WHY ROCK THE BOAT?
Principle over pragmatism can get you in a lot of trouble...or it can kick start a country. It did one July 250 years ago.
The opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a heckuva way to start off a break-up letter to your monarch. In 1776, that’s considered treason and signing it means there’s a good chance you end up with a noose around your neck.
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
“Dissolve the political bands…?”
Why do it unless you have nothing left in life to lose? If you’re poor or destitute, it might make sense. On the other hand, it makes little sense to do it if you’re wealthy or well off and comfortable. And yet the people who assembled in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 were not poor or destitute. Quite the contrary.
George Washington was a-well-to-do part of the Virginia landed gentry as were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. John Adams was a Harvard educated lawyer and part of the Boston aristocracy. Go down the list of everyone who signed the Declaration of Independence and you’ll find they all held high positions in society and had a good measure of wealth.
Most, if not all, revolutions in recorded history are rebellions by the poor against the governing authority because fighting and possibly dying is preferable to poor economic conditions that lead to starvation. When the people of France were starving, Marie Antoinette’s response “Let them eat cake” ranks right up there as one of the greatest hold-my-beer moments in history. She literally lost her head for that one. The causes of all revolutions and rebellions are complex, involving the intricate interplay of a number of societal forces but to boil it down to the most basic, people generally revolt when they’re starving. The French Revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution. Both bottom-up revolutions.
So why would a group of elite level dudes decide that taking on the most powerful army and navy on the face of the earth was a good idea? Risking their lives and their fortunes, 56 of them signed on the bottom line and there was no going back.
When you go down the list of reasons they gave in the Declaration itself, you don’t see much about poverty, starvation or poor living conditions:
“He has refused his Assent to Laws…”
“He has forbidden Governors to pass laws…”
“He has refused to pass Laws for the good of the people…”
“He has called together legislative bodies at unusual and uncomfortable places…”
Are you effing kidding me? Anybody with any measure of wealth could bribe and grease the system to get around any of that. And wouldn’t it be easier to throw a few bucks under the table to local politicians and bureaucrats than to go to war against the greatest Empire since Rome? All in the name of “independence”?
As Ben Franklin states in the 2015 History Channel mini-series Sons of Liberty, “That’s an absolutely batshit crazy idea.”
We throw that word around quite a bit -independence- but do we recognize its value? If other people can control your future and the course of your life, what good is all the money? The authors of the Declaration understood that when they wrote, “Mankind will suffer ills, while ills are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
What an incredibly insightful and astute observation of human behavioral psychology. In other words, people will put up with a lot of crap to keep their comfort level. You see it every day. People staying in failed marriages and relationships so as to not rock the economic boat. People staying in abusive relationships out of fear of an unknown future. In every aspect of society, people put up with the craziest arrangements to keep the status quo.
You’d have to be absolutely nuts to start a revolution over “refusing his Assent to pass laws” unless you recognize the value of independence. And yet, they did it. Because they recognized not only the financial value of “independence” but the spiritual one.
They traded their great comfort for disruption. Not too many human beings would do it in their individual lives never mind getting a collection of 56 people together openly willing to do it as a group. Wasn’t anybody there to talk them off the ledge? Wasn’t anybody there to say “You dudes are out of your MINDS! Keep your heads down, pay a few bucks and keep on rolling.” You’d think their wives would have reeled them in, but no. They were equally principled and I seriously doubt that Washington, Adams, Jefferson and the rest of them could’ve carried on without the likes Martha Custis, Abigail Smith and Martha Skelton.
How’d that conversation go?
Wife- “How’d your day go, honey?”
Husband- “Were starting a revolution against the king and there’s a chance we’re all going to get hung and lose everything we have.”
Wife- “Sounds rad babe! Let’s do it!”
There was nothing typical or normal about any of these people. Only exceptional people could do what they did. Only exceptional people could start an exceptional country.