September 3, 2007
by Clay Barham

Community always reflects a set of social habits built up over time.  It is the culture of a society.  It becomes habitual convention almost as if rooted in human DNA, passed from generation to generation.  Only when people challenge accepted and established cultural limitations, will they be able to break free of it and become what each is capable of becoming.  That takes courage and purpose, as it is always safer and easier simply to drift along in the stream with everyone else.

Cultures evolving from the dark ages, those where a few rule, make war, while the many serve their masters, form the limiting streams of community life in which they drift. The culture defines society and its workings.  If people lived in caves, working under the whip, with no knowledge of the sun and life above ground, that would be all they know.  Unless there is a yearning, a belief in something better, people will accept their stream of existence as it is.

Children, raised by adults limited by their culture, inherit it from parents, relatives and neighbors.  They pass it along to the children.  It is a subconscious acceptance of "you can't do that," or "this is what you are called to be and do," and "be satisfied with what you have."  The rule saying: "Never talk politics or religion" also protects the culture from challenge.  All societies and cultures in the world's history existed on the idea that a few ruled the many. It began with the tight-knit family and extended to the tribe.  Societal culture is fashioned from, and justified by, limiting the hot individual sins of fear, anger, envy and greed. Beyond the happiness of children playing, it had to be a dismal existence. Tension was present and the sword kept everyone in the stream.

Every one of us has behavior-limiting values, superstitions and prejudices impressed on our minds. These things, along with codes of behavior and social convention, kept things in balance. Those limitations serve as boundaries, like avenues or a stream in which we travel and drift. All people had undeveloped specific interests, aspirations, skills and talents to express, existing like a fire-in-the belly. Those burning sensations must have been deep down desires to break free of their restraints if they could. It was only fear of being different, or of the whip and blade, that cooled them down.

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It was the growing belly-burning flames of discontent, the individual's desire to break free, that pressured rulers and their surrogates to punish the curious and inventive members of community.  They had to meet pressure with counter-pressure.  Leaving that kind of society and finding their way to a New World was the only chance people had to break free of the ruler's pressure. Drastic, limiting and punitive religious pressures imposed on people caused some of the more courageous to flee England to Holland, then America. 
 
A band of religious escapees settled in New England.  Their leaders imposed a rigid, religion-centered two-class culture on their community. The few leading the many was a habit from the Old World and still accepted by the settlers. It was not long before the survival of the people challenged their failing culture.  They were starving and dying! Something had to change. They tried a complete departure from the old culture.  It was a lifting of most all external limitations, leaving only the moral teaching of the Bible to set limiting boundaries.  The new boundaries had to fit their situation, their existence and their need to survive.

They acquired and developed private property. The right to pursue one's own happiness was no longer challenged by anyone in authority.  They were individually free to follow their own interests, develop their corresponding skills and talents, and chase their own aspirations.  A new life and culture was being born and nurtured in New England.  It was a culture of self-sufficiency never before tried in this world.  People, for the first time in history, were free to breathe the sweet air of liberty.  This new life experience spread like a prairie fire throughout the newly established settlements.  Individual liberty began to produce an individual prosperity never before experienced.  Every man and woman in the New World had an opportunity to build his or her own life. As each prospered, so too did their families and communities.

From 1620 through 2000, less than four hundred years, the New World evolved into the freest and most prosperous Nation in the world. There were many bumps in the road, but America set the pace for the rest of the world, one they find difficult to match. The cultural stream was wider, deeper and moved much faster than those in the Old World.  Is it time for the modern politicians to narrow it, slow it down and dam it?  Is it time now for Americans to stop being free individuals and enter the new concentration camp of community ruled by the few?  In the year 2008, those questions may be answered.

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Clay Barham [send him email] has been a candidate for the California legislature and a stand-in talk show host for ABC.  He was educated in physical and behavioral sciences, with a Ph.D. in sociology.  He is the author of five books, with his latest being Foundations of Modern American Conservatism and Liberalism: The Roots of Freedom and Tyranny.  Visit his website at http://www.claysamerica.com.