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The great philosopher Plato addresses the US Congress:
Honored leaders, esteemed thinkers, and guardians of the American Republic,
I stand before you—not as a citizen of your time but as a voice from an age long past, where the seeds of civilization were sown and where the specter of its ruin was studied with due gravity. You are the stewards of a great republic, one that stands on the precipice of either flourishing through wisdom or decaying through folly. It is not power, wealth, or numbers that will determine your fate, but rather your allegiance to truth, virtue, and the discipline of reason.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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The Struggle Between Truth and Illusion
In my time, I wrote of a cave where prisoners sat in darkness, mistaking shadows on a wall for reality. They knew only what was projected before them by unseen hands. And I ask you: Are your citizens not also captive to shadows? Do they not mistake rhetoric for reality, passion for principle, and volume for veracity?
The citizenry looks to you for governance, but what they receive instead is often spectacle. You craft words as artisans craft metal, shaping them not always to reflect truth, but to wield influence. When policies are made not in service to what is right but to what is expedient, you do not govern—you merely entertain. Yet no republic can endure when the governed cease to believe that truth exists at all.
Let us be plain: If truth is merely a subjective construct, bent to whims and feelings, then all communication, all discourse, and all governance become absurd. A republic that denies objective truth unravels into incoherence, where power, not wisdom, dictates reality.
The Perils of Unchecked Democracy
I warned my own city against the seductions of unbridled democracy, for I knew its tendency to exalt momentary passions over enduring wisdom. In time, the crowd demands to be led not by those who are just, but by those who can best mirror their grievances and flatter their desires. The noble statesman is cast aside, and in his place rises the demagogue—a man who trades in half-truths and is loved not for his virtue but for his ability to inflame the multitude. Such a republic does not grow strong; it grows restless, resentful, and ripe for ruin.
You, leaders of this Republic, are entrusted not merely to echo the will of the people but to educate and elevate it. If you shape policy by counting voices rather than by weighing truths, you will create a state that is not ruled, but that is manipulated. If you submit wisdom to whim, you will find that whims are merciless masters, shifting as the wind and eroding all that is firm and lasting.
On Justice and the Common Good
I have said before that justice is not the advantage of the stronger, nor is it the mere balancing of grievances. Justice is that which orders a society toward its highest good. But today, justice has been reduced to a currency of endless transactions—one grievance exchanged for another, one injury repaid with another. You divide citizens into factions, setting them against one another like combatants in the arena, as if the republic were a prize to be seized rather than a trust to be safeguarded.
What is the purpose of your station if not to unite rather than divide, to strengthen rather than enfeeble? A nation that devours itself from within does not need an enemy from without. The walls of a city are not its stone ramparts, but the character of its people, and the first responsibility of a statesman is to cultivate that character. You must ask yourselves: Do we govern to heal, or do we govern to conquer?
The Incoherence of Open Borders and Lawlessness
Shall I feign astonishment at your notion of an open border? To dissolve the very definition of a nation, allowing chaos in the name of charity while forsaking the duty of protection? The first obligation of any government is to its own people. To allow the vulnerable to be preyed upon by traffickers, criminals, and cartels under the guise of compassion is not nobility—it is abdication. If the rule of law is optional, then why have law at all? A republic that disregards its own boundaries will soon cease to be a republic at all.
And who suffers? The weak. Women and girls subjected to unspeakable atrocities in transit, children abandoned, lives treated as mere currency in a lawless trade. A government that fails to ensure the safety of those it is charged to protect is not a government but an accomplice in disorder.
The DEI Malaise: Mob Rule in Intellectual Disguise
You speak of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and yet, the fruits of this movement are neither diverse, nor equitable, nor inclusive. It is but a fresh coat of paint upon the same old tyranny—the mob enforcing compliance, demanding obeisance, and rewarding mediocrity. It claims to eradicate racism by institutionalizing new forms of it. It claims to elevate merit, yet discards it in favor of quotas and identity metrics.
Do not deceive yourselves: a nation that abandons excellence for appeasement does not uplift the marginalized; it ensures the continued descent into mediocrity and resentment. The republic you were entrusted to govern does not flourish through division and favoritism, but through the cultivation of virtue, ability, and justice.
The Immutable Reality of Sex and the Family
The most basic truths—those written into the very nature of our being—are now under siege. There are two sexes. Not many. Not an ever-expanding spectrum of self-invention. Two. To deny this is not progress but the deliberate unmooring of civilization from reality.
The family, the sacred bond upon which all ordered societies are built, is derided as an artifact of oppression. Marriage, once upheld as a pillar of civilization, is now treated as optional, disposable, or wholly redefined. Yet without family, what is a nation but a collection of individuals bound by nothing but taxation and governance? A republic that does not honor the sanctity of family will find itself replaced by something far more chilling: the cold, impersonal hand of the state, governing a populace fragmented and directionless.
The Higher Law: Philosophy Meets Theology
Even philosophy, though noble, finds its completion in something higher. If there is no objective, universal good, then every man becomes his own god, and civil order is reduced to scaffolding, bending to the whims of those in power. Your own Constitution presupposes a moral order beyond human decree—a reality not constructed but discovered.
C.S. Lewis, once a formidable atheist turned Christian, warned that without a higher good to which all are accountable, power becomes the only measure of right. It is no accident that oaths are sworn upon a Bible, for in the end, each of us will be accountable—not merely to history, but to the Supreme Judge beyond this world.
A Final Plea: Choose Greatness, Not Decay
If you wish to preserve your republic, you must first preserve what makes it worth preserving. May you have the courage to fulfill this duty.
The choice is yours. The future will answer.
May this comment find us all ever closer to God, and His Justice.
Good imaginative article, I wonder what St. Aquinas would have said.
Speaking of him, I recently proposed why all our Intellects grow Darker through each Fatherless generation raised, Our being Western society, others accepting the insane as normal, and perhaps some of us readers grow slowly more Darken and evil-Blind, proposed in this comment: https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/rip-dei-the-end-of-our-captivity#comment-4953 It doubles as a reason why our Godless law and practitioners need never harm a life and it still suffocates soul-Clarity and Love.
This mentioned factor has the advantage of giving a rational reason regardless of what people believe for when the hypothetical life becomes.
I decided that Truth as a goal, a desire, a want, has been murdered in our Western and World’s sickening hearts. I refuse to believe anything now that does not ‘fit’ into my 61ish years of experience, especially since the Holy Ghost stripped my Family-Demon and Clarity of God and Satan and my sin-filled life, followed by my Conversion to Catholicism and my years of ‘something not right’ new Mass Rite, and other aspects.
Until I learned the new Mass was violently forced on the Body of Christ like a horse collapsing and rolling over the rider – on purpose – and so I started a deeper personally direct Catechises, and started finding other questionable things after 1958, like not releasing the 3rd Secret of Fadima in 1960 (and I do not believe it has yet been released in full, or in the true version) and suspect it was suppressed because of the Modernist takeover of Vatican, but somewhere along this shambling path of Ugliness behind the false ‘ape’ church God put the Traditional Latin Mass and knowledge of the pre-Vatican II Pope’s Chruch, the full form of Wonderous Loving Beauty before me.
So, significant levels of unTruth, inJustice, and disOrder is what this Jacob’s Ladder down to Hell we are Suffering, this Ladder we have been slipping down, another Level of existence closer to Hell then God.
Well, Praise the Lord that I know at least that. Do we want to get even closer to anti-Truth, Justless, Chaotic, Loveless, Quantum Firment deep paradox where God is both dead and alive on His Cross – depending on our Faith, if we have Faith then Christ is Risen, and we Ascend back up Ladder filled with Purgatory Mercy, but without Faith we Blaspheme the Holy Ghost and He can and resurrect Him and us. ..
.. so we suffer drowning in the Quantum Firment that God Willed Creations from, our every whim, though, world, .. is manifested and tortures us, without Divine Perfection or the protection of Him we endlessly suffer ourselves and our imperfections, as they manifest and torment.
But I digress. I asked ChatGPT recently on what laws would be needed changed to allow every social or personal crime like those of 10 Commandments and others our legal system will not or cannot find Justice for, so perhaps a local community of 5 fathers or grandfathers that have raised successfully decent adults, and they are the local court to manage the cases of liars, of false promise, of crimes of women that are now unpunishable but damage and destroy lives, ..
.. with the ruling of guilty having a sentence of Public Pain and Shame. Each Saturday all those convicted that week are taken to a public place and secured to a tree or pole, and a collar placed around neck and then the Taser pain for the sentenced time while other watch, and streamed on video into Web with details of what, why, where, etc.
At 14 yo each older child required to see at least 3 of the Pubic Pain and Shame and learn why, and their questions answered, “no. Jane if you never want that to happen to you then you must not lie, make false promises, …, and you will not be punished.”
At 15 yo and older this Punishment is available to those who really want it – enough to Sin and harm others and society.
Well, ChatGTP outlined that such Loving Corrections that I wish to God I grew-up in such a society instead of this putrid lying death Level sliding us all toward Hell and insanity, well UN would consider it ‘torture’ and likely this GreatSatan, this soul-murdering horror of a nation, would likely do the same, and a few Constitutional Amendments need changing, and additions, and of course the thickness around us of Godless Loveless Hate-filled soul-murdering Demonic-Oppressed souls would have to understand what True Love is, and sometimes it is being Tasered till Screaming and soiling yourself.
God Bless., Steve