The Age of Reason Citizen

To be an age of reason, the time in reference must be characterized as a time when people in general are devoted to fact and truth above any other fealty. This doesn't mean that there wouldn't be room for faith and familial devotion—quite the opposite, actually.

However, it would indeed preclude societies whose claim to reason is based on the leadership of one or a few persons, or of a particular caste of persons—an "elite." That's one reason why I find the Georgia Guide Stones so preposterous—in order to drive the dicta they present, there would have to be a caste that dictated to all others.

Thomas Paine coined the term, "age of reason" by writing a book and giving it that name. The book trumpeted values of The Enlightenment, which placed reason above the dictates of what he considered corrupt or corrupted religion, including the so-called "divine right of kings."

In short, the foregoing puts to its end any call for an age of reason that also calls for demagoguery of any kind, a caste system of any kind, an "elite" to rule the "commons."

We DO need a new age of reason, but that means an age wherein "the masses" are devoted to reason, and in which propaganda (public schools, TV) is not used to undermine individual reasoning and the self-assertion that must necessarily go with it, but rather to encourage them. This latter will not happen until the individuals of society—the "grass roots"—reject the current demagogic regimes sufficiently that change is effectively forced on the powers that be.

Is this a demagoguery of a sort? Perhaps, but it's a defensive form, not one that initiates force. The force has been initiated: to dumb us down, to make us ninny-compliant, to turn us into pseudo-eunuchs and good little automatons, to enslave our minds and thus (or perhaps more directly even) our bodies, souls and lives.

Most of all, this is just a demand that we be left to our freedoms to act and to associate as we will; free to make our own futures as best we can without someone presuming to "parent" us who are adults.

None of this means that there can't be opinion leaders, but it means that one cannot allow others—and others should not try—to force our hand to their conception of wisdom and virtue—which often is nothing more than the way that enriches them at our own expense.