Few people seek to understand. Few people look for the answer to the question, "Why?". Few people probe the depths of human nature and natural law to discover what is morally just. Most rely on others to tell them and they trust what they are told or maybe they rebel against what they are told but they still don't look for the answers themselves.
Human nature produces this deficit of thought. We would rather leave the work of in-depth thought to others and just trust their conclusions. It's easier.
This is not a new problem. Throughout history this work has been left to a few inspired individuals who were willing to invest in the study or who had a desire to change the world around them through the introduction of new ideas for social management. Some were good and some were bad. They were able to wield such influence, whether for good or evil, because the people around them allowed it.
Today, the problem manifests itself in our society in the form of politicians who work only for self aggrandizement and a populace who continues to elect them even though they are producing an evil that will eventually cost that same populace their freedom and prosperity. We vote for the politician who promises us a "free" solution to our immediate concern rather than a statesman who promises to create for us a free society where we are able to find our own solutions to our immediate concerns and work to provide for ourselves and our posterity. We do this because we have not invested in the work of thought that would reveal to us the results of our current course. We don't teach our students how to think. We don't read the works of the great minds that our Founding Fathers admired. We don't study. We are lazy and our idleness will be our ruin.
What can I do? Read the work of John Locke, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, DeTocqueville, The Holy Bible and other works of religion and philosphy and study what they say, look for the basis of their conclusions and see if you agree. Try to be objective, invoke your personal observations but not so much your personal experiences. They tend to compromise your objectivity. We won't all arrive at the same conclusions but we will be better informed and better able to lead and ultimately build a better tomorrow for ourselves and our children.
