1776-2026: The Temple of Tyranny Has Two Doors

Being ruled is easy. Being free is hard.

It is easy to comply in advance with what those in power indicate you should do. It is much harder to take, maintain, and use your freedom to govern yourself politically and personally. Being a subject only requires that you bow down—gravity helps with that. Being a citizen means keeping your chin up and resisting the downward pull.

Do the harder thing.

To conform the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens to our republican forms of government, it is absolutely necessary that knowledge of every kind, should be disseminated through every part of the United States. —Benjamin Rush, Founding Father and signer of the Declaration of Independence in his essay “Address to the People of the United States”, Jan 1787

The Moral Necessity of Republican Virtue and Recognizing True Conspiracies

Americans had to learn how to do government without the monarchy and the Lords. Effectively, the American Revolution was the commoners of the colonies declaring independence from the hereditary imperial system. The British monarchy had become corrupted by the avarice of Parliament’s elite, alienating the colonies from the mother country. To replace this system and support a new one, Americans developed a philosophical “republicanism.” They argued that power is inherently corrupting, yet without an empowered government, you have anarchy—which eventually becomes an alternative power structure of chaos, crime, and exploitation.

Therefore, the Founding generation determined that a successful republic required citizens to possess virtue. Virtue is the ability to tell yourself “No” even when you could take advantage of others. It is the internal voice that says: I could do a bad thing, but I will not, because it is wrong, and power is not enough justification to just take what I want. Seeking the “public good” over your own “self-interest” equaled virtue in the early republic. American women were central to this. They developed the ideology of "Republican Motherhood," shaping a patriarchal society to unlearn the attitudes of monarchism. American mothers taught their sons to be egalitarian citizens rather than tyrants or subjects.

And of course, we can see why women without political power would want the social influence to shape the way men would use their power. They did the job so well that by 1812, Americans had nearly forgotten what life was like under the monarchy—except for the idea that kings were bad and un-American.

But in every time period, there are men who want to bring the rest of society under their control and reestablish exclusive rule by force and privilege. These are men who reject restraint and lack virtue.

To understand this, we need to be adults about the word conspiracy.

In recent years, this term has been weaponized to dismiss anyone who questions authority as “crazy.” That dismissal, like the spread of the QAnon deception, is a deliberate attempt to disarm you—like in Orwell’s 1984—because if you cannot name a thing, it is hard to oppose it. Conspire comes from the Latin conspirare, which literally means "to breathe together" like if we were closed up together in a smoke-filled room, huffing and puffing away, scheming. QAnon and other internet conspiracy theories have made us numb to the reality of conspiracies. A conspiracy is simply an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal or immoral act.

• Price-fixing is a conspiracy.

• Watergate was a conspiracy.

• The assassination of Julius Caesar was a conspiracy.

Conspiracy = A Plot.

Early Patriots understood this. They believed they had to remain vigilant against conspiracies to recreate tyranny. So, they built in layers of accountability and then gave the people the ability to amend the Constitution in case they needed more accountability and additional safeguards. This concern is why they added the Bill of Rights to the Constitution only a few years after ratification. It is why the Radical Republicans—responding to the “Confederate Secession Conspiracy” (the Civil War) and the conspiracy to enforce the Black Codes—passed the Reconstruction Amendments to enshrine rights in the supreme law of the land.

Creating unnecessary divisions among US citizens and setting them against one another is just another type of conspiracy that crops up from time to time in our history.

The Divine or Natural Origin of Rights—It Doesn’t Matter the way they want you to think it does.

Whether you are Christian, non-Christian, agnostic, or atheist, you do not have to fall for the trick that the concepts of “Divine Rights” and “Natural Rights” are in conflict. Or that you have to be political opponents.

Think about it, the Founding Fathers had different ideas about this topic, all the way from Thomas Jefferson and his secularism to Continental Army Major General Rev. John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg and his brother Rev. Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg, the first Speaker of the US House, who were both Lutheran ministers. Yet the founders agreed that what was meant by the divine/natural argument was that the government cannot just do whatever it wants to people. Exploiters want you fighting each other about the origins and not opposing their stripping you and others of human dignity.

Enlightenment rationalism and religious revivalism by arguing that human rights are not granted by kings but are "endowed by their Creator" and are "unalienable," shifted the moral and ethical authority over the social order from hereditary privilege to the individual and their right to pursue happiness according to their ability. This conclusion was not something that simply appeared in the 1770s but grew from the experiences of 1,000 years of English history.

When we lose the context, we lose the ability to identify when we are being robbed. Liberty is something you own, and, like any possession, you can misuse it and or have it stolen.

In our opposition to monarchy, we forgot that the temple of tyranny has two doors. We bolted one of them by proper restraints; but we left the other open, by neglecting to guard against the effects of our own ignorance and licentiousness. —Benjamin Rush

Con-artists and gangsters love “too much liberty” because they exploit your weaknesses—like addictions— to make you their servants. That is what Licentiousness is. It is the “I can so I will” mentality that rejects all restraints without asking why the restraints are there. It is the anti-virtue and anti-empathy mindset.

We see this in foreign policy. It is a mindset that thinks the US was “cheated” by the world order after 1945 because we were the only country with nukes, had 12 million troops, and an intact economy. To the licentious mind, Truman was a “loser” because he did not simply take the resources of the world by force.

To them the Marshall Plan was a waste because it created alternatives to raw American power. They hate the UN, NATO, IMF, and the World Bank because those institutions constrained American power. But those institutions were created by Americans who knew that the USA benefited when the world had rules. The WWII-era leadership realized that war was the usual way great powers fell. If the US was already the greatest power, why risk a major war?

Peace through the international rules-based order meant that there were fewer opportunities for another power to take advantage of a global crisis to displace the United States. Less risk, more reward sounds like Americans First.

The licentious mentality is too simple and barbaric to understand that peace and structure are better for the United States. What they call “America First” looks more like the personalities currently running the American government first, and the American people last.

We forgot our natural suspicion of power in the years of fear after 9/11. That era, more than the Cold War, broke the restraints on executive power and unleashed a “revenge and domination” sadism that had nothing to do with securing the Homeland. Media personalities drove fear of our Muslim neighbors, and beltway bandits lined up to rack up billions of dollars in contracts performing newly bloated national security work.

The government became more unconstrained while problems at home went unaddressed. Americans became more desperate and alienated from one another while kept in various states of anxiety. It is time to reject the post-9/11 mentality of paranoia and return to a healthier mindset of guarded suspicion of all leaders who seek to rule rather than to govern, and to extract rather than to build.

Americans who lost control over their lives have been induced and tricked into indulging cruel domination over others at home and abroad. They do not want you to debate or reason; they want you to dunk, own, and destroy. It is a cheap dopamine hit that does not build roads, hospitals, or a future. That is not self-governing virtue; that is a temporary thrill that only feels like command, but is just another way to con you out of your money and your country.

But we can reject being subject to vile desires for retribution and finally bolt the second door. Instead, we can look them in the eye and ask: “What are you doing about that $38 Trillion debt? We will not be distracted by the latest foreign mischief—answer the question.”

Photo by Sizel C. on Unsplash