# Start Here > Guest Forum >  Imagine

## Libertydreamer

If this country didn't have a history of slavery, imagine how dramatically different the history of this country would have been. And just imagine how incredibly different life in this country would be today........in so many many ways..........

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## fr33

It's worth imagining. That's for sure. Imagine if there were no need for the whiskey rebellion or if the whiskey rebellion would have taught the feds a lesson after they lost.

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## NorthCarolinaLiberty

Well, I suppose, but maybe it would be hard to isolate.  Seems like an issue in larger context.  You still, for example, had Indian massacre based on the same greedy impulse.  The US then jacked around a lot of people when it became a global power.  No, that's not slavery, but still a mentality.

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## tod evans

Imagine if the idiots could focus on something they could do something about.....

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## Spikender

Whenever I imagine the past, I like to imagine having a time machine and warning past Americans about what our country will be like so we can just go ahead and wipe ourselves off the map before the real pain and suffering can even begin.

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## Ronin Truth

Imagine if the Federalist coup against the Articles of Confederation had failed or been stopped and the other Founding Fathers anti-federalists had won the day.

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## euphemia

Imagine if the US wasn't the only country with a history of slavery.  Oh, wait!  That's true.

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## 56ktarget

Imagine if neo-confederates never hijacked our country...

Imagine

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## euphemia

Imagine if all Americans had not lost so many rights thanks to the northern invasion.

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## Lirtydreamer

Imagine living in a world of free market capitalism and sound money - both of which are two of mankind's greatest inventions. The fact that neither one are allowed to operate and function freely and properly as they should is the most egregious crime against humanity in the history of the world. Without the destructive power and control of world governments and central banks just imagine how differently life in the 20th century would have been - and just how differently life and everyone's overall standard of living would be today.

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## oyarde

Imagine , if I got to keep most of the money I earned and spent it on things that I knew were worthy ?

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## oyarde

Imagine if the Shawnee had won , and defeated the evil men who came forth to only give communism root in my lands . Could have been much better if all of them were held on the other side of the Alleghenies to kill and steal from one another. LOL

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## osan

> If this country didn't have a history of slavery, imagine how dramatically different the history of this country would have been. And just imagine how incredibly different life in this country would be today........in so many many ways..........


What is your point?

This nation was founded on the Empire model, meaning that slavery of one form or another is an inherent feature for all including the masters, for they too live in cages, the presence of gilding making it no less a prison than the dank and dark cell of cold and unfeeling stone.  The very architecture of the mindset that lead to the design of this land as a nation-state was inescapably Empire in its corner stones.  How else could it have been?  The men who designed the structure of the United States of America were marinaded in Empire, just are we, for it was that in which they were born and it was all they knew.  It was something of a small miracle they were able to think "outside the box" to the degree that they had.  The very notion of supplanting the king was in itself basically unthinkable for most.  The king was a given in basically all of the known world, save for those places peopled by so-called "savages".

Note that last bit.  People of the "new world" were regarded as uncivilized, which was true for the most part.  The savages had no recognizably great cities and no _obviously_ great works.  They had no engineers, no mathematics beyond perhaps the most rudimentary arithmetic. etc.  There was no overt evidence of "high culture" to the European eye; no architecture; no science; no _Christianity_; no industry; little to no evidence of sedentary life.  In short, there was no evidence of most of the things that in the minds of such men as the Europeans constituted civilization, and they were largely correct.  Therefore, the native people were indeed savages in the sense of being "untamed", which is to say "unbroken", "undomesticated" in the way dogs and cows have become.

The error, the great flaw, or disconnect in the European perception laid in the depth of their fallacious _presumption_ that the absence of such features in a society was somehow inherently abhorrent or otherwise inferior.  They were unable to accept in their minds that such absences as witnessed in the savage tribes could be the hallmarks of any sort of life that was even remotely worth living.  For such men as the Europeans, and indeed the rest of the _civilized_ world all these hallmarks such as huge public works (cathedrals, monuments, etc.) were absolutely essential to any life worth living and the creation of such works almost invariably necessitates slavery of one form or another.  Without such elements of civilization, the only existence deemed possible was essentially hell on earth.  Those men were trapped by the limitations placed upon them by those assumptions that to them were so "obviously true" that they could never be questioned.  Because of that, the fundamental elements of tyranny _had_ to be incorporated into the basic architecture of this nation.  Those men had no choice precisely because not only did they not recognize those elements as such, they perceived them as _essential_ to the preservation of an orderly society, order having been (perhaps tacitly) ranked above the element of freedom in importance.

Valuing order above freedom is perhaps very understandable, precisely because people fear chaos so deeply that they would prefer a predictable tyrant king to what was almost certainly perceived in those days as unpredictable individual caprice running amok across the land.  The Gordian knot of entangled layers through which an analyst must pick in order to get to the heart of the nature of the human being is daunting.  Suffice to say here that for various, often subtle, and frequently cryptic reasons, many of which are simultaneously held in one's thoughts in violent mutual contradiction, people of the Empire mindset (regardless of the specific flavor of Empire in question) fear chaos more than they want true freedom.  This is a truth that perhaps damns the human race to perpetual slavery and misery, though hopefully that will not prove the case.

Because the Framers were the products of their age and history, they were able to wander only so far from the plantation on which they were bred as serfs.  Because of the depth and the sheer power of their fundamental assumptions, the free lives of the savage people as such were beyond any possibility as considerations for America.  This is all very understandable, of course.  How many of us would envision a rightful nation where any man was free to apprehend small children and rape them with impunity?  I will go out on a limb here and say not too many.  Most of us recoil with some violence at that thought, rightly or otherwise.  For most of us _there is no discussion on the matter_;  sex with a child is something seen as so abhorrent, perceived as so fundamentally wrong and evil, that we do not give it any consideration whatsoever and that indeed to do so is to raise hackles and tempt one's fellows to consider that a beating might be in order.  For the Framers, so it must have been in their minds when regarding savage life vis-à-vis civilized.

Indeed the fundamental assumptions about the two modes of living, savage and civil, are so deeply ingrained in us as the latter being "right" and "good", the other "wrong" and "evil", that we have come to make use of the very words "savage" to connote the chaos and violence we generally fear and abhor, and "civil" to connote all good propriety.  "At least they were civil with each other throughout the divorce", and "James beat his random victim savagely" are but two humble examples illustrating how deeply seated are our prejudices regarding the perception of what it means to be civil v. savage.  They are so deeply seated as to not be even noticeable, much less questionable, and that is one of the primal failings of human beings in general.  That anything exists which cannot be questioned damns us as a species either to inevitable and ignominious extinction, or to a future holding no better potential for us than as inmates within the insurmountable and impregnable walls of the prisons we erect about ourselves in our minds.

Because of this simple, yet seemingly unbreakable habit, the Framers were unable to escape recreating Empire.  The "clean sheet" that the Constitution purported to represent was anything but.  This was not, however, perforce the result of evil intent, but of an inability to see past certain mental boundaries those men held in place as artifacts of the era and culture in which they were raised.  For this they cannot be held to blame because breaking away from one's most closely held and fundamental beliefs is perhaps the single most daunting thing a human being can be called upon to do, even in the face of overwhelming evidence compelling them to do so.  Imagine, for example, a Christian, Jew, or Muslim choosing to question the existence of their God?  For most it is not possible because they were taught that to question such a thing was blasphemy and would result in eternal damnation, a prospect that still holds sufficient terror in the individual's mind such that they would never even think to go there, much less actually do it... at least not openly.

Therefore, the fundamental elements that invariably lead to tyranny were woven into the very fabric of the American Constitution, likely unbeknownst to some plurality of the architects, if not the totality.  They were simply incapable of escaping the walls of their thought-prisons precisely because they could not envision a world where there were no rulers, for that is anarchy and we all know where anarchy leads: chaos and death.  There was nowhere else for those men to go because in their minds there _had_ to be _written law_ to control the untrustworthy human.  To some degree they were right, but their chosen solution has been empirically tested and it has failed miserably.  Their solution was a key enabler of one of the Four Necessities: Lassitude.  

The structure of American governance fails sufficiently by the simple fact that it establishes _government_ in the first place.  This fact alone holds the potential for _conceptual_ _separability_, which is to say that "government" by the very nature of the notion becomes separated from those whom it ostensibly governs in the mind of the individual.  Conceptual separation leads directly and with some rapidity to _functional_ separation.  For all practical purposes, government becomes its own entity separate and apart from non-government because it becomes so in the minds of people.  Thought forms reality.  This is precisely what has happened in America, just as it has with every other constituted Empire throughout all of humanity's written history.  There are no exceptions to this because there _can_ be none. This habit of separating, the byproduct of categorization, appears to be hard-wired into our mid-brains.  It is a survival instrument that would seem to work marvelously well where the social groups are small, yet fails with vast and overwhelming misery when people gather in groups of increasing size.

Therefore, when "government" becomes its own reality in the minds of people, the tendency is for people to at first begin to rely upon it, thereby relieving them of an ever increasing proportion of their individual responsibilities to themselves and their fellows to govern themselves and to _act as governors_ when others fail in their capacities of proper self-governance.  Inevitably, reliance gives way to obligation as the full-time governors seek and invariably receive ever greater latitude in their discretion to dictate and enforce.  At that point, tyranny has stepped into the shoes of the king and the individual finds himself once again faced with the choice of singing the ancient tune of the whipmaster or being consumed, for at that point no other options are tolerated, much less offered.

Most of us are hopelessly trapped in the mental prisons we erect about ourselves with the help of our fellows.  So long as that truth and habit persist, we will be doomed to the repetition of the same old dance over and over again into what can only be viewed as the bleak landscape of a grim future.  The advances in technology cement the guarantee of this with ever greater certainty.  We are indeed at a crossroad, for before much longer technology will have clearly swept beyond a threshold where so much power will reside in so few hands that no amount of resistance will overcome the will of the tyrants.

Tyranny is a necessary characteristic of Empire.  One cannot have the latter without the former precisely because the former is part and parcel of the definition of the latter.  Tyranny is the very foundation upon which Empire is built and so long as people want something for nothing and are willing to tolerate the use of violence to get it, which is the essence of Empire, tyranny will remain with us and freedom as shaped by the principles of proper human relations shall remain, at best, as a mere and curious abstraction with no evidence of manifestation of which to speak.

Time is here.

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## Anti Federalist

Imagine there's no heaven...

It's easy, if you try...

No hell below us...

Above us, only sky...

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## pcosmar

Imagine Whirled Peas.

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## Lucille

Well said, Osan, as usual.

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## Danke

Imagine if black Friday was everyday!

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