How Do We Know

16

YIELD NOT TO TEMPTATION

No one can ask honestly or hope fully to be delivered from temptation unless he has himself honestly and firmly determined to do the best he can to keep out of it.

—JOHN RUSKIN

The English critic and essayist, John Ruskin (1819-1900), was also known to the public as a social reformer. Doubtless that’s what most people would label those few Americans who are presenting the case for freedom as an alternative to the communistic mess into which our country is sinking.1 But our “reforms” would not be Ruskin’s.

For years I have begun one of my lectures with a Ruskin suggestion: “A speaker should always tell his audience where he stands at the very outset.” So let me tell you where I stand as related to his interventionist philosophy. Wise in ever so many ways, Ruskin believed in mercantilism, no different from our own planned economy and welfare state. I am opposed to every variety of a politically planned economy.

England’s Industrial Revolution resulted in an unprecedented prosperity for the English masses. Our own private ownership, free market, limited government way of life resulted in even greater prosperity diffused much more widely. But prosperity breeds a peculiar temptation—the temptation to solicit economic privileges from government. I am acquainted with many Americans, outstanding in their specializations, who seek special privileges—living off others by coercive governmental interventions. They yield to temptation, in some cases unwittingly!

Ruskin’s interventionist position has a nonderogatory explanation. To write the above statement and then yield to temptation would make a liar of him. This Englishman was an honest man.

Aware of the enormous bounties that flowed from the Industrial Revolution, Ruskin failed to identify the cause as freedom of choice to act creatively as everyone pleases. To him the event was an historical accident. Millions of honest Americans, unable to see how creation at the human level works its wonders, are also victims of such lack of vision. ’Tis a partial blindness, not temptation, that accounts for this malady.

Creation—Divine Omnipotence—works Its Wonders regardless of human ignorance. As Thomas Alva Edison wrote, “No one knows more than one-millionth of one per cent of anything,” and in this lack of understanding we find an explanation for the growing governmental interventions. Politicians—not statesmen—take credit for the bounties Creation has wrought throughout history, and will continue to confer upon humanity.

Wrote the German scholar and ecclesiastic, Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471): “Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each one hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but show what he is.”

The present politico-economic adversity is a great teacher for those who seek virtue and truth. Privation strengthens their minds and does, indeed, show what they really are. Why this stimulation? It is an observed fact that acts of overcoming pave the road to becoming—the tremendous power of creative human energy when free to flow.

I repeat, politicians grab the credit for what Creation has wrought. While no degree of temptation justifies any degree of sin, millions of politicians yield to temptation. Believing that they are the source of the bounties of our not-yet-destroyed freedom, they “think” that these gifts are theirs to dispense. Results of this gross ineptness? They become predators—“plundering or robbing.” They indulge in legal thievery, having written the very statutes that make their actions legal!

Those who seek political power over others—those who would be human gods—are unaware how little they know. For God does not thus lord it over us. We are free to go His Way or not—to enjoy the rewards or suffer the penalties resulting from our actions.

Those of us who seek a society where everyone is free to act creatively as he or she pleases might well heed the wise counsel of one of the world’s greatest statesmen, Edmund Burke:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite is placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be of it without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate habits cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

If there is to be a return to freedom—and there will be—intemperate habits must be replaced with temperate habits. How do away with the passions that forge our fetters? Have the courage to say “NO” to all political chicanery: “political trickery.”

It is ordained in the constitution of earthly life that freedom shall again bless our lives. Our role? Yield not to temptation!

• 1See Science Is a Sacred Cow by Anthony Standen (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1950), pp. 63-64.