René Descartes’ observation, “I think, therefore I am,” is considered by many to be one of the foundational principles upon which much of modern science and philosophy have been built. I believe another is, “Be not conformed but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” written by the Apostle Paul in his divinely inspired letter to the Romans. And there are many, many others.
The blessing and curse of humanity is that we are innate creatures of thought. Thoughts can bring us together or drive us apart, teach us to love or provoke us to hatred, and stoke our fear or propagate our faith. It all depends upon which thoughts we choose to embrace and which we reject.
I once heard a comedian say that there are two kinds of people: those who divide everybody into two groups, and those who don’t. While it is humorous, many can do either, and even subconsciously switch back and forth, depending upon how deeply they have succumbed to politics. Humor is much like propaganda in that both must ring true to be effective. But they differ in that good humor generally encourages an audience to think in order to “get” the joke, while effective propaganda is designed to narrow the thinking of its target to conform to whatever message it is trying to convey.
The rapid expansion of technology over the past several decades has given us an endless, all-you-can-eat buffet of information, entertainment and propaganda from which our minds can feast upon an abundance of both healthy and poisonous thoughts. The times we are living in bring to mind a passage from the Book of Daniel which says, “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” It is unfortunate that discernment seems to be in deep decline during a time when platforms that promote propaganda are expanding exponentially. Many of those propagandists pose as prophets, stating their misguided opinions as fact.
A free society can only exist if a large enough portion of its population has the desire to continually renew itself by developing the ability of individuals within it to discern the difference between fact and factual fiction, while respectfully encouraging others to do the same. But thinking for yourself is not an easy thing to do. It is usually lonely and labor-intensive.
It is much easier to put your faith in someone else to do your thinking for you—or something else, like family, a clique, a religious organization, a political party or faction, or a street gang, to name just a few. I am not saying that all of those are the same, only that they are similar in that they are all usually more than eager to help relieve you of the burden of thinking for yourself. They can be useful or dangerous depending upon a number of factors, but they are all dangerous when they demand blind loyalty.
There is a point where any entity or individual becomes an idol, and that point is when it demands that we surrender our freedom to allow the continual spiritual transformation that occurs every time we allow a fresh idea to renew our minds. I believe this is the essence of Jesus’ teaching that new wine doesn’t fit in old bottles.
Although my academic credentials might be considered by some to be a bit thin, I believe experience has taught me well, and my journey has been one of transformation through the continual renewing of my mind. Thinking entails organizing our thoughts in a way that makes sense of a chaotic world. While there are many different political and religious belief systems that can be useful in helping us give structure to our thoughts, those systems are bottles, not wine.
A major reason that our political arena is so messy is that it was primarily designed as an adversarial system of governance that distributes power among various branches and levels of government, as well as between outsiders and insiders. The primary purpose of the Bill of Rights, as I understand it, was to limit the power of the insiders.
In a nutshell, politics is an adversarial chess match between insiders and outsiders in which power is continually contested, fashioned in a way that protects the mechanisms of freedom that allow our democratic republic to renew and replenish itself with fresh ideas. If the insiders have too much power and too little restraint, they almost invariably prefer to enforce conformity rather than promote transformation.
Organizations become stagnant and obsolete when they become more concerned about the bottle than the wine. When the internal and external politics of the organization overshadow whatever higher calling it might have once had, it becomes an idol. Political parties are bottles, not wine.
And while both the Democratic and Republican Parties are continually engaged in conflict with one another, I believe they have both become old bottles that need a great deal of reform before they can become vessels capable of dispensing the fresh wine of our representative republic, with its recipe spelled out 250 years ago in our Declaration of Independence with the words:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
