You must make up your mind that peace will not be achieved by laying down your arms: abolition of the general terror of arms and of enslavement is what will bring peace.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero in a letter to Lucius Munatius Plancus
As I continue to read Cicero’s selected works compiled by Penguin Classics, the haunting picture that continues to be painted by Ciceros letters is one all to eerily familiar to the Modern Man in a Failing Republic in a Fallen World.
Much has been said up to this point regarding the second amendment in this country, almost ironically as billions of dollars are created to arm another people, in another country, on the other side of the world. The notion that the educated individual ascends above his need for arms continues to crumble for me as I continue to read further into the works of the greatest humans history has produced. One can have a greater picture of why a continental congress of educated leaders could have written a bill of writes protecting ones right to arms.
Ciceros note to Plancus while at first revelatory in is first charge, it was the second half that reminded me of this verse from Hebrews:
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
Hebrews 2:14-15 NIV
Most, it would seem in the Failing Republic, are as the author of Hebrews notes ‘held in slavery by their fear of death’. And as most see their lives in such single faceted and finite ways, their fear of death isn’t necessarily a fear for mortality it is a death of status, a death of entertainment, a death of access, a death of options, the death that would lead one to discipline.
That feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery. Nobody talks about it as such, though.
-David Foster Wallace
Our Failing Republic is a product of an aggregate of individuals now ruled by fears so small and numerous they’re laying on a bed of needles instead of bearing three nails to a cross. Even the crucified man is not tortured to the duration of the ever dying coward!
Will we all look past sensational headlines, tsunamis of meaningless tweets, and as Edith Roosevelt once noted, the small mindedness of discussing people? When will the time come when men will discuss ideas? Will that time arrive when it is already too late?
-Steven