Participants:
Series Code: LI
Program Code: LI200495B
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00:01 Welcome back to the Liberty Insider.
00:02 Before the break, my non democratic friend here 00:05 was railing against democracy but your point is true 00:08 that majoritarian just the rule of the mass or the crowd. 00:14 Plato considered... 00:15 Has to be right there. 00:17 Go back, Plato considered what the worst form, 00:18 oligarchy, democracy. 00:21 And I forgot, the tyranny, you know. 00:23 Key one, I think of plutocracy or what was it? 00:26 What was where you got the smartest and best? 00:29 Well, you know, is philosopher king, you know, 00:31 if you can find one. 00:32 There's no question 00:34 that a lot of the American system is designed, 00:36 I think very appropriately to protect minorities 00:39 from the majority who would otherwise 00:41 vote them out. 00:42 And maybe out period or harm them. 00:45 And on religious liberty, you know, 00:47 this is a classic statement was it... 00:52 Was it Jeff? 00:53 No, couldn't have been Jefferson, 00:55 it would be Madison probably that said, you know, 00:56 who cannot see that if you give one sect 00:58 a primary position, they would turn around 01:01 and restrict the other sects. 01:02 See, Madison thought, it's great. 01:03 You got all these separate sects. 01:05 Does he call them fighting each other? 01:07 Yeah. 01:08 Because that way, none would have the ultimate authority. 01:11 Yeah. 01:12 So there's a balancing act there, 01:13 but, you know... 01:15 But it's coming unglued. 01:16 Rhetorically, I agree with you. 01:18 But we, you know, we're not anti, 01:20 the democracy that exists in the US, 01:22 but we see clear signs that the system is fraying. 01:27 And I think ironically, it's going back 01:29 to what it was designed to protect against. 01:31 Remember people objecting to the electoral system, 01:36 electing, objecting that, you know, 01:39 the power is designed to divide it up in a way 01:42 that favors they think some of the smaller states. 01:45 All of these things are really unraveling a system 01:48 that was designed to sort of weight and balance 01:51 against that just the popular vote. 01:52 As we talked in the break. 01:54 I mean, this was such, 01:56 you said I thought it was there different countries all in one. 01:59 I remember years ago, I grew up the East Coast, 02:03 was born in New York, grew up in Miami Beach, 02:06 lived in Maryland for 30 some years, 02:10 and I was at a... 02:11 I'll never forget I was at a camp meeting 02:13 in Bozeman, Montana. 02:16 And they were going to have a rodeo. 02:18 You know, I'm coming from Miami Beach. 02:20 I'd never seen a rodeo before. 02:22 And they ended up, I ended up is history. 02:23 Well, they say in Australia, I think rodeo. 02:25 Yeah, I mean, I'm a camp meeting speaker, 02:27 but I didn't have rent a car then and I hitchhiked. 02:31 I hitchhiked from the camp meeting 02:32 and went to the rodeo. 02:34 And I'll never forget. 02:37 They had these girls, roping calves. 02:40 Okay, and I suddenly view them. 02:43 I saw they have these girls from college roping calves. 02:47 And I don't think I ever knew in my life a girl 02:51 who could rope a calf. 02:53 But what I do is... 02:54 You don't know what you missed out. 02:56 Yeah, yeah. 02:57 But I saw that I never forgot that. 02:58 Yeah. 03:00 As a symbol of how, because I probably didn't know 03:05 anybody who knew anybody who knew a girl 03:07 who could rope a calf. 03:09 And it struck me. 03:11 Wow, how vastly different parts of this country are. 03:17 I'm an East Coast boy. 03:18 I lived in Idaho for eight and a half 03:22 or so years coming from, I'd been in the US, 03:24 went back to Australia and then came to Idaho. 03:27 And that was exactly what struck me that's like, 03:29 another world than the East Coast. 03:31 It's not. 03:32 I mean, of course, same country in the citizenship sense, 03:34 but the culture is radically different. 03:36 But you know even despite that, 03:39 there was always something that kept us all American. 03:43 - A shared dream. - Yeah. 03:44 And that now, I think whether you're on the far left, 03:49 you're on the far right, you're in the middle, 03:51 you've got to be blind now not to see. 03:54 Now, let's draw a parallel... 03:56 How this country is coming apart. 03:57 We talk about religious liberty. 03:58 But when you're talking about religious liberty, 04:00 there's the church and the state. 04:01 And I think we've got a parallel problem 04:04 within some of the churches. 04:06 It's not just Seventh-day Adventist Church, 04:08 and law and order and regular operations 04:13 that used to be easy in the past 04:14 are sort of falling apart. 04:16 And I've thought, why is it you know, 04:17 some of our own members decry the leaders on occasion 04:20 calling them you know, papal and inquisitorial. 04:23 But in reality that's nonsensical. 04:27 We don't have it and I'm glad 04:28 we don't have control mechanisms, right? 04:31 But we seem to need them. 04:33 So what's missing? 04:34 Just as the country I think, 04:35 even in the church and church governance, 04:38 you had a critical body of the members 04:41 who bought into the assumptions of the system they belonged. 04:45 Yeah, good point. 04:46 That self regulates. 04:48 Yeah. 04:49 But you don't have that anymore. 04:51 Not so much. 04:52 And the same thing is happening in the country 04:53 and neither system can sustain without the buy in. 04:56 Yeah, so it's a scary, it's a scary time 05:01 and what's going to, and if things do come unglued. 05:05 People want stability. 05:08 They want and they will simplify it. 05:10 That's why Germany went to NATO. 05:13 Yeah, they will sacrifice for that stability. 05:18 And I mean, again, 05:20 you were talking a little bit about the COVID thing, 05:22 and I'm not as apocalyptic about it. 05:25 But your point was, 05:28 look at how quickly we stopped going out. 05:33 We stopped going to work, we stopped doing, 05:35 and I'm not saying it was wrong. 05:36 Again, I don't know. 05:38 I don't know what to believe anymore about any of this. 05:40 But social change happened like that, 05:43 about how life is regulated. 05:45 We, the government told us to do this, and boom, 05:48 we all as lemmings were doing it. 05:51 Now, again, I'm not saying it was wrong. 05:54 But like, wow, wow. 05:56 And some people and again, 05:58 I'm not in a conspiratorial mind frame. 06:00 You don't have to be a conspirator. 06:02 You have to be an independent enlightenment, 06:06 for one of a better word frame of mind 06:08 and that is drifted away. 06:09 People are ready to jump when they're told to jump. 06:11 But what I think is, after this, 06:17 and what we've done, I think, 06:20 something else coming next is going to make it easy. 06:24 Apres moi, le deluge. 06:26 Yeah, well, yeah, not necessarily, 06:28 but there's a whole might... 06:31 I have to explain if... 06:32 Yeah, explain up. 06:34 After me, the flood. 06:35 It's a non French... 06:36 Louis XVI. 06:38 Yeah, the French Revolution, you know, 06:40 things were getting bad. 06:41 And so he says, after me, the flood. 06:43 Well, you know, and to a certain degree. 06:44 And he was right. 06:46 To certain degree. 06:47 He saw things falling apart. 06:48 Yeah. 06:50 But again, when you think about it in toto, 06:52 and again, I'm not defending the French Revolution, 06:55 though there was an awful lot of good... 06:57 An awful lot of good came out of the French Revolution. 06:59 Of course, but what led to it? 07:00 It was corrupt politics. 07:03 It was taxes. 07:04 Louis XIV drained the treasury to the American Revolution, 07:10 and its court at Versailles. 07:12 And so by the time this Louis XVI came around, 07:15 they were flat out broke, they wanted to raise taxes, 07:18 but the aristocracy didn't want to get taxed. 07:24 The clergy didn't want to get taxed. 07:26 So they were going to tax the people. 07:27 So there was social inequalities, 07:29 corrupt government, 07:30 and an unholy union of church and state. 07:33 Well, that was always there all along. 07:35 Yeah, but it got bad there. 07:36 But what that produced once the government, 07:39 people rose up against the government, 07:41 the church was with them. 07:42 So they turned against religion too, 07:44 which did not happen in the United States, 07:46 but it could have because the church... 07:49 They turned against the Catholic Church. 07:52 They turned against the church. 07:53 The French Revolution instituted 07:55 a lot of freedoms for Protestants... 07:57 Oh, the code of Napoleon is still with us. 08:01 France still has the code Napoleon. 08:02 Yeah. 08:03 They were trying to break the back 08:05 of the Roman Catholic stranglehold on them. 08:08 Again, I'm not an apologist for the French Revolution. 08:11 But again, 30,000 dead people... 08:14 I'll tell you three lessons. 08:15 We are falling in some of that. 08:17 Not all of them some of the same prompt. 08:20 Now, what will happen in the US? 08:22 We're running out of time, 08:23 but I read something in Liberty about Rome. 08:26 I said, you know, the Romans, on the Roman roads, 08:29 the legions marched out to the four corners 08:32 of the empire and were and disappeared. 08:35 Literally, a couple of the legions 08:37 were wiped out. 08:38 And then the barbarians followed the roads 08:39 back to Rome. 08:41 Wow, really? 08:42 Is that what happened? 08:43 Of course. 08:45 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. 08:46 And they won't tell you also 08:47 that the barbarians were Christian. 08:49 Yeah, oh, yeah. 08:50 But they were a different type of Christian on the Trinity. 08:52 Yeah. 08:54 But in some ways America has modernized the world. 08:56 There's no question that since World War II, 08:59 America has democratized and modernized, 09:03 and some of those same forces now 09:05 are leading to its stresses. 09:08 But it is a prophetic nation. 09:10 There's no question I think. 09:11 Well, good... 09:15 The American experiment, 09:16 even with all the faults and all its problems, 09:20 I know and we all know it too well. 09:23 We all know it too well, but it's, 09:27 these things just don't last forever. 09:31 And as I said, we'd say it for the first time in my life, 09:36 I can see this common consensus, 09:40 this common thing that makes us American, 09:45 its fraying right before our eyes. 09:48 And it's very scary to think what's gonna come out 09:53 at the other end and to a certain degree, 09:55 we know, and it's not good. 10:05 The great playwright Ingmar Bergman 10:08 once put together a production called the Seventh Seal, 10:12 very complicated story. 10:14 But it was all set in Europe at the time of the plagues, 10:17 and feature to not come back from the crusades 10:20 to encounter not just devastation, 10:22 sickness and death, 10:24 but religious fanaticism, persecution, 10:27 witchcraft trials of the rest. 10:29 It's worth remembering that the Black Death 10:33 that descended on Europe in several waves 10:36 and took out at least 30, 10:39 and arguably in a larger sense, 10:41 maybe 50% of the population brought about 10:44 many incredible social changes, not least of which, 10:47 the modernization that we inherit today. 10:51 I think it just is likely that COVID 10:54 small as it may be as a forerunner 10:56 of radical shifts to our world that clearly 11:00 will bring about a shift in religious attitudes, 11:03 perhaps persecution, 11:05 but perhaps also something like the reformation 11:08 and a revival of godliness. 11:11 For Liberty Insider, this is Lincoln Steed. |
Revised 2021-03-12