By Bill Lindo
Belize City, Dec 28th 2020: Every society has its elite, its patricians, its propertied classes, its gentry or in our neck of the woods – its Hidalgos.
They are the lucky ones. They are the smart ones…the educated ones … the ones with the Ph. D.s, the formulas, and the secrets.
Usually, they are the ones with all the money.
They write the laws, and count the votes. They also write the computer code. They sit on all the Boards, and God knows what else.
In ancient times, the elites claimed to have some inside track with God. The elite, used religion to stay in power. To control. To rule.
Remember this,
We as Christians have just finished celebrating the birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in this unusual year of our Lord 2020. With the birth of Christ the Redeemer, and the role of his Apostles, there was a new concept of man and his society, which was based on the foundations of the Classical Greek tradition, especially the ideas associated with the works of Plato. It was a powerful idea – the idea that man is not an animal. Man, unlike the other species, is capable of willfully increasing our species’ power in and over the universe. Our Christian Bible’s first chapter, Genesis, states: Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fishes of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (English Standard Version of the Bible).
Continuing this is possible, because we have a power which is called cognition – the power to discover universal physical and other principles, to prove that those principles are correct, and to apply those principles in ways which enable us humans to increase mankind’s power in and over the universe and to improve the conditions of life of the human being. Now when this quality of cognition is combine with the determination to do good. To do good in the sense of improving the conditions of life of human beings through the use of this power – it was called in the Ancient Greek of Plato, Agape, which in English is love. But this love is not the love of man and woman, but the love that St. Paul wrote about in 1st Corinthians.
From the above flowed the events of 1776 – the events that shook the World. The first time in recorded history of the World (the over ten thousand years of recorded human history) a nation-state was willfully founded on the principle of man made in the image of his Creator – the Constitution of the United States of America which was mostly written by that American genius, Alexander Hamilton, an early and great American economist and one of the most brilliant American lawyers along with Ben Franklin.
From Franklin and Hamilton came the idea that a national government has no moral authority, except as it is founded on an absolute commitment to promote and defend the General Welfare/Common Good of all of its people, including their posterity. The only foundation of law, is the principle of the General Welfare/Common Good: that all human beings are equally made in the image of the Creator. Therefore, it is our obligation to promote their General Welfare/Common Good as creatures of cognition, and reason, to develop and cultivate, to develop all children, to develop all adults, equally, and to promote actively that General Welfare/Common Good. To improve the condition of the present and future generations their General Welfare/Common Good. This is the only moral authority and the chief responsibility of legitimate government. Our concern as Belizeans and inhabitants of Planet Earth are the emergence of governments which correspond to this principle of the General Welfare/Common Good, which is the foundation of law in the Preamble of our Belizean Constitution and of the constitutional law of our PUP party. Remember, George Price who gave us our Constitution as a nation-state (Belize) and the Constitution/Creed of the Peoples United Party, as a founder, was educated in America, not trained, before the year 1971.
The PUP of George Price have great things in store for his people, the people of Belize.
So, PUP’s make that commitment to define our being, our being the temple of liberty, make that the definition of our being a beacon of hope, and that defines our love, our Agape. We owe the Belizean people, all of them, for the overwhelming trust they put in our great political party – the Peoples United Party. We shall not let them down.
Our Agape will be their posterity!
Bill Lindo blog 