From THE LOST HORIZONS NEWS:
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
-Lord Acton
In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenburg and sparked the Protestant revolution. The Christian world– indeed, the Western world and everywhere else influenced by the Western world– has never been the same since. And yet the key concept that lay at the heart of that revolution was nothing more than: “We can read, too.”
Prior to Luther’s revolutionary act, the Roman Catholic Church had, over centuries, lost its spiritual moorings to the point of assuming a self-serving “gatekeeper of knowledge” role indistinguishable from that of any shaman graced with a naive tribe of hapless victims. Correspondingly, most of the rest of the population had descended to the spiritual and secular status of serfs– pacified “human resources” conditioned to doing as instructed by the priesthood because (as they allowed themselves to be told) scripture said that was how things were to be.
All that was necessary to lock this state of affairs into place and keep it there for, oh, 1,200 years or so was the Church having successfully claimed to itself alone the authority to read scripture and declare its meaning. This having once been accomplished (partly by argument that the proposition was itself scripturally-based and then more practically by a carefully maintained lack of general access to the scriptures themselves and the education necessary to read them), the scriptures were unsurprisingly revealed to be “living scriptures”, undergoing a steady “evolution” which inexorably expanded the power and wealth of the Church, and subordinated everyone else.
Martin Luther, himself a Catholic priest (and thus equipped with the access and education necessary to read the scripture), began the process of undoing this centuries-old, inevitably-corrupting power structure by first recognizing and declaring the doctrinal argument for the exclusivity of priestly authority to be unsound. Then, far more significantly, Luther translated the scripture from Latin into the vernacular, and printed and distributed copies far and wide.
The masses of the people, once able and encouraged to read for themselves the words upon which the Church’s claims of authority were based, dared to disagree. In a great, sustained convulsion, those with the brains and the courage to do so rose to assert and reclaim their mastery of their own spiritual and secular lives. For the first time in centuries, the Church’s claims in regard to scriptural words and meaning were answered by a firm, “Sorry, no. We, too, can read, and that’s not what it says!“ The secular power of the Roman Catholic Church was broken, and both it, and the world, were transformed– very much for the better in each case.
In America today, we face the threat of another effort to gather power into the hands of a priesthood and reduce the rest of us to serfdom. Just as was done by the Roman Catholic Church when drifting into its period of corruption, a would-be ruling class seeks to monopolize the authority to declare the meaning of the words by which other exercises of power are authorized.
Here and now, of course, that effort focuses on the meaning of our written laws. The current American political elite, having been allowed to do so for several generations now without meaningful opposition, has already traveled far down the road to utter, arrogant disregard of those laws– chiefly through the diligent work of the federal judiciary. That dedicated army of carefully-chosen sappers, with increasing frequency and ever-more arrogant flagrancy, ascribes meaning to our laws in plain defiance of their actual words and purposes, and dares the rest of us to disagree. Unsurprisingly, these “creative” readings of our fundamental law and the statutes which draw their authority from that fundamental law inexorably expand the power and wealth of the State, and subordinate everyone else.
Most prominently in recent years have been a series of federal court rulings concerning habeas corpus, speech rights, search and seizure authority, and an endless series of allegedly “interstate commerce clause”-related cases. These indefensible and lawless rulings follow many more from prior decades, and more still are yet to come. We’re all awaiting an upcoming unconstitutional ruling concerning the Second Amendment; and the increasing desperation of the federal and state governments to overcome the effects of CtC’s revelations about the “income” tax is likely to spawn its own brood of ill-favored judicial progeny. (The feeble couple of efforts in that latter regard so far have been decidedly circumspect, though. Such efforts have sought to mischaracterize CtC itself, rather than the relevant law, since the book has laid out the reality of that law too clearly for its direct misconstruction.)
Still, unlike Luther, who rose in the face of a millennium of precedent, and in a culture in which the idea of challenging the established power-structure was utterly alien, the corruption against which we must stand is itself alien to our cultural tradition, and has only acquired its sway within living memory. Our business of standing up and looking after our interests as free, self-governing men and women is as nothing compared to what was required of those who have gone before us.
Nor is what we are called upon to do complex. Indeed, the task we face requires nothing more than modest study, a little courage, and an abiding regard for our own dignity.
After all, we, too, can read.
NOTE: This editorial is not to be taken as critical or disparaging of the Catholic Church today– a church in which I myself was raised and for which I have great respect, especially in recent years. Nor is it intended as an endorsement of any other church or religious perspective. The history discussed here is presented not for its own sake, but merely as a useful model of how power, when allowed to become centralized, is bad for all concerned, and especially so when that power concentration involves control over the tools of knowledge and dissent.
