The Sun God Syndrome

By A.J. DiCintio

For young people, especially.

Want to get real about political reality?

If "yes," understand that none of us ever will unless we overcome the urges which impel the human mind to the worst kind of air-headed foolishness and begin our journey by recognizing two fundamental truths.

First:

Except for relatively few of the hundreds of billions of seconds which have ticked and tocked the passage of time since the Age of Agriculture began, humans have lived under the rule of the morally, intellectually, and emotionally disfigured frauds known as pharaohs, kings, queens, tyrants, emperors, dictators, chairmen, first secretaries, fuhrers, or gangsters of the kind who comprised the Gang of Four.

Second:

Our nation's Founders understood that leaders elected under a democratic system are hardly immune to the depravities that afflict the minds of the fakes and psychopaths mentioned above.

To put the latter point another way, America's authors courageously chose to keep their minds focused on reality, not fantasy, and therefore accepted the profound implications of Washington's warning about "that love of power and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart."

Those truths in mind, we continue by reminding ourselves that at every turn in their efforts to establish a government "of the people, for the people, by the people" the Founders sought to minimize not merely the mischief but the downright evil of which government is eternally capable, a reality supported by the following facts about the republic they created.

It divides the federal government into three branches, each with its own separate, limited powers.

It places de facto limits on the federal government's formidable legislative powers by apportioning the House according to population and the Senate with two Senators per state, regardless of the state's population

It further limits the federal government's power through the Tenth Amendment.

And it places strict limits upon government's power over individual citizens through a Bill of Rights.

Having understood that the concept of limited government is absolutely crucial to the life of a democracy which recognizes and protects the people's "unalienable Rights" to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." we are able to grasp why, in 1849, the iconic American thinker and individualist Henry David Thoreau expressed his fundamental belief about government in these seven words:

"That government is best which governs least."

And being mature in that understanding, we realize further that the price of Thoreau's ideal truly is "eternal vigilance" because human nature dictates that society will be forever plagued by ostensibly new but, in reality, utterly decrepit socio-political inventions which pervert Jeffersonianism to assert, "That government is best which governs most from seats of power farthest removed from the people."

We will not be surprised, therefore, to learn that at virtually the same time Thoreau was singing the praises of the liberty and individualism which lie at the heart of the American Experiment, a supremely arrogant, "temporary dictatorship" loving, human rights hating lump of ludicrousness published his "Manifesto," lying the stinking, abhorrent lie that the dictatorial socialism it advocates reflects "scientific" thinking.

We will not be shocked when we observe that in democracies across the world, power grubbing politicians and their true-believing shills of perfectly obedient "Doesn't Everyone?" incestuousness have labored diligently to lipstick the Manifesto's model, though precious few in our country possess the honesty of Polly Toynbee, the leftist British journalist who openly and unequivocally gushes, "The nanny state is the good state."

And we will not be stunned upon noticing that those who agree with Toynbee, whatever – ism they attach to themselves, remain absolutely silent regarding the reality that the political gods they would empower to rule over us represent the most talented, most accomplished, and most celebrated individuals to rise from the swarm of droning, rapacious locusts whose members are universally identified by their insatiable love of power, infinite capacity for lying, and endless predilection for the most rotten kinds of hypocrisy.

Finally, there is this good news for individuals who get real about politics and government despite the frustrations certain to challenge the optimism of every person who deeply values and respects what William Faulkner called "the old verities."

They will never suffer the anger, disillusion, and betrayal experienced by citizens who fail to heed Ben Franklin's advice, "He that lives upon hope will die fasting."

They will never suffer the humiliation which results from having exposed oneself as self-sickened by a particularly malignant case of Sun God Syndrome, a fate that befell the Washington Post's Richard Cohen when, recently, he slobbered over sun goddess Hillary's "daunting intellect" and then madly gushed that the despair – inducing vastness of her intelligence is exceeded only by that of the sun god also "named Clinton."

And they will never suffer the condemnation deservedly heaped upon those who betray spirit, mind, and body by descending to the dark, hellish place where, starry-eyed and mindless, they bow as perversely low as humans can by making a religion of politics and gods of politicians.

© A.J. DiCintio