The People of The United States,
THE three last numbers of this paper have been dedicated to an enumeration of the dangers to which we should be exposed, in a state of disunion, from the arms and arts of foreign nations. I shall now proceed to delineate dangers of a different and, perhaps, still more alarming kind--those which will in all probability flow from dissensions between the States themselves, and from domestic factions and convulsions. These have been already in some instances slightly anticipated; but they deserve a more particular and more full investigation.
THIS was true so many years ago, as it is TRUE TODAY.
DESPITE my conclusion from my previous letter, or perhaps BECAUSE OF that conclusion, we must address, again, this issue of DISSENSIONS from WITHIN. In this case, as in the former case, we must address those of constant operation upon a society — from domestic factions and convulsions.
Of this description are the love of power or the desire of pre-eminence and dominion--the jealousy of power, or the desire of equality and safety.
In the former case, we focused on these operations between independent sovereigns or states. TODAY, we must expand this to include AGENTS OF COMMERCE and AGENTS OF CAUSES. Therefore I must adjust my former argument from sovereigns to these agents:
A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these [AGENTS] should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.
We will begin with the latter and then move onto the former.
AGENTS OF CAUSES are those who wish to impose their will upon others through public displays. These displays, in a civilized society, take the form of public discourse, public petitions, and public protests, all of which are expected to be peaceful. These are not the AGENTS that we are concerned with. In recent DECADES, many AGENTS OF CAUSES have begun resorting to acts of VIOLENCE and HATRED, often accusing their opposition of the very acts they themselves are performing. This is not new, as I discussed this in my previous writings with respect to specific Nation State Despots imposing their causes upon their constituents and other nations.
The DIFFERENCE TODAY is the proliferation of these AGENTS across not only the Political Class, but from all classes of society, each pursuing their Hyphenated Cause, in apposition to our Common Cause. These classes include the Wealthy Elite, the Political Elite, the Disfranchised Ethnic Classes, the Middle Income Class, the lower Income Class, and most fervently the Media Class which spans all of these other classes. As a result of these Individual Causes, we are no longer UNITED, but DIVIDED by our own self-interests at the cost of our Common Cause.
How have we approached this impasse, you must ask? It has been whittled away with the finest of approaches incrementally stretching the bounds of INTERPRETATION of the term FREEDOM. First, the Areligious introduced their Freedom to worship other than God or gods, but self. Then each of the Hyphenated Americans took up their own Independent Causes. Eventually splintering our Once Great Nation into a tumult of Islands of Individuality seeking to destroy the Common Cause.
MANY, to this day, do not see the change, because it was so subtly executed through indoctrination of our future leaders beginning in their primary education and growing with them into the Institution of Higher Learning to the point where we have four generations who know no different.
What is scariest of all is how the AGENTS OF COMMERCE have capitalized on this hyphenation to cater to individual self-desires to capture markets by targeted campaigns that highlight and emphasize our Hyphenations instead of encouraging our Common Cause. You may have heard the Truth of:
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils.
The AGENTS OF COMMERCE have followed their love to the point where they objectively see We the People as a COMMODITY to be sold through the collection of information concerning our nature and desires. So many years ago, I could not have fathomed the degree to which we would freely give ourselves as a Nation to these AGENTS out of mere convenience for our individual self-interests.
DIFFERENT from the wars I warned of in my previous letters so long ago, TODAY, we are inundated with a CULTURAL WAR that expands beyond any National Territories to empower AGENTS OF COMMERCE with the ultimate power to destroy everything we hold dear. Not through wealth of resources, although they do have monetary wealth beyond my former imagination, but through wealth of information to be used at their will for their cause - COMMERCE.
I conclude as I did in my former letters:
Let the point of extreme depression to which our national dignity and credit have sunk, let the inconveniences felt everywhere from a lax and ill administration of government, let the revolt of a part of the State of North Carolina, the late menacing disturbances in Pennsylvania, and the actual insurrections and rebellions in Massachusetts, declare--!
So far is the general sense of mankind from corresponding with the tenets of those who endeavor to lull asleep our apprehensions of discord and hostility between the States, in the event of disunion, that it has from long observation of the progress of society become a sort of axiom in politics, that vicinity or nearness of situation, constitutes nations natural enemies. An intelligent writer expresses himself on this subject to this effect: "NEIGHBORING NATIONS (says he) are naturally enemies of each other unless their common weakness forces them to league in a CONFEDERATE REPUBLIC, and their constitution prevents the differences that neighborhood occasions, extinguishing that secret jealousy which disposes all states to aggrandize themselves at the expense of their neighbors." This passage, at the same time, points out the EVIL and suggests the REMEDY.
What is True about Nations is true today about AGENTS.
PUBLIUS