Author: Richard R. Tryon, Sr.
It will help the reader to know that the author, five years before he died, had decided that his book was too long. He originally thought that he had to include a major section that described in detail how the world's political, economic, and social systems should be organized and operated to be in conformity with the discoveries of all that preceded this point in his writing. In 1972 he decided to rework Chapter 15 and set the stage to close the book with a final chapter dealing with a summary statement of the two major problems of the world. A second book could then be written to take advantage of the truths found in the first and be aimed at a similar logical study of how to get to the ideal political-socio-economic reality that he wanted to encourage.
It also helps to keep in mind that the author, born in 1901 in Maumee, Ohio, a small town adjacent to Toledo, lived through his formative years as a witness to the beginnings of the two major problems that threatened the world so greatly in 1973. When he was just 16, the Russians overthrew the Czar and tried to establish a Republic. Lack of education and resources to manage quickly set the stage for Lenin to come into Russia and to steal the Revolution in the name of Marxist Communism. The Lenin leadership, accompanied by the brutal, but effective control mechanisms put into place by Stalin, gave birth to the USSR, a collection of many peoples, languages, customs and resources.
Stalin literally murdered entire groups of this diverse population in order to effectively control the will of the people. Ruling in the name of the people through a small Politburo, created by Lenin, Stalin had three of the other four murdered after Lenin died (Trotsky in 1925, then Kamenev and Zinoviev in '26). With control of the party apparatus, Stalin chose executors like Beria of the KGB to insure his perpetual position as the absolute Dictator. Outwardly Stalin lived a simple life and ruled without a King's Throne. But, he showed the world that the USSR would work to make a new society to replace the Czar's feudal approach to perpetual serfdom for the peasant masses.
Intellectuals in the author's circle of newspaper writers for the Associated Press and many papers, with whom the author worked from 1920-37, included many who were "closet", if not card carrying members of the Communist Party. The Western world saw the excessive and decadent period of the "Roaring 20's" followed by the great depression of the 30's, while Stalin forged the USSR into a new industrial state that put a priority on heavy basic industry, while denying the people consumer products in the name of the need to build the "Motherland". With the ability of the Soviets to control the press to report only what the party wanted it to say, it is easy to see why so many were deluded into thinking that the "Wave of the future" would show that the Marxist system was better.
The fact that the USSR did not outproduce the West after Krushchev's boast "We will bury you" following the decade of renewal after the great WWII was easily excused, even in the 60's by a world that had started to move towards liberal ideas of State Socialism. Johnson's "Great Society" may have been inspired by an ego bent on being at once the "World Cop" in Vietnam and the "Great Provider" bigger than anything his mentor Franklin Roosevelt ever dreamed about; but his basic motivation was tied to the idea that it is government's task to save the people from themselves!
When Dwight Eisenhower left the presidency and motored down Pennsylvania Avenue with John F. Kennedy's inauguration, he noted and reported in his memoirs, that he was quite satisfied with his stewardship of containing the communist menace with the Dulles Doctrine of containment. But, he expressed a concern that the South East Asia Treaty (SEATO) link was a weak one because of the untrustworthy Dziem's, who controlled this ancient "bread basket" or "rice bowl" as dictators. Already American advisors were in Saigon, and Kennedy allowed them to multiply a bit more, so that some of them flew T-28 trainer aircraft with guns and Vietnamese student pilots into the first tactical combat situations.
The war escalated and President Lyndon Johnson ultimately was in no position to run for reelection because of it. So, Richard Nixon made the unexpected come-back and became our president in 1968. He managed to negotiate the unhappy way to lose the war without losing all of our "face" in the process. After an unprecedented reelection landslide in 1972 he came to grips with the scandal of Watergate. It took two more years for us to reach the end of the period of paralyzation created by this accident of incredible stupidity that was "stone-walled" by a President bent on protecting his staff and himself from deserved criticism.
With the Ford years came another period of American inability to do more than mark time while the world saw the continued expectation of eventual take-over by the tide of the Collectivist ideology. Even one of our most popular female leaders, and a beautiful actress to boot, Jane Fonda, had gone to Hanoi to show her profound support against the 'errors' of her countrymen.
In Cuba, Castro's power, created by his military victory over the Dictator Fuljencio Batista, with financial support coming from the likes of Ed Sullivan's Sunday night TV variety show, was evident. On several occasions, Americans cheered and applauded this friend of Ed Sullivan and gave millions the chance to see how this new and reasonable man was fighting to save his people and take them into a new dictatorship, now 44 years old in 1997. He should never have been supported by either our government or our people, but the tide of collectivism was still thought to have the momentum of history behind it and Americans like Sullivan may have been duped by it. Krusheauv's memoirs claim that he had to stop Castro from demanding the chance to 'nuke' Washington and other U.S. cities because Castro didn't care if Cuba was destroyed in retaliation, along with the Soviet Union.
All of this period featured more and more stories about the "Ugly American" featured in every corner of the globe as some demanding, unthinking, uncaring, arrogant person calling for actions that looked like those that proved that class war would be inevitable if the masses were to ever be free! These stories played well in the press and helped create the age of dependence upon the TV commentator as the one who could mold public opinion to any position with seven minutes of news commentary sandwiched in between commercials that sold Americans on a greater demand for material possessions.
The last of the American "true believers" of the dreams and moral approach of the past, Barry Goldwater, ran for president in 1964. He lost to the landslide victory of Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign based on the idea that we as a nation were so rich that we could afford "not only guns, but butter". Thus the "Great Society" was presented as the American answer to the tide of Collectivist progress.
Although the Nixon-Ford years may have slowed the tempo a bit, the Congress, dominated by free spending politicians continued to finance, with deficit funding techniques, the continuous robbery of the American treasure of accumulated wealth.
No effective programs were designed or mounted to combat the menace of Collectivist thought from 1960 to 1980. Nixon managed to open the door to China, an event of great importance considering that 1/4 of the world's population lives there. But the world also continued to assume that the great myth of Soviet Collectivism was somehow going to eventually show itself as the model way to live, albeit with some modifications to allow for more human freedoms or rights.
In 1973-74 the Western world discovered an ancient adversary ready to play a major card, aimed at financing its desire to catch-up to the western world's profligate capacity to squander resources. The oil embargo created chaos and a major shift of wealth along with significant, albeit temporary, efforts to learn to live with less wealth wasted. We built smaller and more fuel efficient cars and experimented with wind and solar power. We looked for ways to get oil out of shale and tar sands until oil prices plunged part way back from $40 per barrel to $12 vs the 1973 level of $3.50-$4.50.
With so many problems, who needed to discover that our Great Society was causing a massive new problem called population explosion. Worse, who cared that it was coming from the subsidized poor, who learned of a new way to make a living, by making babies! The food stamps and welfare contributed to the engines of industry and resulted in profitable business for everyone. Combined with the need to fuel the defense industry to protect us from the perceived military menace that was still real enough, we continued to ignore and did not provide any real program to replace the policy of containment that was obsolete by 1960.
With an ever increasing policy of programs of support, we worked to make our welfare state look to be more humane than the Russian counterpart. The propaganda machines in Moscow worked hard to prove that we were losing the race. By 1976, the world discovered that we were so sensitive to the criticism about human rights that we elected Jimmy Carter to be our President. He set about becoming a peacemaker in the middle East, where the Arabs seem to want to fight Jews or each other or at least shoot guns every night just for excitement!
By the end of the 70's Americans were living with double digit inflation, unemployment and interest rates of 22%. The liberals who brought us the Great Society were now old men and they looked back and saw only failure. Meanwhile the Collectivist approach had spread to establish new footholds. Thanks to the Cuban willingness to be the mercenaries spreading revolution in Angola, Nicaragua, and to tiny Grenada, while the South American countries witnessed the debacle of not only Chile, but Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Columbia. The northern Americans saw even Mexico collapse into a state of hyper-inflation and staggering debt that could not be managed.
In short, the trends witnessed by our author until he stopped writing in 1973 continued. No progress was made to either contain our profligate spending or our growing conviction that the tide of collectivism would overtake us, even if we made every effort to make the transition on our own.
Something profound happened in America that just happened to coincide with an even larger discovery to come forth almost ten years later. We elected an actor, Ronald Reagan to be our President and started down a road of recovery based upon a psychological impetus not unlike the one that helped us face the great depression of the 30's when F.D. Roosevelt, a hero of former Democrat Reagan, said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself". The next eight years provided major reversals in the tide of political, social and economic programs. The bankruptcy of the liberal notions of collectivism as the way to provide the Great Society became evident. Meanwhile the positive contribution of a less costly tax system fueled investment that has produced enormous gains in employment, a reduction and retreat from double digit inflation and 22% interest rates and a chance to prove that the American dream wasn't dead yet.
President Reagan came onto the scene with a charisma of leadership and popular appeal significantly stronger than that of his predecessor, who failed to win votes without evidence of successful leadership. Although Reagan's appeal caused the liberal spenders to cut taxes in a way that did stimulate employment, lower interest rates and stop inflation; the rational for "entitlements" and the attitude for social concern prevented any real reversal of spending for social programs. Meanwhile defense spending soared to new highs as Reagan worked to restore American might decimated by the Vietnam disaster. The military build-up and reversal of the Carter tide of cuts led to the campaign for S.D.I. (Strategic Defense Initiative) better know as "Star Wars". It now appears that the evidence of resolve put forth by Reagan and later supported by President Bush played a key role in a Russian internal dispute. Those who had led the Soviet decisions to continue to play on the age old fear of invasion finally lost an argument. If the Americans put SDI in place, it would be folly to go on building more destructive missiles that couldn't penetrate a computer's ability to disable countless numbers in flight. How fortuitous that this observation coincided with ideas of the new leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev.
But, what was happening to the tide of collectivism as an institution, at its Genesis, while all of this was moving America towards this inevitable destiny? While George Bush struggled to be elected against an opponent touted by the media as unbeatable even before the Republican Convention nominated Bush, events in the Collectivist world started to show that the "big lie" was about to unravel. Gorbachev had already been in charge for four years and his efforts continued to show a need to win international friends, not enemies. Those that let the Brezhnev Doctrine seek another sea port via an invasion of Afghanistan discovered that they were in a war as unpopular with the people of the USSR as had been the case with the U.S. over Vietnam.
The lack of evidence of any "victory", combined with careful reading by communist leaders and dissidents in Eastern Europe let the formerly unsuccessful Lech Walesa to gain a following that renewed the Polish quest for something better. The events that came tumbling forth like a mighty river in 1989 demolished Soviet controls that had been so institutionalized by force that few saw any way for the people to ever gain freedom from those who ruled in the name of the people!
There is no need here to recite the litany of events in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and even Bulgaria and Rumania to show that the events had let "Pandora out of the box". Once out, everyone knew what everyone else had been thinking for years but was afraid to say for fear of reprisal. Once the police discovered that even their own disagreed with policy, the walls literally came tumbling down. History has not seen such a dramatic change without enormous bloodshed. In Eastern Europe there was very little, save that of some of the most despotic leaders like Cescacesu of Rumania.
Even the silent but monolithic Chinese discovered a level of demonstration that produced the magnificent stand-off of one individual student against a column of tanks, live on world wide TV because of the accidental coverage being allowed for the simultaneous visit of Gorbachev to Beijing. Although the rest of the world saw this as the beginning of a new revolution in China, the authorities decided that power would permit the government to destroy the questers for freedom and that control of the media would lead to eventual forgetting what the event stood for or that it even occurred. It isn't yet clear how long it will take for the Chinese to find the way to shed their shackles, but the slow deterioration of Deng and his death in 1997, allowed the Chinese to escape a likely chance of serious disorder in the changing of the guard.
Meanwhile, the Western world began to witness a series of events that began with the first evidence of American ability to be something more than a "paper tiger" in defending its system. The liberation of Grenada, marred by military incompetence to the delight of the media that was left out of the planning process because it can't be trusted to save lives by maintaining secrecy, was the first of several events in our hemisphere that began to show that collectivism doesn't work and isn't wanted. Grenada today is still poor but shows signs of vigor in developing tourism to replace dependence upon sale of spices to foreign exchange. Road building and other signs of improved infrastructure may be more than matched by teeming flocks of school children who may have a better chance unless they multiply too fast.
Chile's election produced a new evidence of the validity of Democracy as the preferred way, set the stage for the support of the same institutions in Panama to the surprise of the corrupt Noriega. Chamorro's election in Nicaragua was but another event that couldn't happen against the tide of Collectivist idealism. But it did, and nobody was more surprised than the Sandanistas!
As this was being written in 1990, the Soviet Communist Party had just been through a peaceful but major change in Party politics. Many resigned, not just out of anger of disagreement, but because they feared that the people would turn on the party and move violently in a new direction. The Gorbachev opponents offered lots of vitriolic complaint, but no better alternative to his leadership. In fact, nobody wanted his job, if all that it means is a return to the failed policies and practices of the past.Then came the failed 'coup' and the time for Yeltsin and the beginning of a new revolution in Russia. The Soviet Union was largely dismantled and democracy and private enterprise came alive again along with the Orthodox Church.
The movement for freedom in the areas described is accompanied by an awareness that prosperity, stability, and happiness is not just automatic. Patience will be important as it will take years to undo and replace the controls of the past and to let free market forces build a productive society that permits the institutions of private property, freedom of religion, and free elections. However, considering the bankruptcy of the past, the rate of development doesn't have to be great to look very good! By early 1996 the record shows that much has been accomplished by the Russians to learn the lessons of how individualism can create a better life, but many are so steeped in the old way of the 70 year reign of collectivistic communism that they are working to elect communists who sing the same old siren song. Yeltsin's reelection in spite of ill health and profound problems showed that the people do not want to turn back to communism again! My prediction is that the people of Russia and its many neighbors will find the way to produce and prosper through individualism not via collectivism. Its market potentials have excited many more than just MacDonald's restaurants that have done very well in Russia.
With the rapid renovation of the Eastern half of the once divided Germany now well under way, an example will be forthcoming that will be extraordinary. No national group is more capable of such an accomplishment than the German people. They have experienced such a miracle already in West Germany. But, those who fear a united Germany need to look at the vast difference of the world today in general as contrasted to the decades of the 1920-1940 period. They should also note the vast difference of the development of the European Community that will produce a political federation of states that gain the same kind of economic power known so long in the U.S. With a global economy now a fact of life, not just an idea, Europe will enjoy a new prosperity and growth that will not produce the kind of division found in history.
But, what has happened to the wonderful American example of the past? While the rest of the world struggles to free itself of the Collectivist errors, what have the major events been in the U.S. that reflect on our ability to compete and to maintain our cherished freedoms?
In 1951 the Supreme Court ruled against the Champaign, Illinois Unit #4 School Board in a suit brought by Mrs. McCollum, who didn't want her children to be socially ostracized because they didn't want to attend the voluntary periods set aside for the teaching of religious instruction by members of the local clergy. In Selma, Alabama Martin Luther King joined in the protest that would propel him into the national lime-light and into ultimate martyrdom when murdered for his position. The Civil Rights movement began long before this time, but it increasingly gained national political attention after WWII.
Although the war did much to dispel some levels of bigotry as many Americans were forced to mix with racial and religious minorities in ways that revealed the fallacy of prejudice, old traditions did not give way easily. Thus the Congress began the long road of defining civil rights in ways aimed at protecting the minorities. At first we were told that we must not consider any distinctive racial, religious or national origin factor in making employment decisions. Then we were told that we would have to in order to fulfill "quota" determinations based upon bureaucratic calculations.
Gradually the body of law was expanded and new minority groups, previously not even willing to be identified, became embolden to fight for their special interest rights too. Homosexuals, lesbians joined together to fight for "gay rights". A parallel decline in marriage as an institution thought to be a prerequisite by most in the past to cohabitation or even intercourse became the accepted norm in society and the term POOSSLQ appeared on census forms. Now it has included POSSSLQ as the sex isn't necessarily different!
Combined with the simplistic notions about many worthy ecological concerns and the extension of great society entitlements, we now have more special interest groups than the lawyers can serve. But, alas a new area of law is now unfolding. It deals with the idea that we are entitled to avoid pain and even fear in life. Therefore, if an airline pilot tells us that we will be delayed by a minor emergency involving a passenger who stupidly ate a food being served that generates an allergic reaction; and if that requires us to make an unscheduled landing to care for the one passenger in distress; then the rest are entitled to sue the airline for pain, distress, fear and whatever else. No telling what the passenger, who ate the shrimp is entitled to collect!
In an age where the government has assumed the task of saving us from ourselves even if we go broke trying to pay for it, we find our people less and less able to sort out what risks to take upon themselves and self insure vs which are to be socially handled by taxation and social support programs. The ultimate group has not yet appeared. Someday a right to life group will take up the call of saving all living sperms and eggs from assassination by the people who let them die without getting together to generate an embryo that must be born and cared for by the state, if nobody else wants or is able to do so!
From the study in an earlier part of this book, one notes that a living embryo isn't quite the same as other people until it is born and receives the breath of life that allows its soul to become immortal. We should not draw from this the conclusion that abortion as a means of birth control is automatically acceptable. Men and women who conceive together and then sanction abortion must bare the burden of the decision and reflect upon its interaction with their own souls. It may be hard to perceive, but there may be some situations where abortion saves the life of other children or a parent and we must allow the parents to make that judgment and accept the consequences. Aborting a defective fetus and replacing it with a healthy one may be a bad decision, but it is hard for society to condemn the person making that decision. It is even harder for society to demand that the decider must live with the result, even if it is supported with state aid.
The ultimate in our quest for civil liberties is found in the completion of the right to do away with socially imposed marriage. Freedom demands the right to have free love, freedom to use drugs, and to demand government to support us when we contract AIDS. Some even believe that refusal to give such aid is a license to spread the disease without remorse.
Along with the acceptance of all of these aberrations as an inevitable part of progress, we have come to accept rape and murder as just everyday events that probably have always been with us, just not so well reported. But a closer look, such as the one taken by Ben Stein in an 1990 essay for Business Month published as though it is Chapter 12 of The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, produces abundant evidence of the profound ignorance and benign neglect of the American people. Along with the drug culture has come a system of collecting the funding for it. It involves thousands of children serving as distributors to their elders and to their peers, both of whom must steal from everyone to feed their habits. Grade, middle and high schools are becoming armed camps where police patrol the halls trying to keep some degree of order for the institutions that have become "baby sitters" for parents too busy to worry about quality education.
"Yuppy" parents too often find it important to have children only as a sign of affluence. Some consider hiring surrogate mothers so as to avoid loss of productive employment opportunity to get richer. Many regard the rigors of child raising as not important enough to demand their personal effort and the rewards too lacking in material satisfaction to be worthy of their time and effort. The "yuppies" didn't invent this life style, they got it by watching their parents, who started the surge for "the fast lane" thinking.
Throw in the conversion of professional teacher associations into full blown and militant labor unions, mix in the ideas that every child needs to progress with his peers (indeed it is too dangerous to leave them behind with smaller and younger children that are equal or better intellectually) so that his/her psyche won't be damaged, and you have a formula for failure in education. All of the standard performance indicators confirm this fear, yet nobody has found an effective way to restore the cooperative advantages of the past when parents, teachers, administrators and students all worked together to achieve the best results possible.
Computer technology may provide a new tool to help our young people learn the 3 R's and also to think, if properly programmed and combined with efforts aimed at helping the individual learn to think, not just to be a rote trained robot.
Meanwhile, the same technology has spawned a way for a significant portion of our graduating functional illiterates to still find some kind of work. All they need to know to run a cash register is to push the button with the correct picture of the food requested, enter the amount of cash tendered and the change is automatically dispensed. After putting in their hours, if indeed they have managed to get to work, they are free to go pursue pleasure in a world that presents no meaningful moral standards. Although the laws of the land forbid selling "recreational drugs", it may be the most profitable business in America. The fact that the sellers must buy protection from the law and allocate a small portion of the profit to pay for legal expenses and other losses, the profit potential is so large that a major "money laundering" industry is required to help channel the profit into "legitimate" businesses.
Is it any wonder therefore that the major bastions of business have been invaded by such new techniques as the sale of "junk bonds" to finance the buying and selling of viable businesses that have taken decades to build? The 1990 "backlash" as a result of the Wall Street scandal has destroyed one major brokerage firm and penalized several of the men who have now lost a portion of their ill-gotten gains. Don't expect them to think they sinned. Rather look to see this type of bond return but with a new name.
The same immoral quest for satisfying greed set in motion a legal way for Savings and Loan companies, with Congressional approval, to become speculators in a government insured "pyramid" club. Those who invested for high interest yields took no real risk as their deposits were government insured. They knew and didn't care in many cases, as did most of those who sold these investments, that eventually the "house of cards" would fall. No matter, Uncle Sam will pay back the capital deposited! Billions more were collected in taxes and dispensed to pay off for the failed S&L's and much of that could have been avoided with a little common sense. But, we now live by laws, not principles and common sense. The system is run by lawyers with enormous capacity to find the rule that controls so that nobody has to think or be responsible.
The rise of hedonism or the pursuit of pleasure in America may seem like a form of personal behavior that can't be blamed for any serious ills of the community or society. Nobody can claim that the ancient Stoics in 300 B.C. had it right when they determined that one should be indifferent to both pain and pleasure and seek pain in order to prove one's persuasion. But, we have allowed pleasure, comfort and the pursuit of personal power to become as important to all as Vince Lombardi, a professional football coach put it to his Packer team. "Winning isn't everything, it is the only thing". Put that thinking into personal living and substitute the word pleasure and we have created a demand for enormous industries and even larger profit. Our unregulated media, in the name of free speech, can sell us every conceivable device to induce the perception of pleasure.
History probably doesn't accurately document, and statistics were not so easily captured or recorded for endless study, but it doesn't take any real data to convince most Americans over 50 that life in their childhood was a lot freer of the endless parade of sins that are now tabulated. Rape, incest, murder, and crime in general were not well reported 50 years ago, partly because there wasn't as much of it. Sure, the sociologists can note that there were fewer divorces because women were not free to escape the male tyranny. They can also claim that victims of incest lacked the freedom to come forth and point fingers, knowing that social concern groups and government will come support them whether the crimes were real or imagined; or just invented to provide an avenue of escape to pursue their own pleasure free of parental guidance or control.
While it is laudable to help the real victims of any crime, we do very little to encourage an educational or religious system to teach young people or their parents to live proper lives. Instead, we build guns for all to "protect" themselves at a profit to the sellers. The strongest lobby is Washington is probably the NRA that protects the out of context "right to bear arms" with a fanatic zeal that knows no limit.
At the same time, we have provided a system of social support for all that are euphemistically called "entitlements". Through this system of support paid for by a tax structure that redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor; or creates money via deficit finance, that essentially robs the capital saved by everyone, we have provided the means to finance the greatest social problem of all - overpopulation!
While the minority population learned long ago how to take advantage of the "system" so as to gain everything from food stamps to welfare payments, the poor "white trash" learned the same lessons at the same time. With a bureaucracy run by people who have limited education and often motives that encourage the growth of the problems they are trying to manage, can we expect these programs to lead to control of population? The baby makers are just poor women, mostly without other means of support, who have found out that making babies increases their benefits. Of course, many of them find other ways to increase their personal access to cash to feed their own habits, as they join in with the national mania to pursue pleasure. Or is it more often escape through drugs?
One must conclude that the Churches of America have a common desire to provide a means for support of the victims of this mania and a vehicle for them to learn how to turn away from the Siren Song of Satan. Led by volunteers, teaching a subject to an audience that isn't listening, only looking for a "handout", it isn't surprising that no Church is showing any great sign of success in slowing the birth rate or reducing the numbers of people listed as among the poverty classification.The much maligned Planned Parenthood organization has achieved significant success with programs aimed at teaching individual self control and responsibility that has has helped many to learn how to avoid abortion and to plan parenthood. Unfortunately their willingness to provide abortion services to those who would otherwise seek an inferior source, has put them on the wrong side of the 'right to life' extremists.
Those who look ahead to the next several generations see little evidence to suggest that things will get better because of the programs devised by our political leaders. The appeals of the Church of any faith are not gaining much evidence of a renaissance that shows a drop in the birth rate of those who will increase the level of poverty. We are rapidly creating a generation that will have to steal in order to survive. Those who can work because they learned how to do something, will have to support the poor or put them in ever larger prisons.
Just to complicate matters, we have a twin problem running rampant. The ultimate goal of the civil rights movement was not ERA and the right of women to choose abortion as a legal escape from the burden of pregnancy. The real goal is to give the "right to life" to the unborn by forcing the pregnant women to deliver a fetus into this world as a living and breathing individual; to be cared for by the mother, with State support, if needed. Those, who seek this right for the unborn, do not offer any alternative means for the fetus to reach the breathing state; nor do they seem to recognize that such life may not last very long in many cases, regardless of the financial support system put in place. Some mothers, and fathers, if known in these cases, just don't want to let children interfere with their own pursuit of pleasure. If we let the well meaning, but arrogant leaders of this movement establish their position as one that can be forced into existence, we may add even more babies to the welfare camp, to be supported by taxes. Of course, illegal abortion will take the place of the legal type albeit with greater cost and greater loss of life to the potential mothers.
If the reader will review the chapter that explores the scientific way in which the soul becomes immortal, one will wonder if the Right to Life movement isn't making an incorrect judgment? Or should we be trying to give life, before it has an immortal soul the same rights as we do after God has turned the newborn into a being with an immortal soul via the ingestion of the Holy Spirit from the atmosphere into the soul cell? Perhaps we should consider that sperms, and eggs are life building substances, controlled by the souls in whose bodies they reside, not by the laws of the land.
Perhaps we should allow that unless we have willing parents, able to raise a fetus, capable of becoming a living baby with an immortal soul, we should allow them to decide to proceed or not to proceed with the process that may deliver a healthy living baby. If the mother to be decides that she should not deliver for whatever reason, be it offensive to society, as in the case of rape or incest, or for lack of economic means of support, self respect or emotional ability to be a parent, or whatever; perhaps we have to leave that decision to the parents, not the state.
It isn't easy to call for the rights of the father as a consideration. Nonetheless, if the State and the Church have recognized a marriage, one can ask, does the father have the right to insist upon a behavior of his wife that will lead to the delivery of a baby with an immortal soul? In an age of women's liberation the easy response is "Hey, you don't have to carry the fetus for nine months or care for it after". Therefore, no man has anything to say about it.
To be consistent with all that has preceded these chapters, it seems fair to say that if the marriage meets the normal tests for viability, it will not be possible for the wife to want to make a decision for abortion as a unilateral action. It may be fair to say that the husband has a say in deciding to abort as well, but the best argument for the man who doesn't want children is to call for abstinence or birth control. Given that such doesn't always work, what right does the father have to abort or not to abort? The answer lies in the mystery of the relationship between man and wife. They must work that out on their own. The State should have no right.
If it yields and lets the "Right to Life" ideas win and then finds a way to eliminate all abortion, legal or illegal, our hedonistic society will procreate itself faster than otherwise. We will produce a state where avoiding infanticide, and starvation of the unwanted will be a problem second in importance only to the dealing with the poor survivors, who, lacking any meaningful parental support, will make the current level of crime seem like "the good old days". The "thin veneer" of civilization can't tolerate the production of an exorbitant quantity of unwanted children that lack parents who understand how important the parental function is to the future of society. There is no evidence in theology to suggest that God gave us the power to procreate with instruction to maximize the quantity of souls produced. One must assume that an all knowing and omnipotent Creator, would want to encourage the creation of quality souls. If He just wanted quantity, God would have designed us to have litters like pigs, so that souls could multiply like rabbits.
While it is imperative that society needs to recognize that procreation is a serious and important act and that abortion is a poor choice form of birth control, we must accept it as being a question for parental not societal decision. This still leave plenty of room for the so-called "right to lifers" to advise and even support those considering abortion with pledges of support or even adoption; but, it does not allow them to force their idea of a moral right to life for every fetus. In a perfect world their will be no abortion. At this point no part of the world can make that claim. Inasmuch as we can't turn off the God given sexual urges or hope to educate all to control them, we had best allow that we can't legislate a moral imperative that should be important to all of us and isn't. We find nothing in scripture that demands that all eggs be fertilized to satisfy God's demand for living babies that take in the Holy Spirit and thus become activated souls put onto the path of immortality. If God wants all aborted fetuses, be they spontaneous or not, to be given immortal status, God will take care of it without our intervention.
The author in 1973, when he stopped writing, saw a world heading for destruction in one of several ways. Either the arms race would ultimately lead to a physical "Armageddon", or a worse fate would unfold via the rise of collectivism that would ultimately leave all of the world's population under the rule of a tyranny in the name of the people. One where the ruling class would keep everyone else in a state of perpetual servitude, in a Godless World, devoid of the chance for a meaningful religious understanding. In such a world the population explosion would be controlled via the Chinese method of giving licenses to those allowed to procreate. Abortion would be required for all others and repeat offenders would lose their own lives because the State wouldn't want to pay for their failure to conform.
Of course, smaller wars of the type thought to be "conventional" could achieve the same result as the nuclear horror, except there might be more living survivors left to deal with the ultimate tyranny of collectivism. Those who have lived to see the collapse of the Collectivist system in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and to speculate that even the monolithic Chinese may ultimately find a way to escape the tyrannical way of life that has prevailed there for thousands of years, see a chance to avoid the nuclear disaster and perhaps even to see a global economy that works well enough to avoid even the small wars that prevailed so long, for example, among the different nations of Europe.
One other scenario has been ignored. If the world accepts individualism as the only approach for building a successful social-political-economic system, but fails to consider the impact of unfettered population development, will we be bringing about our own future destruction by lack of water, clean air, food or space for people and the rest of nature? Since John Malthus man has underestimated the ability of man to produce more food than man can eat. On the dawn of the age of biotechnology that can multiply food production perhaps 1,000 fold, it is hard to imagine running out of food as the limiting factor for world population. We should anticipate greater problems with the supply of oxygen and clean water. Yet, we have not done any serious work to convert sea water to drinking water and oxygen by use of a number of techniques that will be inexpensive if we find a way to make nuclear energy cheaper and perhaps safer. No, man can build answers to such problems and can probably build structures to house 1,000 times as many people as live at present. We might have to store them vertically or under the sea in order not to crowd out the flora and fauna so dear to many groups. Of course, the deer population may cause even greater problems as we can't get them to stay off of the roads or our back yards. Imagine there population explosion as a protected species? The better question to ask about population is why make it much bigger? It can't be a reflection of the will of God. If God only wants more souls and is somehow unable to make them in Heaven, we surely could make a zillion more just by mixing eggs and sperms, if that in fact caused instant manufacture of immortal souls. But, God is omnipotent, so He doesn't need our help in such a silly way.
Until God reveals to us His need for us to procreate more and more until the explosion reaches 1,000 times our current world population and then is ready to compound again, we may be wiser to recognize that such a need doesn't exist. If man is able to live longer and grow wiser, would that be better? We could give such a chance and wait for a new sign from someone other than a celibate priest to tell us.
Another possibility to consider is Divine Intervention. Given the logic that shows that God can and has come to Earth to set certain events into motion, one can ask, will there be a Second Coming? Would it be God's purpose to come himself again or to send Jesus as a means of bringing order out of our chaos?
All of the logic of this book says "no" to these questions. That isn't to say, however, that God doesn't care or that we will not ultimately find our souls with Jesus. Because of the explanation of the soul-cell's ability to reincarnate en route to a heavenly rejoining with Christ for all souls, there is no need for God to come or send Christ again. As George Burns put it in the movie "Oh God" several years ago, speaking for God, he said, "I gave you everything you need". That says it all! Therefore, we have no reason to assume or wish for Divine Intervention to save us from ourselves. Only the government tries to do that and it should be instructed to let us assume many risks ourselves.
If God won't do it, and even the renown "George" won't either, then how are we to save ourselves? Do we search for a way to return to the cave man mentality where every man lives in a state of armed truce? Ready to kill his neighbor at first opportunity, to add his wife to his harem? Or do we live with a civilization that is too complex for such to ever occur? The answer is so clearly yes, that no reasonable thought can even be generated to support such a thesis.
A reading of the Appendix marked as the 10 pillars of the American Economic Foundation leads to a more reasonable approach. One that is consistent with the logic of this book. It fits into the theological truths, if discovered herein, and into a world that could move to a new plateau of interactive prosperity with a peace that might pave the way for greater understanding and development of the souls of all peoples of the world.
If this book achieves its purpose, it will be to instill in the minds of the readers a zeal for becoming a living example that makes for a form of Evangelism that isn't born out of the need to convert people to worship in some specific church. It isn't possible to sing to all of the world's people that only some brand of Christian Church can save their souls, unless we define the word Church the way Christ defined it. He didn't instruct the disciples to go forth and create any monolithic and hierarchical organization to control man's thinking or living. All of that has been man made in every religion, Christian or non-Christian.
What is needed now is to let the Christian message show that God did come, that Christ did live, die and rise from the dead for all of mankind, not just the Chosen people or the converted Gentiles of the Roman Empire. Such an example can allow all of the many brands of Churches and religions to continue providing their physical centers for good purposes, and even permit them to continue fighting their incessant internal political battles over details of liturgy, etc.
But, if all of this is framed in a new and global understanding about the ultimate reality that shows that all humans have souls that will ultimately get to Heaven to be at one with God, then the differences borne out of centuries of evolution that has given us different racial and religious characteristics will come in time to be less and less important. This book never gave its author the conviction that all answers have been found. The mystical need and fact prevails. Without it, we probably can never have the proper mind set to deal with the fact that we are insignificant beings that walk on the face of this Earth only by the Grace of God.
Both the author and his son hope that the reader will find that these words have helped us all move one tiny step closer to the ultimate goal of helping your own soul reach for God's immortal promise. If that happens, perhaps we will find that the secular world will rediscover how a better understanding of Christian morality can help us learn to live better together under a system of individualism that finds all men and women agreeing that we must be responsible for our own salvation, for each of us will find our immortal soul to be the part of us that can finally rest with God.
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