What do I mean when I refer to Americanism? I do not use that casually, I refer to very specific qualities, which are covered in my pending book: “Americanism. The Life Guiding Principles of Freedom.” but as it is pending, it is not yet available for reading. (It takes me a long time to write stuff, I am not that good of a writer.) So I present in brief, the Pillars of Americanism, which are the subjects of said book.
The “ideology” by which I am building America, what I call Americanism, is itself built on three understandings, what I call the “Pillars of Americanism.” They are:
- Spiritual Living,
- Freedom, explained for the first time via the “Life Guiding Principles of Freedom”,
- and Simple Competence.
I’ve listed these in order, though working on any one of these will help in learning the other two requisites to Americanism, as I present it. The most accessible (easiest to do…) are the Life Guiding Principles of Freedom. As you will soon see, each of these are required, but let’s start at the beginning.
Spiritual Living
The essence of spirituality for me, is an awareness and reliance on things beyond my ability to see and understand. There are all sorts of things real, that we cannot see and do not understand. Our sciences are devoted to learning what we can about a few of these things, yet there is so much more, we have no idea how much. God, whoever and whatever God happens to be, I do not know, created us. By us, I mean ALL of it. The universe and beyond. Time itself. And in our creation as human animals, along with the rest of the animals, there is a love in our being here. We have value to creation, to the creator, by virtue of being here. While we are here. There is great benevolence in life. Spiritual living is an understanding and embrace of this underlying, overbearing fact, most of which is beyond our ability to see and understand, yet entirely within our ability to experience, when we stop our own noise long enough to notice it.
I lived for years not wanting to live at all. I did not want to die, but I did not want to live either, because of the pain in living. But for all that time I was living by my own means and understanding, which as a human animal, is very limited, and completely inadequate to a happy productive life. I’ve been very religious in the past, and that did not help either, because religion was still within my understanding and control, religion is not spiritual, explicitly so. God’s grace will not interfere with your own noisy nonsense. You have to shut up and wait and trust and let it go. When I did these things, my world did not fall apart because I was no longer “in control.” My world, my LIFE got better because I lost that illusion, the delusion of control, and LET good things happen.
Since then, for me, my pride is gratitude in being a part of things that go well (or badly), rather than taking credit for something I was only a part of. This current effort being a great case in point. I have my part, and for that part, I am gratefully satisfied in showing up and doing what I can.
Spiritual living is requisite to allowing genius to happen in your life. And genius is a wonderful grace from God. There is so much more to this, but this is “in brief” after all. For now, understand that spiritual living is a core requisite of Americanism, thus being an American, as I present it.
The Life Guiding Principles of Freedom
This is my marketing tittle for “The Ethic of Freedom.” “The ethic of freedom” is very poli-sci, but lousy in vernacular conversation. But freedom is an ethic, and as an ethic, it is important for people to know what an ethic actually is: a protocol of occurrence. OK, that’s probably not helpful either. An ethic is a recognized framework by which something happens. Let’s just present it. There are as of this morning (I just split value and need into two separate principles), seven ordinal principles in the ethic of freedom: value, need, responsibility, liberty, action, results, satisfaction. They proceed in just that order, freedom begins with value, which exists due to our being alive. Life itself is requisite to everything. (God’s fluorescence through the living physics of empirical matter.) So, in brief:
- Value: what is important to you. You choose what to value, though there are lots of values that are not really optional, like survival and an intimacy with God. Sincerity, it is the very cause of freedom. Without this, you have no life that you’ll want to live. Or at least that’s how it is for me.
- Need: needs arise from your values. Needs are specific things to get or do to that arise from your chosen values. They are important because you choose to value them.
- Responsibility: having a need, you also choose to satisfy it. You take responsibility for meeting your need. This is the most important principle, because liberty follows responsibility. The heavy lifting in the lingual establishment of rights, second to value, is responsibility, not liberty.
- Liberty: not much to say here, except for the clear establishment of the authority to act on a thing. The establishment though, is done by responsibility. You can hire someone to meet a need, at which point they have the responsiblity, subsequently the liberty, to do it. Liberty follows responsibility, and if you lose a liberty, it is because someone else is taking responsibility for something you need. Do not let that happen!
- Action: so far its all thought and planning. Doing is what is real, doing is what is productive. Nothing happens until it happens, and it happens by doing, not needing, nor wanting, nor hoping, nor wishful thinking. Doing is real, nothing else. (Nothing in language is real.) We learn what to do when we go to do. Even me in this campaign. Spirituality is very helpful here, because you do not foresee how things will go, nor what will actually be needed to complete a “thing,” until you do it. It frees us from “starter’s paralysis.” I would never attempt to do what I am doing with this campaign, except for my spiritual fitness to tackle something I have not done before, and do not know how to do, except to do it, and learn along the way. That is the power of spiritual living, and why it is so important to simple competence, mentioned later.
- Results: finishing the job (yes, you also have to finish the job!), you are in possession of the results of your work. This is where the incompetents, through government crime, steal your productivity, when you let them. And good or bad, you own what you did. Results are defined and recognizable. They are property, your property.
- Satisfaction: do your results satisfy the need that arose from your value(s)? This principle is very familiar to code developers, cause we always (should always…) check to see if we met the needs that created the job in the first place. It loops back to value. This is where we learn. The only real failure in life is to not learn. This principle is the learning principle, and the “still got more to do…” principle too. Speaking for myself, I rarely get it right the first time. Usually, I eventually settle for the best I can do, which is just fine.
Because these principles do loop back to check itself, I also call the ethic of freedom the “Circle of Competence.” Now that there are seven principles, I’ll look for some clever tie in with “The Seven Deadly Sins.” How about: “The Seven Virtues of Power.”? I’ll think about it… These are the life guiding principles of freedom. They explain for the first time, so far as I’ve discovered, what “freedom” actually is. For all the noise about “freedom” people cannot tell you what it is. As an ethic, it is not any one thing, but an ethic, which is a protocol of occurrence. I hope that makes more sense now. That’s it “in brief.”
Simple Competence
Simple competence, like rigorous honesty, is competence at its purest most competent form. People complicate stuff to induce an incompetence that only they can fix, in an attempt to exploit you. Competence is simple, because it is the ability to do successfully (create value) a thing that we can humanly/spiritually do. Complications interfere with that, and are, as mentioned, an attempted exploit, and let’s not forget ego either. The “look at me” factor.
Simple competence is the defining characteristic of Americanism, thus an American, as I present it. Simple competence is productive, sustainable, wealthy. Poverty is an absence of simple competence, as explained by the ethic of freedom: value, need, responsibility, action, results, satisfaction, in this circular order. Poverty is evidence of a lack of freedom, a slavery to incompetence, and when willful, it is evil. You cannot break any of these principles of freedom and exhibit simple competence.
Simple competence is the solution for charitable needs, charitable giving. Like the saying says: “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for his life!” Simple competence. It is what is missing from America, our governing, the practice of legal, in each of us until and unless we become Americans, by way of Americanism as I’ve presented it. This is not so because I say it, I say it because it is so. I did not create this, I only present in language my experience and understanding of this material, which is very very real. As God made it. Simple competence IS the arbiter of correct.
That’s it, in brief. Americanism, the life guiding principles of freedom provide a context in which we are able to be Americans. Spiritual living, the ethic of freedom, simple competence. The health and well being of society comes from the health and well being of its people. Americanism and the life guiding principles of freedom are doable by everyone, and starts with valuing our own lives while opening ourselves up to more than we can see and understand. God is real, whoever and whatever God happens to be, I do not know, and there is benevolence in our creation. Intimacy with creation, with God, as a living part of God’s creation is such a gift, just being here is a mind blowing, heart filling realization!
“Americanism wages peace on the world—and the world is better for it!”
Learn it, live it, love it. And let’s found America!
David Weeks
Candidate United States Senate, Florida, 2018