Trusting the Purpose of Government
Here’s a disturbing fact. The people no longer trust the government.
There are numerous polls that show this, but let’s just take one of the most prominent.
The Pew Research Center has been asking Americans if they trust government to do the right thing most of the time since the Eisenhower administration. Back then, 73% of Americans said they trusted their government to do the right thing most of the time.
Today, only 24% say the same.
Only 1 out of every 4 Americans thinks their government will do the right thing most of the time.
That is a failure of trust. To put it another way, that is evidence of a strong distrust of our government.
That distrust is not unreasonable. This isn’t the public having an irrational fear of government. This distrust is actually perfectly rational and reasonable, and moreover, predictable.
It was predictable.
Why?
Because when purpose is not known, abuse is inevitable, and the first thing to go in any abusive relationship is trust.
That phrase, “When purpose is not known, abuse is inevitable,” comes from the book Understanding the Purpose and Power of Women by Myles Monroe. Now, he was talking about personal relationships and an individual’s purpose in life. But, the principle is broader than that.
What’s the purpose of a hammer? To pound nails with, right. But, if you don’t understand that, and you try to use a hammer to paint with, you’re going to put holes into your walls and splotches of paint everywhere else. You will miss use the hammer if you don’t know its purpose. You will abuse the hammer, and the walls, and the paint.
I often say “Words have meaning.” Turns out the phrase “when purpose is not known, abuse is inevitable” is literally true as well. The dictionary definition of the word “use” is “to employ for a purpose.” The prefix ab means away from, or off. So, the word abuse, when you look at its roots, means off purpose, or away from purpose. If you don’t know your purpose, you will be off purpose. You will be away from your purpose. “Off purpose” is abuse, literally.
What is the purpose of government? Some people think the purpose of government to keep us safe, or to run the economy, or to make sure everyone has enough money to live. That’s wrong. All of that is wrong. And, no, that’s not just my opinion. It’s a self-evident truth.
The Second Sentence of the Declaration of Independence is what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the American Creed. It is the idea of America. America was the first country founded upon an idea and the Second Sentence is where you can see that idea in its entirety.
The Second Sentence tells us exactly what the purpose of government is, and it points out that the purpose of government is a Self-Evident Truth, not just mere opinion. If you are a patriot, and you love your country, and you realize your country was founded on an idea, then you need to love that idea, every word of it, or you are not, in fact, a true patriot.
The Second Sentence says, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
Now, the sentence continues on from there, but let’s just stop at this point. We just heard the purpose of government. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that governments are instituted among men to secure these rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That’s it. That’s government’s purpose. That’s not just the federal government’s purpose that’s the purpose of all governments. State governments. City governments, school boards. All government has the same purpose, which is to secure the rights of the people.
This truth is obvious. It’s plain as day. It’s written down in our founding document. But, ask your city council member what is the purpose of government, and I bet you he or she won’t have the right answer. Ask your school board representative. Ask your state rep. Ask your state senator. Ask your governor. Ask your congressperson. Ask your Senator. Ask your President. Try it. I dare you. I bet none of them know the right answer. What happens when purpose is not known? Abuse is inevitable.
The purpose of government is to secure our rights. That’s the entire purpose of government. That’s the only purpose of government. The only proper use of government is to secure the rights of the people. If government tries to do something other than simply securing the rights of the people, then it is doing something that is off use, off of its purpose, away from its purpose. If government tries to do anything that is not its purpose, then it is, by definition, doing something that is abusive. Words have meaning!
The reason why people don't trust government is because government is trying to do things no government should be trying to do. We no longer trust our governmental institutions because our governments have been abusing us by trying to do things no government has any business trying to do. And, as anyone who's been in an abusive situation will tell you, the first thing to go when you've been abused is trust.
Take a look at what government has actually been doing for the past two years. Lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, stay at home orders, contact tracing.
Why?
To control the virus, right? But, where in the Declaration of Independence does it say the purpose of government is to control viruses?
The purpose of government is to secure our rights, not fight our diseases.
What are those rights again... Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
Don't think of these three things as slogans or a catchphrase. This is an instruction manual. Take this literally and seriously.
Let's go in backwards order... Over the past two years, have our governments done a good job of securing our rights to pursue our own happiness?
School boards masking kids, or doing virtual learnings. Are kids happy? Are parents happy? Our children have lost on average, a year and a half of education. Is that going to help them pursue their Happiness in the future. Thomas Jefferson said any nation that expects to be ignorant and free expects something that never was, and never will be.
OK, so clearly our school boards failed in their purpose of securing our rights to pursue our Happiness.
Local and state - same question. Did your governor telling you to stay home, not got to work, that you were not essential back in the spring of 2020 secure your right to pursue your Happiness? Federal government, same question. How has the Federal government secured your right to pursue your Happiness?
Let’s look at Liberty.
Have our governments done a good job of securing our rights to Liberty? Mandates are the opposite of Liberty. Liberty requires a freedom of choices. Anything that takes away the freedom to behave as one wishes is, by definition, restricting some form of Liberty.
So, again, all of our governments get a failing grade on securing our Liberty at some point, through mandates or stay at home orders, or other restrictions on movement, assembly, or the rights to worship. Even the state of Florida at one point restricted Liberty. All of governments failed to secure our Liberty at some point between March of 2020 and today. All of them.
Finally, Life. Now, some would argue that the lockdowns and the mask mandates and the vaccine mandates are all designed to protect the rights to Life.
But, this misses something... We are given by the Creator a right to Life. We are not given, by the Creator, a right to eternal Life. Life eventually ends for all of us. The question isn't if we are going to lose our Life, it's only when and how.
Government has a responsibility to protect Life, to stop others from taking away your life. But it does not have a responsibility to seek to secure eternal life. That's not something it can do. COVID wasn't the only threat to life over the past two years. We still have all the other threats to life that exist - smoking, eating fatty foods, driving cars. Even eating any food comes with a choking risk, but it's one we all take every day, because managing the risks to your own life is largely your responsibility. And, there’s no action that doesn’t come with at least some risk to your life. You can die from drinking too much water. You can die from getting too much oxygen. Life is a risk. Therefore, the right to Life also includes those risks to life. If you are securing the right to Life, then your objective isn’t to make sure people live forever, but to ensure that people’s lives aren’t ended prematurely by other people, that the right to Life isn’t taken away by someone else.
Once the COVID virus escaped from that lab in Wuhan (which does currently appear to be the most likely explanation for the origins of this disease) our government had already failed to protect the right to Life. That’s especially true if our government was funding the research going on in that lab in the first place (which also appears to be true). After the virus escaped, there was no stoping it. The virus was going to do what viruses do. The failure to protect the right to Life had already occurred. And, nothing any government did after that could undo that initial failure.
Governments across the country and around the world shifted into a mindset that they had to protect the health of their populations. They decided their purpose was to protect the right to Health. One problem. You don’t have a right to health otherwise everyone would be born healthy and stay healthy. We weren’t and we don’t. But, we do have a right to pursue Health. Just like you don’t have a right to be Happy, but you do have a right do pursue Happiness, you don’t have a right to be Healthy, but you do have a right to pursue Health.
Ben Franklin, who helped write the Declaration of Independence, once said, early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. He was saying your actions have an impact on your health. Your health requires your actions. You must pursue health if you want to have it. You have to go to be early and get enough rest, and you have to get up early and be active during the day. Your health is up to you. The pursuit of health is part of the pursuit of Happiness. Government can't secure your right to health because you don't have a right to health. You have a right to pursue your health, and that's what the government should have secured, your rights to pursue your own health against this virus.
So, people no longer trust our governmental institutions because for the past two years, they've all been doing things that were outside their purpose, away from their purpose, off of their purpose, in some cases, in direct opposition to their purpose. And, when purpose is unknown, abuse is inevitable. We no longer trust our governmental institutions because our governments have been abusing us by trying to do things no government has any business trying to do. And, as anyone who's been in an abusive situation will tell you, the first thing to go when you've been abused is trust.
So, how do you get trust back? Go back to your purpose. If our governments return to their purpose and stop trying to do things that are outside of their purpose, our trust in our governments will return. The irony here is that if our governments will start trying to do less, we will all start to trust them more.