Thomas Paine was one of the most lucid and far seeing thinker and Founding Father of the American Revolution, and of the English Enlightenment.
One of his works of note, the Rights of Man, prefaced and in many ways accompanied both the Revolutionary War as well as the French Revolution.
The Year was 1789. The French Revolution was giving a pregnant pause for reflection to all monarchs and republics alike duly worried on account of its ‘excesses’.
Some, like Edmund Burke, rose in defence of the monarchical principle. Others, like Paine, took on a more democratic approach.
In it, Paine attacked one of the proponents of British absolute monarchy, Mr. Burke, on account of latter’s Tory position.
In short, Mr. Edmund Burke quoted a declaration of Parliament made in 1688 to the reigning monarchs William and Mary, in the following spirit and terms:
The Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, do, in the name of the people aforesaid (i.e., people of England then living) most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities, for EVER.”
Declaration of Parliament, 1688
Thomas Paine, not only rejected such an outrageous point espoused by Burke a century later. The man took the matter further. He went on to argue that:
There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controuling posterity to the ‘end of time’…
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies…
Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated.
Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, Vol. II (1779-1792)
Paine is, of course, right. His arguments follow a logical suite in that no generation may compel all others to follow its lead, in perpetuity.
This is a point we need to follow, and even more importantly, we need to implement. And we need to do it now.
Time is of the essence. We must do away with the shackles of representative democracy, which is a bastardization of the true form of democracy: direct democracy.
We, the People, must decide on every single policy matter via referenda. We must put it all to a vote.
The will of the past must be constantly validated by the Present. As our Will surely shall be by the Future.
The level of taxation, the principle of taxation itself, gun rights, war, technology, advances in science, everything must be debated and directly decided by the People, the only Sovereign of the Realm.
We allowed politicians to usurp our Natural Rights far too long. We may not remain idle if we are to retain our Liberty.
No Congress, Parliament, Executive Branch, or Supreme Court, which are a distillation of the elite, of the establishment, possess the legitimacy to decide our present, future and historical legacy.
If there was ever a time for action, that time is Now.
In 1690, the English philosopher John Locke consecrated the right of the People to revolt by refuting the divine right of kings.
And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case; yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge, whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven.
Second Treatise on Civil Government, Chapter 14, John Locke, 1690
Götterdämmerung 