The American Crisis: Defined
Journal Entry #5
The American Republic has lost its way. My people suffer from lack of knowledge and the path of understanding they no longer search out. Virtue, Truth, Goodness and Beauty are the desired objects of an enlightened citizenry. Yet the recognition that the pursuit of Wisdom is essential to the furtherance of self government my people no longer grasp.

And so we toil in vain and labor in futility, and we raise-up children doomed to misfortune. We plant much but harvest little; the wealth entrusted to us we have placed in purses with holes; we have squandered our precious inheritance. My people clamor loudly for their rights, but seem to forget our responsibility, our obligation, our sacred trust to preserve FREEDOM and faithfully pass it along to our posterity. We should have practiced the latter without neglecting the former.

We once swore a solemn oath to trust neither Monarch nor Mob; our forefathers taught us to eschew Tyranny and Anarchy, yet we have yielded to both. We have dispelled the light of Reason and Truth, so we are no longer able to appraise the Darkness into which we have arrived. And we are exceedingly perplexed by the calamity that has befallen us.

Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist #1, unerringly posed the central question that directed the debate over the proposed draft of the Constitution then, even as this same question bears heavily upon the continuation of the American Cause of FREEDOM today. Are we indeed, a society capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice? Or are we forever dependent upon chance and the coercion of the State for our political order?

To seriously propose that a distinct and real danger to our FREEDOM derives from our system of thought- our Western intellectual tradition- particularly as a result of the esteemed work of modern science, surely invites a range of responses, from bemused skepticism to the severest criticism. What after all, should we utilize in order to understand the world and advance knowledge, if not the most highly developed form of reasoning yet devised in all of human history?

And what are we to say of all the advancements gained thus far in human knowledge generally and in the physical sciences specifically? Surely the intellectual and material benefits we enjoy as a result of the growth of our knowledge and the activity of our science are no mere illusion? No, these benefits are no mere illusion but then, neither are its appalling failures. And I would never advise my fellow citizens to scrap our magnificent Western intellectual tradition in favor of, well, what else is there more effective than empirical-rationalism?

But it is essential I remember to remind America that our rational system of thought as it has matured since the Enlightenment has produced totalitarian as well as democratic government. Research universities and libraries as well as ministries of propaganda; the beneficent medical research of a Dr. Jonas Salk and the depraved activities of a Dr. Josef Mengele; a Franklin Delano Roosevelt and an Adolf Hitler; a Henry R. Luce and a Joseph Goebbels; and progressive and peaceful communities as well as the unmistakable stench of the Gulag and Concentration Camp.

In order to promote a proper understanding amongst my fellow citizens of the potential of our ideas- whether we shall henceforth enjoy FREEDOM or suffer Tyranny- I shall more closely investigate the nature and methods of our Western intellectual tradition, our system of thought and its assumptions, to fully understand how we’ve lost our way.