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blogging, culture, faith, insanitybytes, insanitybytes22, opinion, tyranny
I thought this was just so insightful from Citizen Tom:
“Tyranny is making choices for others that those others have the right to make for themselves. What are those choices? In a free country we debate such matters. In a tyrannical state the tyrant decides. In a free country, we humbly admit that none of us have the either the wisdom or the right to run the lives of people who know their own situation better than we do.”
Amen to that! There are many layers to that concept and it can apply to the state of our Republic at large or the condition of our individual lives. Perish the thought I ever suggest “the personal is political,” but our politics really are made up of a lot of individuals who seem to suffer from this affliction themselves. Don’t forget all the friends and neighbors who suddenly decided people like me should not only have all our choices taken away, we should probably be thrown in the brig for being so non compliant.
To be exceedingly charitable about it, I suppose we probably all have a little tyrant living within. Some of us are just more aware of it, understand that the entire world does not revolve exclusively around us, and realize that tyranny is exceedingly immoral.
Many of us are actual grown ups, so we tend to keep our inner L’enfant terrible contained and under wraps. After having lived the past few covid years, I realize the world does not have as many grown ups in it as I once thought.
Something else that often drives tyranny, is fear. I don’t think I score very high on the potential tyrant continuum, but I have observed that when I get scared I am more inclined to want try to control those around me. So long ago I figured that the solution to that problem is simply to deal with the fear, sort it out, and refuse to give way to it.
God is good that way and the Bible is a very useful tool for sorting it all out. Somebody smart once pointed out that there are 365 admonishments about fear in the Bible, one for every day of the year. I’ve never counted them all, but there is lots of wisdom in there.
I have the fine distinction of living in the only county in my entire state still on red alert, still in a state of emergency, still at high risk for covid, still all masked up and fearful. In fact, our Governor ended his little reign of terror, his endless “two weeks to flatten the curve,” and our county commissioners promptly voted to not comply. Yep, they were so deeply disappointed to see their police state powers fade away they simply voted to keep them going on.
Morons.
Anyway, the last sentence of Citizen Tom’s quote is really good, too. He said, “In a free country, we humbly admit that none of us have either the wisdom or the right to run the lives of people who know their own situation better than we do.” I’m chuckling here, I’m a wife and a mom, so that one is a bit convicting. I’m also a caretaker, a bit of leadership and looking out for others going on. I can’t tell you how many times the Lord has told me, I know you don’t like what you’re seeing, but you must let the grown up people run their own lives as they see fit. That means you must let them completely faceplant and destroy themselves if necessary.
I’m not very good at it, but I’m really committed to that principle. Except for small children who must be somewhat contained for their safety, and outright thugs who must be contained for our safety, I really do humbly believe that none of us have the wisdom or the right to run other people’s lives. That is just as true when serving in an elected office as it is when serving in a home. The freedom to run our own lives also happens to mean the freedom to experience the full consequences of our own actions.
I also believe in grace, in heaping kindness on people, but I’ve learned that we can do a lot more harm than good when we make our helping all about us, our fear, our unmet needs, our desire for power, our need for control.
There is a caveat to all this. Some people are so afraid of ever being seen as a tyrant themselves, they simply refuse to take a stand on anything, ever. Uhg, those kind of tyrants are just the worse. They are the peacekeepers, not the peacemakers. Constantly sweeping things under the rug and carrying on about the need for unity, as if their fear of conflict can be magically healed by everyone else just unconditionally obeying and following orders.
See, there's this thing called biology... 
“Tyranny is making choices for others that those others have the right to make for themselves.” What a great quote!
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Good morning!
“ I know you don’t like what you’re seeing, but you must let the grown up people run their own lives as they see fit. That means you must let them completely faceplant and destroy themselves if necessary.”
That is the hard part.
But, that is how our Lord teaches us as well, isn’t it?
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Good morning! I think the Lord is a pretty gentle teacher, it’s when we run off and insist on teaching ourselves everything the hard way, that we tend to suffer. 🙂
There’s a darkly humorous skit where two knights are in an abandoned castle looking for something to eat. The one says, “whatever you do, don’t drink out of that black cup over there!” The other one gets angry and says, “don’t tell me what to do!” So he drinks it and promptly drops dead. Then another knight comes in, hears the same thing and goes, “you’re not the boss of me!” So he drinks it and dies. Another comes in and says, “you’re just hogging all the good stuff for yourself!” So he grabs the cup, drinks, and dies. Pretty soon the floor is littered with all these dead knights and the lone survivor is just running about wringing his hands, trying to figure out why no one would listen to him.
Besides just making me laugh, it’s a fun skit because it really shows that how by design we simply don’t have all the information. We need to learn to rely on one another, we need to have a teachable spirit.
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Thanks for the link and the kind words. I really appreciate them.
I would just like to add an additional observation to this statement.
When people are too young or their minds are too injured, we try to put competent people in charge of them. We should do this because we love them and they cannot survive on their own. Yet, look what has happened. Abortion. Euthanasia. Mentally ill people left homeless. Criminals let loose. Men allowed in the ladies room…….
Seven years ago ColorStorm coined a word I think we need to remember, Meebot.
Ironically, we cannot have freedom until we consider the needs of others as important as our own. That is because as Meebots we cannot rationally discern when others have the wisdom to run their own lives. As Meebots we don’t care. All we care about is getting and keeping what we want. Justice is not in the vocabulary of Meebots. What they want is social justice, which is injustice.
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Oh yes, I do remember Colorstorm’s Meebots! Very funny and apt description, indeed. 🙂
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O my goodness- forgot about those creatures who walk among us! What a nice word- meebot- should market that. But timely once again, and things true never go out of style right
Tks CTtom- awesome handshake there.
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Meebot won’t catch on unless we use it, and this was appropriate occasion. Thanks for coining that word.
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In todays world , tyranny is often accomplished with lies and omission of the truth. People can’t make good decisions when they’re only shown part of the story and we live in a very short-sighted culture. Look at china’s sudden admission of how their one child policy has backfired on them . They had overcounted their population by 100 million people! Now people are predicting the downfall of China as its population dies off . Just one example of bad decision making. Your state will also have to deal with the fallout from its ridiculous Covid policies.
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Good point! We do seem to be very short sighted in the modern world. It’s as if cause and effect has just vanished from our landscape.
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Part of the problem is our combination of dumbed-down schools, a servile media, and narcotics proliferation among the public has led us to choose candidates funded by Special Interests and packaged by Madison Avenue shylocks to sell an image. The real ‘issues’ in most elections are the apathy, greed, envy, and ignorance; while ‘policy’ is centered on mass-hysteria.
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I was thinking about this today . I think it’s a worldview problem. The progressives and evolutionists and humanists and statists were very effective at changing the worldview through the public schools and Hollywood and celebrity culture and advertising. Traditional values and logic and virtue lost the war.
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Apathy is a real problem. The way that our Party System is set up, the one place where people really CAN make change is at the Primary Level. Primaries are places where numbers can really make a huge difference; but people don’t participate and so we get RINOs and Whacko Left activists for candidates.
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Citizen Tom speaks eloquently of what tyranny does, not what tyranny really is. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle who laid the foundation for Christian Western Civilization, taught mankind to look more deeply into the nature of things.
It wasn’t until the time of the American Founding Father that the nature of tyranny was spelled out clearly and then incorporated into the US Constitution. The spelling champion was Charles de Montesquieu, a French political philosopher whom the Founding Fathers took to heart.
Tyranny is a governing regime where the executive, legislative and judicial powers are held by one person, one group of people or one organization.
Knowing this, the Founding Fathers divided the US federal government into three separate but equal branches. They further divided the Congress into two houses. Each division of the government was to provide a check and balance on the others, thus holding tyranny at bay.
Government then, is rule making, rule enforcement, and then judging the rules for legality. From this, the citizen can discern clearly that the federal government cannot cure poverty, heal the sick, create wealth, properly educate citizens. Additionally, a federal police force like the FBI will naturally devolve into a thuggish, unchecked, organized crime syndicate, replacing the power of the people with the brute force of tyranny (all the branches of government rolled up into one judge, jury and executioner).
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Yes Silence, I’m a huge fan of our 3 branches of government and our system of checks and balances! Our founders knew all men, all governments, have the potential to become tyrants. The concept of individual rights is something else we have tried to hold sacred, so preserving the rights of the one, protects the rights of the many, rather than the other way around.
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That’s a great point, IB. Certain Founders understood that the US Constitution wasn’t enough. So they insisted on a bill of rights with freedom of speech and the right to bear arms at the top of the list.
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Good points.
Do I think I have all the answers or the wisdom of the founders? No. Then again the founders worked together and went to war together. They also studied some great works that contained exactly the wisdom they needed. As you have observed, few provide their children a classical education anymore. So, even if I had the genius of the founders, I will never have the advantage of working such brave and able gentlemen.
So, have I described what tyranny is or what it does? Well, I think the issue is one of perspective.
How is tyranny defined except by what tyrannical people do? Simultaneously controlling the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of government enables tyrants to make choices for others that those others have the right to make for themselves. Why did the founders focus on the powers tyrants want instead of what they do with those powers?
Consider on rare occasions that people with tyrannical powers have not abused their powers. So, we usually define tyranny as the abuse of power. The focus of the founders, however, was preventing anyone from attaining tyrannical power. So, they defined tyranny in accordance with the requisite powers required for tyranny.
In my post, I focused on our tendency to abuse power, our pride and arrogance and our willingness to be tyrannical. Why? We still have a constitutional republic, but we no longer have the self restraint required to enforce on Constitution.
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That is, ‘our Constitution.”
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“Tyranny is making choices for others that those others have the right to make for themselves.”
Yeah.. ok. So, let me get this correct here. Our government… wait… it’s not the “government” but rather institutions of government run by people who want to be tyrants and tell you what to do and how to act… it’s THOSE people that are tyrants. After all, our government is in place because of our Constitution, so the theory of government is not being put to task here but rather the people inside it meandering around in power-modes… right?
Yet, is not the Constitution.. a represented democracy in general, even… specifically designed as a plan by which the general citizenry “grants” (or “surrenders” if you prefer that drama) power by exercising the right to vote for those who participate in government… who in turn we assign a public trust to make decisions for us, and make non-elected appointments as required by law, most by the advise and consent and vetting by those same elected leaders?
This constant lament from the Right about tyranny in our government is getting way old. To the Right tyranny is defined by the result of those holding positions of government at federal, state, or local levels.. even school boards… making decisions that you don’t like… and if your vote or letters to your elected officials don’t “fix” the problem to your satisfaction, all the more a tyranny is in place. Time for a civil war! Uh-huh.
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Well, no! Do you honestly believe we vote people into office so we can surrender our power to them and enable them to make all our choices for us?
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Maybe more to the point.. what do YOU think the Constitution does?
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Doug: you need to have a good look at the 9th and 10th Amendments if you really think that the Constitution gives the Federal Government the right to impose its arbitrary will on anybody. The only authority it has over the States and individuals is guaranteeing that every State has a republican form of government and that the civil rights specified in the Constitution are upheld. There are a few other conditions such as military installations, taxation, foreign trade, and interstate issues exclusive to the federal government, but that’s about all.
Thomas Jefferson that the theory behind our Republic is that men select the best-qualified to manage it as representatives. We have six levels of governance: the people, the States, the Congress, Senate, Executive Branch, and Judicial Branch. They’re each supposed to be a check on the other.
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I never once stated that the government is “permitted” to act arbitrarily. You entirely left out that we vote for our representatives.
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I assumed that everybody knew that representatives are elected, but…even so, the fact that the people choose them doesn’t authorize them to roll over the Rights of others. That’s why we have a division of powers, so that ‘majority rule’ can’t build a tyranny anymore than any other Branch of Government can.
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I assume you are defining “tyranny” as meaning someone is violating the Constitution (by your interpretation) and doing things their own way regardless of being elected?
If the Constitution has been violated then bring suit… level charges. Next election, vote them out. That’s the rules of the Constitution. If you’re just complaining about Democrats in general being tyrannical, and they are the majority, and the nation’s voting Democrats agree… is not that the nature of politics?
I’m still curious.. what exactly is some “tyrant” doing to you to affect your life?
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It’s the tyranny of the administrative state honestly that troubles me the most; the unelected, accountable bureaucrats that hold so much power over our lives with the flick of a pen. Did you know your local county health director could order you to close your business, cover your breathing holes and not leave your house? I sure didn’t….
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It seems to be getting worst
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Maybe it’s just getting exposed more? I like to think that anyway! Sometimes in order to clean things up properly you have to drag them all out of the closet and heap them up in the middle of the room. It might have looked much better before, but the mess was just all stuffed in the closet and under the bed. 🙂
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True that might be the case that its exposed more
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You make a great point about not trying to control other people’s lives. We all have free will, we are all supposed to be able to live our own lives, that is the way God intended it.
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Reblogged this on clydeherrin.
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Thank you, Clyde. 🙂
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I love both Tom’s comment and your post expounding on it, as tyranny is something we need to discuss more. I feel for you in WA too and the Covid state of emergency nonsense. Newsom of course still has us under one in CA, but I think things are a little more relaxed here.
It’s the threat though that the switch could flip again at any time where we find ourselves once again under new mandates that is oppressive and depressing. That is why I firmly believe that accountability for the monstrous shredding of civli liberties that occurred during Covid has to come about. Nobody who was responsible for it or who dutifully complied of course even wants to talk about it let alone expose the wrong doing and enact protocols to prevent it from happening again.
This quote by you is priceless and really is the basic rule life hours be lived by. “The freedom to run our own lives also happens to mean the freedom to experience the full consequences of our own actions.”
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Accountability is really important, Tricia! Justice really serves to help create a sense of safety that also allows us the freedom to build, innovate, and create.
I’ve been really noticing how the rampant and almost guaranteed injustice locally has impacted our economy so negatively. People don’t want to invest in starting businesses, people hardly even want to work, because there is no stability in place. You might be fired tomorrow for not getting your tenth booster or your business might get ransacked by thugs or shut down by failing to meet some recent recycling mandate that somebody just dreamed up. The Bible says, “where there is no vision the people perish.” That threat that they could flip the switch at any time really is oppressive and prevents many of us from investing in any kind of vision.
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I’ve been noticing the same thing IB. The smart people here, just leave and open their businesses elsewhere. It’s very much a two tiered society where only the already established businesses with plenty of capital can afford to navigate the byzantine city/state regulations.
One small example is the CA Coastal Commission is putting tremendous new burdens on business owners who expanded their outdoor dining during the pandemic in to parking areas so they could survive the city mandated shutdowns of indoor dining. Everybody loves the expanded table service to outside areas and very few are complaining about the lost parking spots, or at least they feel the added value of it outweighs the minimal impact of the lost spots. Yet people who work in offices very far away from these establishments are making gross decisions having nothing to do with reality and will surely lead to to more closures.
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