One cannot reason with mobs. Yet one can always reason with their constituents, one mind at a time. Freeing minds trapped by tyranny or misguided by corruption was a noble mission that Jefferson inherited from ancient Greek philosophers and ardently fulfilled. Let us honor and safeguard the torch of Jefferson’s liberating light, bearing it forth as fellow practitioners in our own time. Lou Marinoff is a professor of philosophy at The City College of New York and founding president of the non-profit American Philosophical Practitioners Association. He is also an internationally bestselling author, a table hockey champion, and a Bellwether Alliance member since 2021. https://appa.edu and https://www.loumarinoff.com
state of fever which the world has so often seen in the history of other nations … We are now taught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth.” Were he alive today, Jefferson would unfortunately have many more, and more exotic, examples of corruption to diagnose as anathema to a healthy body politic. Whether built on speculative greed, Ponzi schemes, toxic banking practices, reckless government spending, ideological lunacies, or digital “tricks upon paper” such as derivates or counterfeit cryptocurrencies, these processes enrich the few by destroying the wealth of the many. Destroying other people’s wealth for personal gain is the antithesis of Jeffersonian ethics and economics. In contrast, he held that personal gain is morally desirable and developmentally sustainable only when it also creates opportunity, thereby engendering wealth creation for others and thus enriching society as a whole. Jefferson understood wealth to mean material assets accrued by dint of honest toil: producing reputable goods, delivering beneficial services, or disseminating valuable knowledge. As President, he reduced the US national debt from $83 million to $57 million. An antidote to economic bubbles is Abundance Exchange, which inverts the pyramid of greed. Instead of standing atop a mountain of corpses, or bankrupt consumers, we exercise our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by adding value to others’ enjoyments
of those self-same entitlements, never depriving them of such for personal gain. technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are concerned, each generation can indeed stand “on the shoulders of giants” to see further, evolving its own titans in turn. But where moral education, character formation, and civic virtues are concerned, each generation must begin at the beginning. Each citizen can become a moral giant (or infant, or tyrant) depending on which principles they adopt to guide them in life. Where science, An inscription on the Jefferson Memorial reads: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” (letter to Benjamin Rush, 1800). Tyranny over minds must likewise be resisted in every generation, especially in dangerous times when statues of Thomas Jefferson are pulled down by minds that have succumbed to a tyranny of destructive doctrines.
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