The internal accountability of individuals to the Nation is a given fact of the Westphalian world in which Nation States are the Prime Movers of interactions between and amongst mankind's diverse populations. This solution to actually have an accountable Nation State was hammered out via long religious wars in which a central religious Power sought Dominion over all Earthly States that adhered to its type of religion. That homogeneous conception failed, however, as the religion, itself, was unable to readily adapt to a changing world. Indeed, the conception of change, as a thing in and of itself, was something that this religion would only let people have once it had been thoroughly processed by the Seat of Power so as to not conflict in any way, shape or form with the religion. Here the stability of continuity of religion was seen over and above such gross concepts as 'human freedom' or 'human liberty'. While these concepts were put forward in the area of religion, so that any could convert TO it, the rest of thought was to be put under harsh stricture so as to keep the religion itself pure. This would prevent new ways of looking at the world from appearing without, first, having gone through the lens of religion and adapted to it.
What brought this down, as a conception, and would change all of what would follow was a tradecraft that revolutionized the world of thought: printing via movable type. This was something that in the form of block-cut printing, or carving out blocks of wood and then inking the raised surface and applying a transfer media, was not unknown. Indeed there were some few printers of that sort around for ages. Because lengthy tracts could not be readily carved out of wood for this printing, it was limited mainly for black and white woodcut art of a mass form. That changed when the conception of making letters and spaces that would take up identical sizes, or proportionate sizes to each other, appeared. This was applied to the simple knowledge of metallic casting which had also been around for some time, starting out at the 'lost wax' technique and moving up to soft metal within hard metal casting. Together the simple conception of repetition of letters made from the same mold and each mold of the proper sizing created a new industry of printing which had not been conceived of by any high or noble thinker. The printer was now, with this single change, able to become a 'typesetter' and put together much longer, printed script works that would take years to hand copy, but mere days to transcribe over from script to movable type. And a new economic function was ALSO born of this: as more copies are made, the original labor cost of setting the type and proof-reading it were now absorbed across all the copies of a work that were made. At first this did not make new printed material of long length 'cheap' but it did bring the price down to the realm of limited personal wealth and individual libraries. Where, before this, libraries were things run by States and Cities, now an individual could endow a library or even, as things went on, OWN a library. And because the printing press, itself, was something that any wine making region of the world could easily assemble, and wine pressing only took a few weeks of the year, the idea of using pressmen on a permanent basis also invented a new category of labor.
One innovation, applied to known technologies suddenly revolutionizes economies, thought, and, ultimately, the world itself. The ramifications of these changes are still felt and fought throughout the world today, because it is liberating to give individuals information and then letting them make an honest and reasoned judgment upon it. The Birth of the Modern Nation State rests solely on this innovation. Without it, the promulgation and inculcation of ideas and their spread and interplay would not have happened with anything like the rapidity seen during the Renaissance, and conceptions that would be anathema to the religion of that era would never have seen the light of day, save via the burning stake. Higher idealism for mankind and individuality rests upon this and honors and acknowledges this via the pathways taken to ensure that such ideals could not be rooted out from society. The meeting of such groups with craftsman, who were now becoming of moderate means and no longer poor, started a blend of revolutionary individualism with the arrival of that new group known as: the middle class. No longer was there a hard and fast division between the upper class wealthy aristocracy and the mere serf or laborer.
Middlemen merchants had always been around in the world, but their wealth from trade was always seen as tainting such individuals so as to make them not worthy of the aristocracy, save for the very, very few. The Middle Class would come to engender a different attitude on life and outlook which would drift from aspirations to aristocracy and towards fulfillment of individual's lives. This part of the foundation of the Modern Nation State is that of abundance of wealth from this concept known as: working for it and earning it. While the good and charitable works done for religion and mankind were still given high honor, that was an outgrowth of 'extra wealth', not a mandatory payment extorted by the tax man. Freedom that was given to income brought with it responsibility beyond oneself and one's family via the active use of wealth for the betterment of others. Many did invest wealth in new enterprises, seeing that employing one's fellow man was giving a 'hand up' to a better life through gainful employment. Acting in a charitable fashion, however, was still a reciprocity to society for ones place in it. When Dickens wrote of Scrooge, it was not that he was wealthy that was being attacked. It was his lack of charity and understanding that to lead a fulfilling life one must give back to society and embrace the larger concept of a 'societal good'. Looking out for oneself is absolutely vital and necessary, of that there is no doubt. Looking after the society that allows one to have the freedom of opportunity that one has gainfully used is just a high a responsibility so that not only can oneself continue to attain such means, but so that the entire society can reach out further and deeper to uplift the entire Nation. Charity builds the Nation so that it may be strengthened in those ways that individuals see fit to do so. No Government may ever lift that burden from a Free People as it is their debt to the society that gives them freedom of opportunity that we know as Liberty.
One of the great wonders of the Modern Age is that so many can point to the fine ideals of Liberty and so few point to the necessary physical underpinnings of it. Having fine and noble thoughts on the 'brotherhood of mankind' is all well and good, but having it jotted down on a scroll or a hand-illuminated book that sits in a library where few will ever touch it, or having all known copies sequestered by a religious institution does not, in reality, have much impact upon things. In point of fact without a way to quickly disseminate ideas and make enough copies to ensure that they will not be squelched is a necessary part of Liberty and Freedom. Having the ideas without the means to preserve and promulgate them does no good whatsoever, and usually leads to a shortened life for the individual doing such espousing. What is rarely looked at is the opposite case in which you have printing, but no great thinkers that have postulated upon Liberty and Freedom.
The test case for this is currently going on in China, in which the all digital revolution is slowly undermining the entire foundational structure of Authoritarian control there. What every modern individual in China who considers themselves to be modern has is a cell phone. And in this era of cheap digital integration it is most likely a picture phone. The lovely thing about these phones is that they have two main methods for moving data around via the cell phone networks. The first is the high throughput communications to move pictures and voice communications, which are the well known uses of the modern cell phone. But there is a slower, less data intensive capability known as Simple Messaging System. Here text is a low-bandwidth affair as it takes up little data space, has known error correction capabilities via the data stream and it is readily transmitted in very short periods of time via the wireless communication system. And SMS messages can be easily passed on to callers in one's personal directory, thus enabling a rapid dissemination of information amongst individuals. Teenagers were the first to pick up on this in the late 1990's, particularly in the Far East and Europe, and the ability to do this spread deeply into Nations that had unreliable land line systems for wired communication. Totalitarian Nations, looking to do things a bit on the cheap, decided to use this technology and save the time and effort of laying down copper or fiber optic cables.
In post-war Iraq the landlines telecom system still lags behind modern standards for availability, but nearly everyone has a cellphone. This is communications for the People. And as China learned, like the religious institutions of ages past, once the People get this power of communication, the very first thing they do is start to undermine the authority of the system itself. Chinese authorities were already having problems with encroaching information from the West via the Internet, and has worked hard to try and stem this tide of information. They still pick up those putting forth new ideas of Liberty and Freedom, but have found that getting the individual and stopping the idea are two totally different things. For when the Chinese authorities take in the computer of such individuals, they find that the files have already been sent to many other individuals. Some of those individuals run web sites and they are doing a fun thing known as: database replication off-site. As the printing press and copies of books spread widely, so is the ability to keep a 'hot spare' site up and running. Even worse for the Chinese authorities is that computers, even in China, are cheap. Trying to take down networks of individuals who have multiple, anonymous contacts spread throughout the Nation is difficult. What they never, ever thought of was that the SMS capability would prove even harder to stop. When one Chinese official in a Province was going to give a bad report about the situation there, he diligently did so. His superiors did not want the bad news to be spread and told him not to tell anyone of this news. He smiled and let them know it was too late to do so, as he had uploaded it to his cell phone and sent it out through his calling list and then erased it. The scandal itself was minor, as these things go, but the Chinese authorities had to fess up that things were not so rosy.. because tens of thousands had gotten the message within hours of its being sent out. Hitting the 'message forward' button and 'send to all' means that no idea can be stopped as every cell phone of every friend acts as the 'hot spare' in China. And as SMS crosses back into the wired networks, messages promulgate asymmetrically throughout the world.
Saudi Arabia loved the cell phone, until the picture phone showed up and dating hotlines were soon spreading pictures and nude images across the cell phone network. Actually, from what has been heard from the Middle East, everyone who has a cell phone most likely has some porn, a number of quite rude jokes, a huge set of information readily available and even more once they swap memory cards. This is the beginning of the all-digital, all-the-time era for mankind. And the only way to stop this is to end the technology and its use, thus throwing mankind back into the Dark Ages once more. No previous conception of mankind has prepared it for this upcoming era, which is one in which the individual will be given the fullest power and capability to express themselves across all boundaries of Nationality, Religion and Culture. What humanity currently does not have is an adaptable cultural outlook to allow this to take place without either a reversion to Authoritarianism or a decay into an Anarchic state of being. Walking that middle-path between tyranny and anarchy is something that requires more than just Liberty and Freedom: adaptable social structures. In this realm mankind has not done so well, as the ability of culture to change to technological influences has been slow, at best, and reactionary at worse. The pathway for such change started when the last speciation event diverged the paths of the two segments of Homo Sapiens into Neanderthals and Cro-magnon. A look at the stone tool suites of both races indicate that at the start of both, they shared a high degree of similarity in stone tool making, shaping and use. A bare double handful of stone tool types were seen and both served as a starting point for tool use in each of those groups. Neanderthals, up until the very last, were using a stone tool making and crafting suite of skills little changed for their duration of existence. Sapiens, however, soon started crafting new tools, started using stone flakes for tools and, in general, let nothing go to waste as better tools were formed. By the end of the simultaneity of this side-by-side existence, Sapiens was using hundreds, if not thousands of different tool types.
This led to the ability to adapt nature to needs, rather than the Neanderthals needs to nature, and would prove to be a vital turning point to actually start inculcating change and advancing culture. Of course change was something happening on the order of tens of generations, so adapting to it was little problem. The advent of depicting ideas in symbols that were painted or scribed was another major change, that allowed for long term record-keeping and the start of cultural memory. Some few verbal stories in the Australian Aboriginal histories and the faintest echoes from the Norse culture both point to the very beginnings of that time. With writing would come the need for further abstraction and actually needing to count things. That, secondary, need was pushed by a physical labor that allowed an untold change for all of mankind: ploughing fields. These two combined to create a new cultural milieu that created the foundations for the local City-State via recorded governance and laws. The earliest of Empires sought to extend the influence of these concepts and gather more power to themselves as they agglomerated other Peoples into this new ruling paradigm. These first Hydraulic Empires, centered on water source utilization and control would prove to be self-limiting as people with different backgrounds from those ruling would pick up the necessary new tools from the expanding culture, and then seek to undermine it with those very same tools. Cultural conflict intensified the change cycle, although it was still not outpacing society in the realm of governance and religion.
In particular the mass media of the day, that being the carved glyphs on State built monuments, served as ready propaganda for all to see. This stranglehold upon the written text, and thus upon the movement of cultures, did not let up until the printing press. Advances in other areas were sequestered into knowledge zones kept by religious sects and tradecraft guilds, both of which had need to reduce the amount of information put outside of their areas, so as to ensure their supremacy of oversight upon them. With that breaking up came the fastest series of advances in the shortest period ever witnessed by mankind. While the doubling of information may have been going since the invention of the written word, the geometric progress in shorter time scales seen today are undreamed of by earlier human cultures. What this gave rise to was the formulation of Nation that was *not* under religious oversight nor control. That hard divorcing of the 'revealed truth' against the 'measured facts' required that two major realms of human life be split apart: religion and government.
In Europe this started in the 17th century and the Peace of Westphalia, thus putting centuries of religious based bloodshed behind as a new era of Nation based bloodshed began. Competition amongst Nations soon led to the need for ways to make actual human labor more productive, so that a Nation could get a competitive advantage in such production. In the 19th century the new, Industrial Empires expanded to the point of meeting the last of the Hydraulic Empires in China, and the harsh difference in philosophy of governing, population management and trade had stark outcomes upon China. Throughout all of this the pace of change increases as the means of communications amongst mass populations becomes less expensive. That is a basic paradigm shift for humanity, from hording knowledge to disseminating it and the realization that the greater the interaction of knowledge the greater the result. Not, of necessity, benefits, because progress has come to have its darker side in that society no longer keeps pace with the rate of the rate of change: the rate of change itself is increasing over time.
This brings back the hearkening of what one does to cope with this and adjust to it. One can ignore change, as China did, and pay a higher price in blood, tyranny and now a liquidification of society as it seeps out through the cracks in the Great Firewall of China. By stepping into affluence and instant, cheap communications, the Authoritarian structure of the Government is finding itself in the same bind as Western religious institutions found themselves in the 17th century: adapt or be broken. Western religion survived because of the slow pace of change in that era, while a regime attempting to control thoughts and information, and thusly lives, finds itself hard pressed to do so and little time to adapt. The Western ideal became typified in the United States in which personal Liberty and Freedom were given reign, and religion relegated to the States. Thus the Union had no religion, no matter what the make-up of its States were. With changing technology and demographics, most of the States changed to become more secular in governing and repealed such things as 'Blue Laws' that attempted to enforce religious belief upon the activities of the population at large. Attempting to make individuals lead moral lives through the process of law is impossible if there is not absolute majoritarian adherence to that religion to near unanimity. Further, technology and the needs of an advancing society no longer permit the niceties of a day of pure rest as perishable goods would, indeed, start to perish without their getting to market for sale. Society adapted to this and the laws fell by the wayside as impractical for the modern era. It is this adaptation and adjustment from the bottom-up, from Individuals to the Nation that makes Western democracies capable of shifting with the times.
What has happened, in this secularizing of the Nation, is that the deep religious nature of the United States has become masked by a photogenic mask put forward by the entertainment industry. Amongst Western Nations the US still has the highest rate of church attendance for believers and the rate of charitable giving far outstrips the Government in all but a few areas. The deep disconnect between the media industry and the majority of the population puts an internal stress upon the United States unlike any other Nation: two distinct sides of the US are present, although only one gets a forthright glare upon the world, which is that most suited to the limelight. Even with some of parts of the older line religious sects moving into the televised and now digital realms, the feeling of disconnect is still present between what the US distinctly *is* and how it is seen to be. Even those that do not partake of religion can be troubled by this, and by the vehement anti-religious attitude put forth by the few upon the many. The overt, anti-religious nature of Mass Media is attempting to enforce a viewpoint against religion, particularly traditional sorts, while opening up a broad 'spectrum' of other views that may only be as deep as a single proponent. While there is some equality of footing in the 'marketplace of ideas' the inequality of making a sliver or singular minoritarian viewpoint exactly equal to a majoritarian one is anti-democratic in its nature and outlook.
This is not to say that individuals or minoritarian views are to be stifled. Let each have their say, but then let an equal weighting go to the depth of the believers. For the few, paltry hours put out by sectarian religious channels and those giving sermons or speeches on the weekly holy days, the rest of the mass media outweighs that by thousands or tens of thousands to one. And the majority of that media does have bias against religion, against faith and pushes agnosticism or atheism as an 'enlightened' message to the masses. Religious believers had to get a thick skin and learn to take much of the earlier good-natured sets of jokes and stereotypes of their various sects, that is pretty much par for the course. What has happened in recent years is the attack upon personal belief and faith itself, by demeaning individuals who have same and then attempting to belittle the majoritarian belief structure with quite recent and outre new beliefs. Part of that is intentional, and comes from Marxist ideology put forth from the previous generation of scholars. By pushing an anti-religious message, the attempt to divorce religion from society, isolate it and cause it to be an effective anchor for individuals is an outright attempt to put forth ONLY a secular society with no place for belief or worship of something greater than the individual. Unless, of course, it is worship to the State itself.
Another part of this comes, quixotically, from the fact that the written word of religion has locked it in place. That same printing press which freed new ideas to move forward through Peoples did the exact opposite to religions: their texts became locked for good and all at one state of being. Some of this was already being done for those religions that followed the Word, and their texts have only seen some adjustment over the ages, with some funneling due to disasters and editing causing texts to be merged and cross-shifted. The benefits of locking such texts are obvious: they give a uniformity of understanding, history of society and commonality of belief. The downsides are less well understood, but also manifest: religious strictures becoming inapplicable due to changing technical capability, rigidity of thought and belief, and the distancing of the Divine, over time, to an era that the modern reader has less and less identification with. Attempting to re-interpret texts and underlying belief structures for new problems that could not even be thought of when the original texts were created is a vexing one as it is a direct attempt to put words into the mouth of the Divine. And some large amount of the texts speak to different visions and different ways of looking at things that a justification for anything can be read into them. The need to bring the Divine and Spiritual into the present is manifest by these new religions.
A bemusing side note about a game I heard about some decades ago, although the name of it escapes me. There were 6 different alien groups and they were each defined by race, capabilities, outlook and religion. Basically, each race or species has one religion... until you get to humans. There the writer of the text put forth: 'Humans are a very strange race in that instead of having one religion for their species, they, apparently, make up a new one every day. Each of these new religions gains some number of adherents that fervently believe in it. Often a number of adherents will shift day to day on what they believe in.' That is an attempt to cope with the modern world, by trying to plunk down a belief structure that is either a deep mutation of a previous religion, a revival of a religion out of favor, or, as has been seen numerous times, a brand new religion with little connection to much else in the world. Cults of personality crop up as anyone that claims superior moral guidance and direction may just be that 'beacon of hope' to understanding an ever changing, complex world. The result is a small group or cult that deeply reflects the central personality and the fissures of an individual become manifest amongst the followers. And if the individual lasts long enough, is persuasive enough and gains enough followers, then those divisions become inculcated into the new belief system and will manifest itself from thereon out.
The wisdom of having a secular State with joining the non-religious commonality of a People together avoids those rifts and divisions, which were the cause of so much in the way of destruction in previous eras. This problem has arisen once more, in an old religion that became reflective of the central figure and the divisive problems of having multiple records of his sayings then becoming unreconcilable due to cultural application by different Peoples. Within religions there are multiplicity of outlooks that do support commonality of theme, but those difference are seen, within those communities, as worse than those of the unbelievers: no one sins as much so much as one who agrees on the majority of things, but disagrees on one or two resultant viewpoints. Within a secular state, those differences must needs be put aside to have a common society, so they become relegated to those things held in the personal and understood to reflect the frailty of man's understanding of the Divine rather than seeing the Divine, itself, as totally different things that need be fought over. These two major themes in World Affairs are driving the United States to a central cross-roads of Liberty, Freedom and Individuality.
Internally the divisions are those between a minority viewpoint that gets full and deep expression and feels itself safe to actually deride and demean the culture of the Nation. That goes against the fundamental compact between We the People to set aside such differences and have common culture that is an agreement amongst the People and not dictated by any segment or portion of the population. Mass media, while attempting to find a 'lowest common denominator' soon stressed THAT and academia picked up on that as the actual culture of the Nation.
Externally there is a movement to bring back Empire and the Totalitarian State on a large scale. This has two parts to it, also. One portion of this is the secular outgrowth of Western cultural perspective of lowest common denominator viewpoint coupled with Marxist views of the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'. To have that ruling dictum, however, religion needs to be ridiculed and divorced from culture, which is why so many attacks upon religion use a lowest common denominator cultural approach to do so. Hit at the perceived basics and one hits at what should be the center of that religious outlook. What this does not recognize is that the commonality of the compact amongst the People of the United States is an agreement amongst ALL religions to have a common culture. Strike at religious belief, and one strikes at the entirety of that peaceful compact. This attempt is one to cause an outright divide amongst the People so that affiliation to common culture and commonality amongst religions is replaced by less associative group distinctions or class distinctions. This is further emboldened by the fact that academia supports this wrong-headed view and gives intellectual cover to those looking to divide the People so as to bring down society and reform it into something different that is anti-democratic. The entire concept is encapsulated as Transnational Progressivism, both in its wholly interior varieties and the unity of those varieties with a larger, Western movement against the ideals of Individualism and Freedom.
The other exterior attack is being promulgated by far off-shoots of Islam. What cannot be done with Islam, as it is currently constructed, is to find any centrality of belief and wisdom, beyond the multiplicity of reports on the Prophets words and ideas that were somewhat rectified in the Koran. This attempt, like that at creating the Holy Bible, required that some written texts were seen as valid over other written texts and accounts of the same or similar happenings. Unlike the Holy Bible and structured religion around it, the Koran had to reflect a much more diverse viewpoint of multiple tribes and how they each heard the words of the Prophet. Further, the entire affair is harder to reconcile as the Prophet, himself, changed viewpoints as he grew older and wiser in outlook. These two divisive factors were not ones that were given over to a council or set of wisemen to reconcile during the life of the Prophet. And as the forethought of how to actually continue the religion as a coherent belief structure was never put forward, the divisions amongst interpretations after the death of the Prophet were almost instantaneous.
Unlike Christianity, there was and is not coherent central force to Islam. The variety of Church types after the death of Christ grew up out of a commonality of interaction between groups and the letters they sent each other. Consolidation of the fundamentals of Christianity still coalesced to multiple religious doctrinal sets, but the need for a common wisdom and understanding between these Churches was seen as a central need early on. The benefits, as discussed, were there as well as drawbacks, but this commonality gave a chance for a 'live and let live' atmosphere to grow up and that atmosphere would then need to be found anew when the Protestant sects broke from the commonality of the Roman Catholic Church.
By only having the somewhat central agreement upon the words in the Koran, Islam did not come together to heal differences and form a greater understanding of itself as did the Christian sects. Without a centralized force, the religion which had started decentralized remained so and continues to do so. And giving offense by impinging upon the beliefs of others in Islam is seen as something not done.... unless it is directed at killing them. And even then, the lack of understanding of Individual Rights and Liberty keep such views sequestered so as to not bring the full factional differences of Islam to the foreground and show a religion divided amongst itself. Thus the extreme factional off-shoots of the main thematic areas of Islam are putting forth a belief in two things that must happen.
First and foremost is that Islam be the Only Religion of mankind. Do mind you that this 'universal doctrine' is present in Christianity, but there the hard work at making that the sole realm of the Individual and respecting the decisions of that Individual are paramount. One agrees to enter into that belief and move towards understanding the Divine via that route. Under the extremist factions of Islam this is removed and simple submission to religion is all that is necessary of the Individual. The Individual, as these factions view Individuality, must submit to the Divine. There is no illegitimate submission in that realm of thought.
Secondly, a Religious Empire, called Caliphate, must be established so as to put one Religious rule over mankind. In this the dividing line on exactly how the upper echelon of Ruling Islam is to proceed is at odds between these factions. A Wahabbist view is that of a Caliph ruling over the secular and religious. The more Khomeinist Shia view is to have a council of religious elders rule over the Spiritual and set secular doctrine and have the Caliph as a figurehead for such doctrine. The entire Totalitarian structure to get to either of those is exactly the same beneath that highest area of rule.
As these factions within sects within two of the main sections of Islam put forth such things, they also demonstrate their view of the value of human life: there isn't any beyond submission to the Divine. This is a harsh spasm of religion against modern culture in an attempt to return to a Golden Age that never did exist. Further it is both fantastical in outlook, that the Divine will step in to uphold the righteous, and it is fatalistic in that one's life only has meaning in submission. The works of man, then, are seen as unworthy things and somewhat degenerate as they do not revolve around the Divine. Secular common culture is abhorrent to these factions, as it is a negation of the place of the Divine over all things, including economies and politics. By stressing the violence that these factions put forward, they are using intimidation and coercion upon the direct local Peoples that they go against and directing events so as to further demoralize Western secular culture.
In that last doing, they are aided and abetted by those portions of the Mass Media that also wish to demoralize and fragment Western culture. This, then, is a coalescence of Barbarity and Authoritarian viewpoints handed to the culture of the People as a whole in which the aim is to corrode and destroy that cultural cohesion. There are further segments, within Western thought, that propagate an ideal that economic freedom will gain other freedoms. They do miss the point that in order to properly use economic freedoms Individuals must have cultural openness *first* so that the fullest expression of the Individual may take place unhindered. To do otherwise is to relegate human Liberty and Freedom to economic good to be traded away in the hopes that it might be allowed to flourish. Within China that is a direct attack upon the social structure that is now going on in which centrality of State Authority, which has existed across all of Chinese time and culture, is being removed and NO structure is given as an alternative. The mass removal of these underpinnings are a threat not only to the Communist Party, but to the continuation of society as a whole in China. These last, desperate grabs to hold on to the ancient power concepts of the Bureaucrat as Continuity Figure under a ruling Authority is being liquidated by economic capability. Attempts at Liberty and Free Expression on a mass scale do arise, but in their inability to formulate what those *mean* to Chinese culture they have trouble gaining foothold and are repressed by the Government.
And Islam, as a whole and with all of the Nations that have large sections of believers, is undergoing this exact same decohesion of culture. The radical factions want to put an extremely Authoritarian structure down so that this can be fought. By attempting to put a rigid belief and social structure into place, these extremists realize that the entirety of Islam, itself, is decohering because it has no Central Axis. Starting out as a distributed religion it will further be distributed and decohere until it is a diffuse belief system with thousands of separate off-shoots, each claiming validity of insight and belief structure. By being unable to formulate a secular response, as the Protestant Christian Nations did, the only other option on the limited menu is that of Empire. Instead of fostering Individual Liberty and Freedom, economic freedom and inexpensive goods have armed these factions with cheap and deadly weapons with which they will use those to enforce their beliefs upon World.
Or die trying.
To remedy that only One Nation, amongst All Nations offers a way forward for Accountable personal Liberty and Freedom: The United States of America. The attacks upon such Accountability are central to Transnational Progressivism, so as to remove ideas of personal accountability and put nebulous 'society' or 'culture' to blame. What is not understood by them nor by those who espouse Liberty before Accountability, is that without the structure of Accountability, Liberty turns to Anarchy or Totalitarian State. Culture is either destroyed as it atomizes into pure, unaccountable Individualism, or personal Accountability is vested in the State to use as a tool against the Individual and the Individual has no recourse against such uses. Either way society as a common agreement amongst People is destroyed.
The way forward is harsh, clear and will most likely put all life of Free People to be Free at risk either by removal of all lives on Earth or by the removal of the underpinnings of Freedom and empowering the State to use technology against the People. Against the internal divisiveness supported by outside Transnational Progressivism, The Jacksonian Party espouses what it has always espoused for those decrying the nature and state of culture and society: Tell us how you think it should be fixed or shut up about those trying to do ANY fixing at all to keep it going. To have Individualism and Freedom the structure of Accountability for Personal Actions is Primary. Any attempt to make that diffuse is an Authoritarian power grab by those espousing it, be they clergy or lawyers or scientists. Commonality of Law and Accountability to same is fundamental to Society actually having structure. The clearly stated goal of all of those within the culture is that 'to form a more perfect Union' amongst the People by the actions of Individuals. Remove the Accountability and degeneration happens as Law is diminished and no longer applied to actions destroying society.
On the International Affairs realm the US needs conduct itself as an actual Nation that has Stance and Posture with respect to Individual Liberty and Freedom. This requires recognizing that only those things that support such goals in the form of cultures that have Accountability for Actions as a touchstone are those which help spread Liberty and Freedom. To do this required divorcing the US from any global organization that does not have that as a foundational view, discriminates against Nations based on that view and uses that as a necessary and positive bias for bringing about the greatest of Individual Liberty while having the Individual hold themselves accountable for their Actions. This is an across-the-board Precept that is not something the US can ever negotiate upon without demeaning and devaluing human Liberty and Freedom as a whole. To negotiate in that realm is to succumb to Authoritarianism and the eventual erosion of all human Freedom.
And to finally begin to address the problems of schismatic and factional Islam that puts forth means and methods and activities destroying human lives and seeking to subjugate all of mankind, Islam needs something that it has never had: a Central Axis upon which it holds itself accountable. In the modern age this requires an across-the-board coalescence of Islam at the only single point that it holds in common, that being Mecca. And the only way forward for that is to get All of Islam to hold Mecca as One Religion with multifactional views that have means and method to come to common agreement on what is and is not allowable for the entirety of it. That is the beginning of an Accountability Structure upon which Islam can find its bearings in this modern age. Retreating to the past and to Empire will put not only the vast majority of human life at risk as the web of infrastructure comes tumbling down that supports modern life, but it will also remove the concept of Liberty and Freedom for Individuals and put a Totalitarian Empire enforcing beliefs upon Peoples in place. By trying to formulate the Koran, those doing that formulation found that many of the separate works and beliefs of the Prophet and various teachers could not be expunged. The attempt was of the right direction, but the inability to coalesce around meaning of a totality of Islam that would *also* give meaning of life to Individuals and respect them in their differences points to an overall failure for Islam.
That failure has placed the entire planet in grave danger as the reductio ad absurdum of Total War, being weapons made cheaply so that the greatest taking of life can be done for the lowest cost, now puts minor Nations and rich organizations or organizations with dispersed and decentralized economic income, into a position of gaining such weapons and putting an end to Liberty and Freedom. Islam is not the only threat from this realm, but it is the most pressing and by far the worst as the reactionary segments and factions seek to impose their will upon all of Islam and upon the World as a whole. That threat cannot even begin to be addressed until Islam finds a way to make Individuals accountable to the belief structure of Islam. And then address how Islam, itself, can exist in a modern age that will dissolve it as the cultures supporting it are likewise dissolved by rampant technology empowering Individuals to do as they please to destroy such culture as that does not promulgate Liberty.
With Accountability.
Even if that can be done, the continued threats to culture, society and Freedom will continue in other realms, but these few things need be done or the way forward upon this present path is one that leads to no good ends for anyone.
