Excellent

Free rein for whatever – or the Reign of Discipline for Good, Better and Best

 

 

In the Reality of Goodness – where we live – scofflaws never win no matter how much trouble they make, but people who practice EXCELLENCE win – today, tomorrow and every day in every way.

From ancient time in Britain ( England, Scotland and Wales) a contest has always gone on in the minds of the Sapiens characters who inhabit that island. That contest is between the attitude of FREE – free range, free action, self-determination, unhindered plan-and-action, unfettered interaction with others and , BEST – an orderly, careful, measured, considerate, thoughtful, wise, circumspect, accomplished way of life. In the history of the three nations, now Great Britain, it has taken hundreds of years and a lot of grief and struggle to create some nation(s) that try to make a success of this situation. It has not always been a stroll through an English country garden.

The contest between Free, whatever and Excellence, disciplined achievement in a world of good and bad possibilities sets us up for the Problem. You can do – whatever – and have happy experiences with pleasant results, or you can do whatever that leads to bad experiences with shabby, disastrous, sometimes fatal results. At the same time you can do discipline and organize or construct pleasant and profitable improvements for yourself and others, or you can do discipline that locks people into a national dungeon. The interaction between the two has always been a difficult balancing act to achieve an approach that helps people accomplish their Best. The task that we must accomplish is to ‘balance forward’ independent initiative and careful deliberate planning for the Best – for those who are actually interested in the Best.

From our vantage point in the 21st century we can see the stages of development that people have gone through and the human response to each advance up the long, difficult path to our ‘amazing’ modern selves.

From Shakespeare’s ‘green and pleasant land’ going back in time to a place where hill forts were built and turned into broken and charred ruins the people – various tribes and ‘fiefdoms’ – have had a two-faced reality as a way of life. ONE aspect has been ‘free range’ with a good neighbors, sunny side up, hail fellow well met, up with the sun or rain every day, live and let live, we can make life a bearable, and happy time – because we KNOW we have the mental capacity and the gumption to make Good happen. With that free range came people who took their chance to succeed greatly and contribute in amazing ways, while others took their chance to lie, cheat, swindle, assault, rob and even murder    – and wait for –  the Laws that people organized for themselves as a statement of faith in Goodness and Wisdom.

The OTHER aspect, order and accomplishment with everything in its proper place – with mother and father at home with absolute responsibility for their children, with property lines for homes, villages and shires, and rules for commerce and punishment for lawbreakers, a calendar with holidays and feast days, and the presence of nobility set at the top of a social system and cemented in place ( which should never have happened, crimping the nation into a rigid system) has been cooking on  Britain’s front burner for centuries while the free range group have been bubbling along in a big pot on the back burner. The two aspects, for much better and some worse, have been jostling for predominant position in Great Britain right along. The Order and Accomplishment crowd have not yet achieved a clear position  for the superiority of personal excellence in British society.

Across the Atlantic, in the woods, the situation is MUCH worse. American history is the story of astonishing failure for 250 years now to achieve a national understanding that Our Country is now, and always has been, a nation of Ordered Excellence and Wonderful Accomplishment – NOT a nation of scratch and scramble, shout and shove, crass ‘liberty’ and witless ‘freedom’. The Problem which came over from Great Britain, with Pilgrims and adventurers, took root here and has stuck around and caused trouble for Our Country right up to the present.

With the onset of microwave broadcasting, all sorts of modern technology, and now a computerized digital information tsunami all happening at an accelerating pace – the ‘good old ways from the good old days’ seem to be a relic that can be discarded – but that would be a mistake. We find ourselves at this time in U.S. history being entertained by a parade of problems, Very Large Problems, that are irritating and disturbing with an ominous sound track playing in the background. We are in this fix because We the People avoid, actively, the fact that all of those problems have that One Original Problem at their source. The Problem has infested our society and culture everywhere in debilitating and destructive ways in commerce, education, religion, family, government, entertainment – everything that constitutes a society.

There is One Main Point to be made here: The Problem has a self-perpetuating, metastasizing function… People all come in a range of behaviors and abilities and personal character traits which go from weak, faint or low to powerful, strong or high with most people situated in the middle zone of competence. In the middle is where we can suppose ourselves to be doing sorta great, kinda pretty good and talk ourselves into agreeing with ourselves that tenth rate is okay, if we just call it third rate! This is where the American Way becomes a servant to the Problem. The American Way is the loudmouth, blabbermouth, know-it-all know nothings yapping about how great everything is no matter how bad everything is BECAUSE this is a – free country – where LIBERTY is the cause of America’s greatness and anything goes is the rule no matter what evidence piles up to the sky that the new! societal system is an abusive, tiresome Bad Joke. Americans need to listen and be informed that a ‘middling attitude’ is precisely what is wrong with this country. OUR FAILURE IS TO REFUSE TO APPRECIATE, LEARN, UNDERSTAND THAT WE CANNOT ALLOW THE MEDIOCRE TO BE THE ENEMY OF THE BEST. ( And, bragging about our incredible mediocrity will not make it okay.)

America is a successful, prosperous, Good and Wonderful nation (almost) and that prosperity lures us into that old civilization mistake of supposing we’ve got it made in the shade and we can coast up to a brilliant future. NOBODY coasts UP to anything. Our American -TEAM – has lots of problem members. We are currently stuck in the bottom half of the world league in lots of ways WHEN WE SHOULD BE AT THE TOP IN EVERY CATEGORY! The problem members are those people who WILL NOT catch on to the Problem – that freedom and liberty ARE NOT WHAT MAKES OUR COUNTRY GREAT. From the first people who came here to Plymouth and the Old Dominion the True Nature of Our Country, both when we were British colonies and now as United States, has been Goodness and Decency, Understanding and Accomplishment. Freedom is necessary for we the Sapiens to achieve our BEST. But freedom and liberty come along for the ride on the Upward way from Good to Better to Best. We can have freedom and liberty at the bottom, in the Zero Place where socialists – and other criminals dwell wretchedly, or we can have freedom and liberty in the middle zone where people spend their lives in shoppers world, or we can have freedom and liberty at the TOP – the place where we are at our BEST.  IT IS OUR GOODNESS, OUR BEST THAT MATTERS – NOT THE FREEDOM.

From ancient time when free range and unhindered living was just the way things were, through many difficult centuries, to our time in which a crowded world and omnipresent technological interference make us wary of losing our ‘freedom’ in a digital jail without walls, we human conservative beings correctly value freedom and liberty as important for a Good life. But we cannot deceive ourselves into claiming that freedom and liberty is ALL that we need to get by, all that we need to thrive, succeed and triumph.

We Americans need to commit ourselves to obliterating the Problem of half-wit, half- hearted living and wake up, measure up, wise up and LIVE UP to the discipline and effort that is required for the achievement of a Good, Better, BEST society that was the Original and still is the True America.