Trust and Values

Abstract: First a disclaimer: I know little about Charlie Kirk or Turning Point. My only contact is through many, many emails and letters asking me to contribute to Turning Point. I never contributed, mainly because I am concerned that organizations like Turning Point and others on both sides of the national divide potentially divide and isolate more than they help the Republic. The real casualty of this divide is trust. And I sometimes wonder whether that is the whole point and whether there is a divide at the puppet master level. As Americans, who can we really trust when both sides are polemically pontificating constantly? There is no honest debate and perhaps has not been since the days of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. The two victims of this conflagration are values and trust. We need core values. They are our compass in difficult times and our map when we get lost. When we lose trust or people advocate competing ideas, they are the loadstone to help us find our way. When we destroy values, we destroy trust as well. The question I have is, is it better to ensure the principles in the documents are fairly applied to all groups or to toss them out? I hope Charlie Kirk’s execution helps to stimulate constructive conversation and debate, but I suspect it will just deepen the divides.

I’ve been working on a blog series about values for the last week. The concept of values is, I think, far more complex than many people realize. We hear the word all the time and think we understand it. I’ve been trying to discuss why values are so critical, yet perhaps so problematic.

Then, today, an executioner took Charlie Kirk’s life while speaking in Utah. Second, the execution is morally reprehensible. Now, I don’t have the text of his speech, but I suspect it had to do with values. The execution carried out his sentence because he did not subscribe to Charlie Kirk’s values and had values that conflicted with Kirk’s. Or perhaps it was people behind the executioner who planned it, found the killer and convinced him to pull the trigger.

Values. Both sides have them, yet they are so different. But as Americans, one would think most sides of the spectrum would share two core values:

• The sanctity of life.
• The premise is that ideas should be debated and that we have means to resolve them short of violence.

However, assassinated presidents, political violence, and a civil war seem to fly in the face of these core values. The sad fact is that the perpetrators mainly have what they see as strong values.

But the values on each side are different, and those that the sides of the divide potentially share are no longer core or as important to them as the divisive powers.

In theory, the core American values are “life, liberty, and pursuiting happiness” as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and echoed in the Preamble to the Constitution. They stood virtually unquestioned until Charles Beard started questioning the driving forces of the War for American Independence. He asserted the driver was not political independence or philosophical concepts from the Enlightenment, but rather greed and socioeconomic factors. This watered down any set of common core values.

The radicalism of the civil rights movement, which, to be honest, stood for many good things, also helped to water it down when Marxism crept into it.

The tenets of Critical Race Theory, 1619, Critical Systems Theory, and World contest against the concepts of the Enlightenment, capitalism, and meritocracy. They seek to discredit the Declaration of Independence and Constitution because of the curse of slavery. Make no mistake, slavery was wrong, and it was evil. But the question I have is, is it better to ensure the principles in the documents are fairly applied to all groups or to toss them out?

The major casualties in this war of ideas and memes are values and trust. The core values that once united most Americans are now questioned and cast aside.

We need core values. They are our compass in difficult times and our map when we get lost. When we lose trust or people advocate competing ideas, they are the loadstone to help us find our way. When we destroy values, we destroy trust as well.

There is nothing political about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” or “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”, unless there is a fundamental dispute about liberty vs. equality and whether power flows from the people to the government or from the government itself.