liberty is not an entitlement that can be given and taken at will by governments. Governments are instituted among Men to secure their Liberty.

Man’s pursuit of Happiness

Because Man is a spiritual being, Liberty is not a human right, but a sacred one. Sure enough, in what the Founders described as “the course of human events”, Liberty can be suppressed, especially by corrupt and corrupted governments that grossly abuse their “just powers” against the consent of the governed. But it can never be destroyed. The totalitarian enemies of Liberty can only succeed in completely suppressing it by continously attacking, impairing, undermining and taunting Man’s awareness of himself as a spiritual being. Which is why the principal obstacle that confronts Man in his pursuit of Happiness is his agreement with the falsehood that Man is no more than one of the many outcomes of an evolutionary process in which only the fittest will survive. Wherefore any serious attempt to Liberate liberty from its shackles must begin with becoming fully aware of the truth that Man is a spiritual being.

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[i] ANH Press Release / 18 August 2024; ANH Appoints FDA Dragon Slayer as General Counsel; https://anh-usa.org/anh-appoints-fda-dragon-slayer-as-general-counsel/

[ii] Conversation between Jonathan Emord, Esq. and Dr. Robert Verkerk; https://rumble.com/v5awxn6-anh-usa-newly-appointed-general-counsel-jonathan-emord-in-conversation-with.html