Post-Benign Despots

What is with you guys at the top of the food chain? Are there none of you left who still have a shred of noblesse oblige remaining in your sense of self?

As it becomes increasingly unlikely that my kids or grand kids were or will be told this in the schools you have decimated, I am going to write it down for the record.

In my earliest school years, maybe fourth grade, I recall being told of why the founders of this country created the form of government they did. They understood implicitly not only that power corrupts, but that the corruptible are apt to seek power.

It goes something like this.

They looked at all of history and saw bloody tyrants far worse than the one they had been fighting, and cringed. Even the few benign despots were dismaying examples because of how shortly such rule lasted, for the most benign were frequently succeeded or replaced by tyrants. In all instances, there was corruption awaiting its opportunity to begin or increase.

The founders attempted to minimize the effects of the corruptible attaining power, so they sought to institute a non-violent method for the transfer of power. And not simply generation to generation, but from limited periods of time to the next.

Hence they created a republic. But not a republic of men; a republic with a constitution describing a limited number of positive duties and containing a list of powers that were proscribed: a constitutional republic.

From the very beginning there were men who carried on intrigues to garner power for themselves and their backers. Despite our founders best efforts, despite the checks and balances they built into this greatest republic that ever existed because it allowed the mind of man to flourish, you (and a few other misanthropic sociopaths who gamed the system now and before your time) have successfully schemed, finally, to negate it.

How do you illegitimates live with yourself?

More importantly, you realize that judgment day is coming, and your Judge will not be impressed. What profit you to gain the whole world yet lose your immortal soul? Even in a universe where you may be convinced that God does not exist, no matter how high you rise in your own estimation, you will have marked yourself forever as the scum of the earth.