Soon it will be the Fourth of July, American Independence Day. It is the first in the life of the Latter-day Liberator and it dawns dismally. Instead of a celebration of revolution, of liberty, we find the creeping Fascism of the past few decades has suddenly become a raging torrent as the officers of the State have begun to openly wage war directly upon American citizens and the actions of those in power threaten hundreds of millions of people with absolute poverty, starvation, devastation, and death. And the depressing reality is that this is the case not in spite of the beliefs and ideals of the American people, but because of them. As noted writer Alan Moore once put it:
We’ve had a string of embezzlers, frauds, liars and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact. But who elected them? It was you! You who appointed these people! You who gave them the power to make your decisions for you! …You have encouraged these malicious incompetents, who have made your working life a shambles. You have accepted without question their senseless orders. You have allowed them to fill your workspace with dangerous and unproven machines. All you had to say was “NO.” You have no spine. You have no pride.
This quote tells a stark truth. If you want understand why America is in the situation it is in you cannot blame Donald Trump or Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan or Franklin D. Roosevelt. You cannot blame any of these supposed great men. If you want to understand why racists, Fascists, Marxists, and thugs plunder American society with near reckless abandon, why cities burn, and how things simply got this bad all you have to do is look in the mirror and the answer will be staring back at you. You are to blame.
When things became tough instead of asking the hard questions and making the real changes necessary to create a free and prosperous society, you fell back on the age old delusion and imbibed that most deadly opium of the masses as the cure-all for your problems, the idol of government power. You just wanted people to save you, to fix your problems, and promise that they would deliver you to the Secular Promised Land, the Atheist’s Zion. You begged for Babylon and its Strong Men to save you and are now shocked at how that has only weakened you. But what other outcomes could there be? In the words of the Prophet Isaiah:
The earth mourns and withers; the world languishes and withers; the highest people of the earth languish. The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.
Or, in the voice of French philosopher Frédéric Bastiat:
The law perverted! The law—and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation—the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law become the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish!
Both of these voices testify to the same truth- that when the people allow the law to be perverted from its true purpose the only outcome that can result is corruption, violation, suffering, and oppression. Though you be promised Heaven, all that will be delivered is Hell. If we are to reverse this course, if we are to climb out of the pit and discard those twin relics of barbarism- Socialism and Fascism- we must then start our ascent by coming to an understanding of what the true law is and how it operates. Before that we must go even simpler, we must determine what is and what is not law.
To do that we turn to one of the greatest minds in European/American history, Algernon Sidney. Sidney’s book, Discourses Concerning Government, not only proposed ideals of liberty so radical that English King Charles II used them as a justification for beheading Sidney, but it was also one of the texts most influential in laying the intellectual foundation for the American Revolution. Thus by studying his ideas we not only return to the fertile bed of ideas that bore the fruit of the original Independence Day and which can rejuvenate our own coming Independence Day, but we can also draw forth fruit which give us the vigor to push forward to an even greater realization of the supernal truths of universal God-given liberty.
The following quotations are taken from chapters 10 and 11 of Sidney’s book. Discourses was written in response to Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha wherein Filmer defended the idea of the divine rights of kings to rule. Keep that latter fact in mind when it sounds like Sidney is responding to someone, such as when he says, “So, says our author…” or mentions “Filmer” in chapter 10, and it will help you understand the text better that he isn’t saying he believes that thing but is responding to a writer who did believe that thing. The writing is a bit archaic (it was originally published in 1680 after all) but the ideas make the study of what is written both intellectually and spiritually rewarding to all seekers of truth and friends of humanity.
What Does The Bible Command Regarding Obedience To Government?
The Apostle [Paul] farther explaining himself, and shewing who may be accounted a magistrate, and what the duty of such a one is, informs us when we should fear, and on what account. Rulers, says [Paul], are not a terror to good works, but to the evil: Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shah have praise of the same; for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil. He therefore is only the minister of God, who is not a terror to good works, but to evil; who executes wrath upon those that do evil, and is a praise to those that do well. And he who doth well, ought not to be afraid of the power, for he shall receive praise.
Now if our author were alive, tho’ he was a man of a hard forehead, I would ask him, whether in his conscience he believed, that Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and the rabble of succeeding monsters, were a praise to those who did well, and a terror to those who did ill; and not the contrary, a praise to the worst, and a terror to the best men of the world? Or for what reason Tacitus could say, that virtue brought men who lived under them to certain destruction, and recite so many examples of the brave and good, who were murder’d by them for being so, unless they had endeavour’d to extinguish all that was good, and to tear up virtue by the roots? Why did he call Domitian an enemy to virtue, if he was a terror only to those that did evil? If the world has hitherto been misled in these things, and given the name of virtue to vice, and of vice to virtue, then Germanicus, Valerius Asiaticus, Corbulo, Helvidius Priscus, Thrasea, Soranus and others that resembled them, who fell under the rage of those beasts, nay Paul himself and his disciples were evil doers; and Macro, Narcissus, Pallas, Vinius, Laco and Tigellinus were virtuous and good men.
If this be so, we are beholden to Filmer for admonishing mankind of the error in which they had so long continued. If not, those who persecuted and murder’d them for their virtues, were not a terror to such as did evil, and a praise to those who did well. The worst men had no need to fear them; but the best had, because they were the best. All princes therefore that have power are not to be esteemed equally the ministers of God. They that are so, must receive their dignity from a title that is not common to all, even from a just employment of their power to the encouragement of virtue, and to the discouragement of vice. He that pretends to the veneration and obedience due to the ministers of God, must by his actions manifest that he is so. And tho I am unwilling to advance a proposition that may sound harshly to tender ears, I am inclined to believe, that the same rule, which obliges us to yield obedience to the good magistrate who is the minister of God, and assures us that in obeying him we obey God, does equally oblige us not to obey those who make themselves the ministers of the Devil, lest in obeying them we obey the Devil, whose works they do.
…But as the Christian law exempts no man from the duty he owes to his father, master, or the magistrate, it does not make him more a slave than he was before, nor deprive him of any natural or civil right; and if we are obliged to pay tribute, honor, or any other thing where it is not due, it must be by some precept very different from that which commands us to give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s. If he define the magistrate to be the minister of God doing justice, and from thence draws the reasons he gives for rendering obedience to him, we are to inquire whose minister he is who overthrows it, and look for some other reason for rendering obedience to him than the words of the apostles.
If David, who was willing to lay down his life for the people, who hated iniquity, and would not suffer a liar to come into his presence, was the minister of God, I desire to know whose minister Caligula was who set up himself to be worshipped for a god, and would at once have destroyed all the people that he ought to have protected? Whose minister was Nero, who, besides the abominable impurities of his life, and hatred to all virtue, as contrary to his person and government, set fire to the great city? If it be true, that contrariorum contraria est ratio [the reason for contrary things is contrary], these questions are easily decided; and if the reasons of things are eternal, the same distinction grounded upon truth will be good forever.
Every magistrate, and every man by his works, will forever declare whose minister he is, in what spirit he lives, and consequently what obedience is due to him according to the precept of the Apostle. If any man ask what I mean by justice, I answer, that the law of the land, as far as it is sanctio recta, jubens honesta, prohibens contraria [a just decree, commanding what is honorable and forbidding the contrary], declares what it is. But there have been and are laws that are neither just nor commendable. There was a law in Rome, that no god should be worshipped without the consent of the senate: Upon which Tertullian says scoffingly, That God shall not be God unless he please man; and by virtue of this law the first Christians were exposed to all manner of cruelties; and some of the emperors (in other respects excellent men) most foully polluted themselves and their government with innocent blood. Antoninus Pius was taken in this snare; and Tertullian bitterly derides Trajan for glorying in his clemency, when he had commanded Pliny, who was proconsul in Asia, not to make any search for Christians, but only to punish them according to law when they should be brought before him.
No municipal law can be more firmly established by human authority, than that of the Inquisition in Spain, and other places: And those accursed tribunals, which have shed more Christian blood than all the pagans that ever were in the world, is commonly called The Holy Office. If a gentleman in Poland kill a peasant, he is by a law now in use free from punishment, if he lay a ducat upon the dead body. Evenus the Third, king of Scotland, caused a law to pass, by which the wives and daughters of noblemen were exposed to his lust, and those of the commons to the lust of the nobility. These, and an infinite number of others like to them, were not right sanctions, but such as have produced unspeakable mischiefs and calamities. They were not therefore laws: The name of justice is abusively attributed to them: Those that govern by them cannot be the ministers of God: and the Apostle commanding our obedience to the minister of God for our good, commands us not to be obedient to the minister of the Devil to our hurt; for we cannot serve two masters.
In the above quotation, Sidney attacks the basis many Christian, even today, will use to justify our supposed duty to obey all government figures. He starts off by pointing out that the rulers appointed by God according to the Apostle Paul are those rulers who do good and do no harm to those who in turn do good themselves and are only someone to bear feared by those who do evil. He then goes through a series of infamous Roman rulers to demonstrate how they were corrupt and in fact were a terror to those who did righteously and the benefactor of those who acted corruptly and evilly. He then concludes by arguing that these men did not serve God with their wicked rulership, by their rewarding evil and violating the natural or civil rights of the people; rather they were the servants of Satan because if you can tell a minister of God by the way he promotes and defends the good then you can tell a minister of the Devil by the way he promotes or defends evil. And as we can only serve God or the Devil, we not only aren’t under commandment to serve wicked leaders but it is our duty to disobey them as service to them is to only serve their master, Satan.
What Is True Law?
Having determined by scripture and by reason that the people only, if ever, owe allegiance to leaders whose laws are just and do not violate the civil and natural rights of the people, Sidney goes on to determine what the law is and what obedience we owe to the law.
SECTION 11
That which is not just, is not Law; and that which is not Law, ought not to be obeyed.
OUR author having for a long time pretended conscience, now pulls off his mask, and plainly tells us, that ’tis not on account of conscience, but for fear of punishment, or hopes of reward, that laws are to be obeyed. That familiar distinction of the Schoolmen, says he, whereby they subject kings to the directive, but not to the coactive power of the law, is a confession, that kings are not bound by the positive laws of any nation, since the compulsory power of laws is that which properly makes laws to be laws. Not troubling myself with this distinction of the Schoolmen, nor acknowledging any truth to be in it, or that they are competent judges of such matters, I say, that if it be true, our author’s conclusion is altogether false; for the directive power of the law, which is certain, and grounded upon the inherent good and rectitude that is in it, is that alone which has a power over the conscience, whereas the coercive is merely contingent; and the most just powers commanding the most just things, have so often fallen under the violence of the most unjust men, commanding the most execrable villainies, that if they were therefore to be obeyed, the consciences of men must be regulated by the success of a battle or conspiracy, than which nothing can be affirmed more impious and absurd.
By this rule David was not to be obeyed, when by the wickedness of his son he was driven from Jerusalem, and deprived of all coercive power; and the conscientious obedience that had been due to him was transferr’d to Absalom who sought his life. And in St. Paul’s time it was not from him who was guided only by the Spirit of God, and had no manner of coercive power, that Christians were to learn their duty, but from Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, who had that power well established by the mercenary legions. If this were so, the governments of the world might be justly called magna latrocinia [large robbers]; and men laying aside all considerations of reason or justice, ought only to follow those who can inflict the greatest punishments, or give the greatest rewards.
But since the reception of such opinions would be the extirpation [total extinction] of all that can be called good, we must look for another rule of our obedience, and shall find that to be the law, which being, as I said before, sanctio recta [justly sanctioned], must be founded upon that eternal principle of reason and truth, from whence the rule of justice which is sacred and pure ought to be deduced, and not from the depraved will of man, which fluctuating according to the different interests, humors and passions that at several times reign in several nations, one day abrogates what had been enacted the other. The sanction therefore that deserves the name of a law, which derives not its excellency from antiquity, or from the dignity of the legislators, but from an intrinsick equity and justice (Chapter 4), ought to be made in pursuance of that universal reason to which all nations at all times owe an equal veneration and obedience.
By this we may know whether he who has the power does justice or not: Whether he be the minister of God to our good, a protector of good, and a terror to ill men; or the minister of the Devil to our hurt, by encouraging all manner of evil, and endeavouring by vice and corruption to make the people worse, that they may be miserable, and miserable that they may be worse. I dare not say I shall never fear such a man if he be armed with power: But I am sure I shall never esteem him to be the minister of God, and shall think I do ill if I fear him. If he has therefore a coercive power over me, ’tis through my weakness; for he that will suffer himself to be compell’d, knows not how to die. (line 426)
If therefore he who does not follow the directive power of the law, be not the minister of God, he is not a king, at least not such a king as the Apostle commands us to obey: And if that sanction which is not just be not a law, and can have no obligation upon us, by what power soever it be established, it may well fall out, that the magistrate who will not follow the directive power of the law, may fall under the coercive, and then the fear is turned upon him, with this aggravation, that it is not only actual, but just. This was the case of Nero; the coercive power was no longer in him, but against him. He that was forced to fly and to hide himself, that was abandoned by all men, and condemned to die according to ancient custom [“stripped, fastened by the neck in a fork, and then beaten to death with rods”] did, as I suppose, fear, and was no way to be feared.
Sidney starts off by rejecting the idea that it is the power of the politicians to enforce their rule that justifies their rule. He says that what gives a law its power is its justness. If it is not just then it is not a law but rather the depraved order of depraved men. Sidney then goes on to justify the right of the people to defy the unjust orders of those in power. If those in power give orders that protect or compel wickedness, if they violate the rights of the people as he talks about in Section 10, then they are the ministers of the Devil and we should not obey them, even if we are faced with severe punishment, including death. Here Sidney sounds the call that will only be echoed by Thomas Paine a century later, and calls for liberty or death.
In doing so Sidney also attacks the very power of the State itself. The State is defined by its ability to use violence to compel obedience from the public. If it has no authority to compel obedience based on the supposed legitimacy of its edicts, if instead the justness of the law itself is what gives it force to be obeyed or denies it any authority that the people should recognize, then the State itself has no authority or power at all. The government is, at best, a secretarial position whose role is simply to keep track of the paper work. It has no power, authority, or purpose on its own. Where it facilitates the natural law it should be followed, where its edicts contravene the natural law they should be ignored. We can see this is Sidney’s conclusion in the final quoted paragraph where he argues that those in political power who do not follow the true law -by which he means establish justice in protecting the civil and natural rights of the people- are not ministers placed in power by God and the people are justified in turn in rising up and rebelling against them and destroying their rule.
A New Independence Day
In a nation afflicted with the disease of Statism, with the masses proclaiming their loyalty to an oppressive, violent, government whose every action is a violation of the rights of the people, one which many recognize as being alternatively racist, Fascist, Socialist, sexist, and bigoted, Sidney’s lessons are as a drink of cool water to one dying of thirst in the Sahara. It matters not whether you be a Leftist or Rightest, Progressive or Conservative, religious or atheist, etc. these profound truths should bring you joy. Nothing in God’s decrees or Nature’s law binds us to obey the liars, thieves, adulterers, warmongers, authoritarians, and wicked leaders that occupy any political office in the land. The exact opposite is true. God’s decree and Nature’s law directs us down another path. We should be rebelling against the violations of life, liberty, person, and property we are subjected to every day by those in power and their lackeys.
In doing so we would not be resisting some just officer using legitimate authority. No person who proscribes or enforces unjust laws has any authority worthy of recognition and laws which are not just -which violate the life, liberty, person, or property of anyone instead of protecting them- are not laws at all. We can do this more powerfully and more successfully without violence, but we still must take direct action and refuse to comply. In doing so we will renew the old celebration from the worn, hollow, empty thing it has been for a long time now; in doing so we will transform it, give it a new birth, and more fully live its meaning, by not just declaring but by demanding and actively living our liberties to the benefit and joy of all people. It will mean something again because for the first time in a long time it will be real again.