There is a common error that the ideals of liberty, individualism, limited or no government, and universal inalienable human rights are an invention of Western culture and history. This is not true. In fact, the very opposite is true. The oldest texts to recognize these truths date back almost 2,500 years ago and come from China. This article explores the ancient Chinese history of liberty through the writings of one of history’s greatest and most important philosophers – Lao Tzu, the Old Master.
Tag: welfare
How Mormonism Can Change The World
What would a society where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was one of the major influences on everything look like? How would it function? What would it mean for rich people? For poor people? For property owners? For homeless people? For politicians? For the public? What would it look like in terms of sex, marriage, and children? What would its economy look like? If we could carry out a generations long experiment with the effects of Mormonism on a nation, what would be the end results and how would they stack up against other places with such a heavy Latter-day Saint influence? Our critics would have us believe that it would be a dystopian nightmare. Are they right? What proof otherwise do we have? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot.
C.S. Lewis: “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”
Lewis’s warnings about the way that science and good intentions have a way of being perverted by the government to become justifications for tyranny and genocide -Hitler’s scientific basis for the Holocaust and Stalin’s scientific atheism being prime examples – such that horrendous evils can be done with a clear conscience and in the name of the greater good by those in power, the true nature of all governments as de facto oligarchies, the rising threat of technocracy to the liberty and humanity of mankind, the threat to privacy that exists from state authorities, the tendency of people to sell themselves into slavery for the promise of having our physical needs taken care of materially, and the willingness of those in power to promise us anything and everything in order to obtain such surrender and devotion from us, whether they can actually deliver or not are all observations and warnings that don’t seem simply prescient to the modern eye, but down right prophetic.