"The whole body of the nation is the sovereign legislative, judiciary, and executive power for itself. The inconvenience of meeting to exercise these powers in person, and their inaptitude to exercise them, induce them to appoint special organs to declare their legislative will, to judge and to execute it. It is the will of the nation which makes the law obligatory; it is their will which creates or annihilates the organ which is to declare and announce it " The law being law because it is the will of the nation, is not changed by their changing the organ through which they choose to announce their future will; no more than the acts I have done by one attorney lose their obligation by my changing or discontinuing that attorney. " ( The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; Volume 10, Page 126; 1904.)
In my April 27, 2009 OpEdNews article " The Cult of the Individual ," I stated my reasons why our individual liberty depends not solely on us as individuals, but on all of society. "Mutual respect [and willingness to protect] one another's rights is the true basis for being free. Furthermore, the denial of any group's or individual's rights are inherently dangerous to anyone and everyone who enjoys freedom. If, through the law, you (individually or as a group) can deny a group or individual some right or freedom that you now enjoy, then at some time in the future the same logic can be used to deny you a right or freedom that you have heretofore enjoyed.
For Americans, our preoccupation with wealth has in many cases led us to conflate freedom and being free primarily with the right to acquire and use our property (wealth), rather than the rights of all of our fellow human beings to live and be free [in a physical, moral, and emotional sense]. This in turn has led us to grasp our individual perceptions of "freedom" so tightly that they have shackled our lives, rather than use our freedom as wings by which we may best live our lives and be free. Like the [apartheid era white] South Africans, we are imprisoned by our beliefs about what freedom is, while at the same time binding millions of our fellow citizens with unrequited needs--including a job with a living wage, and an adequate level of food, housing, medical care, education, and [the] real opportunity [to improve their situation, which] they must have to truly be free.
We are burdened by [the misapprehension that our freedom, and what we desire, are one and the same. T]oo many Americans have become enamored with what [I believe] is an idolatrous fixation: that our own individual freedoms--both real and assumed--matter above all other considerations and responsibilities within our society. This way of thinking has led us to our current economic meltdown, the alienation of ourselves from the other people in our lives and communities as well as ourselves, and the exaltation of material possessions over human interactions and human needs."
The word "idolatrous" I think may have confused a large number of my readers. Here is a dictionary definition of idolatry, courtesy of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition; copyright 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
i -dol -a -try (à ¬-dà ²l -e-trà ª) noun
plural i -dol -a -tries
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Worship of idols.
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Blind or excessive devotion to something.
Note the second definition. There are far too many Americans whose first loyalty is to the almighty dollar, that old demon Mammon, as the Bible calls it. As Erich Fromm points out in his 1966 book, You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition (pp.28-29):
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