The Divine Right Kings experiment failed.
Why? Because the very nature of man and
his penchant to consolidate power, build
controlling empires of oppression is to
blame. You're a founder; you're trying to
establish a new government. This is the
dilemma that you face. What do you do?
Let's take a step back and look at the
pattern. Those Pope's, those nephews
demanded taxes and service from kingdom
vassals with revenues going to Rome. To
control the population and local
parishes they were kept uneducated on
religion, the doctrines of the Rights of
Man, and the doctrine of Social
Redemption prevented the vassals from
prosperity of their own labor. Under the
Divine Right Kings, you see, Europe was in
chaos as the Vatican was used as a way
to emit power and personal Wars of
Kingdom against Kingdom. And only the
elite seemed to prosper. All in all the
Divine Right Kings, humanists at its core
as predicted by St. Augustine, was no
better than the days of ancient Rome.
Our founders saw that the Protestant
Reformation, the return back to genuine
scriptures, resulted in education of men,
prompted an empowered Kingdom rulers to
protect vassals from the humanists
Church oppression. Localization of power,
a mutually-beneficial of the kingdoms
and vassals as capital,
prosperity, and truth was kept. The
difference was stark. Comparing the
kingdom rulers who choose to maintain
their allegiances to the Pope versus on
the other hand those who did not. The
despotic power of the Divine Right Kings
like Philip who tore nations asunder and
bankrupted others according to the
Pope's vendettas. What initi ally worked
well over time, that consolidation of
power became corrupt, abusive, and inevitably
imposed terror to maintain the power
structure in the status quo.
But there's more. The institution of the
church and the sovereigns that drove
Europe to despotism, as power transferred
from the deMedici route out of Vatican
power, over a brief three centuries
centralized the power of five ruling
families, a super elite creating a
different order across Europe. And its
kingdoms were just as cruel, just as
violent, and oppressive as before. The
Divine Right Kings experiment failed. Why?
Because the very nature of man and his
penchant to consolidate power, build
controlling empires of oppression is to
blame. You're a founder; you're trying to
establish a new government. This is the
dilemma that you face. What do you do?
Brings you a new appreciation for the
rarity of freedom because in human
history it truly is rare. To our founders,
the lesson in history was clear.
Governance is driven by the fallen state
of man because of sin. All governance
draws power to itself. Power eventually
draws corruption from within. Corruption
derives power that ultimately imposes
its will across all human boundaries.
Corruption of the evil state always
views itself as absolute, divine, and
incontrovertible. Those are worth writing
down.
These observations told them what
happened. Power in the fallen state of
man was why. The only issue left was how
did this circumstance come up time and
time again. Again, our founders knew the
answer. From the most misunderstood and
political genius of the era, enter hero
Nikolay Machiavelli author of the Prince.
I just think Machiavelli what has been
very maligned by history because you
know put it simply, Machiavelli was not
Machiavellian. You know I mean he and his
name has come to stand for, you know,
cynicism and deviousness and
ruthlessness and power politics in
general. Uh, because of his this little book,
The Prince, that he wrote, and you have to
think about the writing of that book.
This is a man who was a profound
Democrat, you know who served the city of
Florence when it became a republi,c when
it chased the Medici family out and when
the Medicis came back and regained power
they hated him and they tortured him and
almost killed him and then sent him into
exile. And he spent the rest of his
life be unable to return to his own
hometown to live in the countryside in
exile in the villa. So he had every
reason to loathe Princes of the Medici
kind.  And he lived in this
period, when not just the Medicis, but
the Borgias of the sport czars and all
these great families were behaving in
the most ruthless way. And he wrote this
little treatise about not what he would
like things to be like, but how power
actually worked, the what he observed, you
know the ruthlessness of it. And it's a
classic case of shooting the messenger.
You know. Here's a man who understood the
nature of power and made the mistake of
writing it down too clearly and
unvarnished. And not at all - no soft
something at all. You know it's better to
be cruel than be kind, he said. You know,
there's an extraordinary chapter of
advice to rulers taking
power where he says what he should do is
do all the worst things you have
to do on the first day. You know, kill
everybody you have to kill. Do all the
worst things of the first day because
after that people will say about you
well, he's not as bad as he used to be.
For our founding fathers, the Divine Right
King experiment came down to one moment
in time. On May of 1785, many feared the
young country would not survive.
Realizing the Articles of Confederation
were inadequate to preserve the nation,
comes James Madison. We did this
realization, he embarked on a study and
he looked at religious freedom and he
looked at individual rights across
history. And he answers this
question. What do you do with those issues we
just came up. His answer is taken
from Machiavelli.. In fact, from our
founding fathers' perspective, Machiavelli
is the father of modern Republican
government. But you didn't know that.
Madison taking from Machiavell,i his
answer is genius.
And he sums it up this way in the
constitutional debate. Let ambition
contend with ambition. If we take the
state's interests, the federal interests,
and the people's interests and bring
them together in a number of checks and
balances, the same issue Machiavelli
faced,  then where they agree is most
likely the best for the people. And if
they don't agree and nothing gets done
according to Madison, that's good.
That's less that the government can
impose upon its people. If Madison's
solution was so brilliant and why do so
many Americans today sense that
something is wrong with their government?
Where did Madison or us go wrong? We will
begin to answer this question in the
next and final installment of the Divine
Right Kings experiment.
