My life-long conclusion from study of humanities and the history of civilizations is as follows: By the virtue of their higher intelligence, in the absence of education, ethics and example, which I call the Baic 3e’s, human beings can be more of a threat to themselves and to the world than the beasts can. Operating on instinct, beasts kill other animals or humans only for their fill; whereas uneducated and unethical humans have the potential of killing their own. In other words, we as humans are at the low end of moral order unless educated.
The American founders created an environment that stressed education, ethics and exemplary lives duet o their first-hand experience with tyranny and a strong will to eradicate it. They accomplished this by first doing their homework. Their genius was in their painstaking review of world history, extracting the truth as it applied to human nature, and to a great extent, predicting the future before writing the Constitution.
The first and foremost genius of America’s founders was their ability to devise a system of government with universal appeal to the masses. American nationalism unlike the old world nationalism had no geographic and racial boundaries. This was described by Abraham Lincoln as “An abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” This was the secret of American strength through diversity. America was the first large scale experiment for such an idea that formerly was only abstract and philosophical thoughts.
The second genius of the Founders was to safeguard the American public from the from which they had ran away-runaway hypocrisy and tyranny. To them the only antidote to hypocrisy, tyranny and exploitation was public education which was devised by no other person than the Father of Public Education, Thomas Jefferson to whom we owe so much to enlighten not only America but the whole world. I suspect that this great man must have shared my views that hypocrisy is the silent killer of democracy. Indeed, with the exception of natural calamities, runaway hypocrisy has derailed many powerful empires from the roller coaster of history regardless of their material wealth. Hypocrisy or dictatorship in disguise has always favored uneducated, unprincipled and mediocre for its own sustenance.
