by Mary W Maxwell, LLB
As I happen to be “in Court” at the moment, with my lawsuit against the unconstitutional waging of war in Iran, I have had to recognize three new forces that work against me. I mean three new patterns of social behavior that could lead to a termination of my case. Since these forces are also affecting people in a general way, I wish to identify them. I hope I am wrong in rating them near-lethal.
Force 1. The first and most surprising force is the loss of interest in our Constitution. I can only guess that the young have not been taught its great value, and the old may have decided that it has gone out of style.
Going out of style is common and is normally quite acceptable: Do you remember in the 1960s that we girls used hair spray almost mandatorily? One didn’t question it, one just did it. That’s how we do most things: we pick up what’s in the culture. And later we drop them.
But our Constitution is not a hairstyle. It is a very big thing; actually it’s ‘yuge.’ People had started to come over to America from the UK and Europe about 400 years ago. There was the Jamestown settlement in Virginia in 1607 and the Massachusetts Bay Colony after that. The king of England made land grants and folks migrated. Native Americans got displaced.
By 1775, there was a so-called rebellion, starting in Concord and Lexington, and soon the colonists fought to gain independence from their British kinfolk. On July 4, 1776 they signed a Declaration of Independence, using moral justification for this move. The fighting continued till 1783; then the different colonies merged and wrote up some “Articles of Confederation.”
Four years later, some “leaders” gathered in Philadelphia and wrote up the Constitution. I put the word leaders in quotes only to call attention to the fact that human societies always have leaders. We often act like there’s a definite agreed-upon authority, and sometimes that’s true. But strong individuals crop up and they might be able to inspire a voluntary followership. Or bullies might crop up and force people to obey them. You never know.
I cannot say for sure that the leaders who arranged for us to have a Constitution really meant to put forth a system for fairness and a happy society but I think they did. Granted, their little masterpiece did not include a Bill of Rights but it included an Amendment procedure that led, in less than a year, to all the stuff about free speech, guarantee of privacy, of due process, etc.
The state constitutions of Massachusetts and New Hampshire have their Bill of Rights up front, making it fair to say that the theme of “Keep Government from Hurting Citizens” is the real ‘ticket.’ We have had 250 years of referring to that Bill of Rights (plus the anti-slavery amendments of 1868) as the means – yes the means – by which we stave off bullies.
“Oh hello, Bully. I see you want to harm me or cheat me, but forget it. My group has a plan by which we unite against your type. And we’ve appointed an authoritative government that can legally use violence against you. So there!”
Thus, in sum, I see it as surprising today that Americans are not guarding that document. They are not noisily expressing a belief that the Constitution’s allocations of power are stronger than bully power. Were they ever that? Yes, because people thought so.
Force 2. A second force is notable. Namely, the new ability for a man to accumulate great wealth — wealth that he does not need. All humans – like all squirrels – want to put away some food for a hungry day. That is why the trait of greed is adaptive. But greed easily gets out of hand. And since money is fungible, one way to spend it is to buy out other people’s self-protection.
I don’t like the word corruption, as it keeps the ‘naughty look’ too limited. When the bully is called ‘corrupt,’ we only notice his bad character. But the accumulation of wealth in a small group is changing everything that the afore-mentioned Constitution stands for. It diminishes what used to be population’s power of numbers.
A single chicken thief in a village could be overcome by the whole village. He might even get lynched. Numbers win. But today the thief can buy off the opposition. He can, say, make the cops look the other way. I was once sitting in the passenger seat next to a driver who was in the upper class. He ran a red light. A cop pulled hm over and asked to see his license which must have had a code on it. When the cop realized it was a protected person, he APOLOGIZED. Imagine that.
Extreme gathering of wealth can also change the habitat. Look how, in the recent months of “the Iran war” we have seen cities turned to rubble. One popular theory is that weapon manufacturers need to get their products used up. Another theory is that men are proud and each tries to tell his nation that he is the most clever and will defeat the other side easily.
Thus we have a trend that is, in every particular, going against the “rights” of man and against the designing of a happy society. The wealth thing is turning America to chaos. Some commentators seem to find this fascinating. Or maybe they are not so much fascinated as scared. To come right out and admit that our future is all downhill would have to make anyone go into denial, or depression, or maybe get aggressive and start to practice hate.
Aleksandra Solzhenitsyn, who, as a prisoner of the gulag, was in a very good position to discover the human capacity for hatred, went so far as to insist that all of us have hate as well as love in our hearts.
In sum, radix malorum est cupiditas; money is the root of all evil. We really ought to say this out loud. Instead, we act like wealth-accumulation is helpful. Remember after WWII when part of the world got labeled ‘developed’ and the other part ‘underdeveloped?’ Just calling it under-developed implied that there was no other way for those societies to go but towards ‘development.”
Force 3. Are you wondering what I am going to come up with as the third new force? Dropping our interest in the Constitution was a bad thing, accompanied by – or maybe caused by – the new bundles of wealth, the billionaire class (poor things). I see the third thing as the formation of unthinking loyalties.
Sure it’s an age-old human trait to feel attached to one’s basic group, such as family or tribe, or occupational calling. It’s usually considered a good thing. Loyalty is a great feeling. Years ago I attended a funeral of a man who had caused his family a lot of trouble. Everybody in the neighborhood wondered how his parents and siblings could put up with him. So we were very touched when his sister started her eulogy for him by saying, “He wasn’t heavy. He was my brother.”
I went to another funeral recently where it was the older, protective sibling who had died. We knew his younger brother sometimes made things hard for him, yet that brother said, in the eulogy “He always had my back.”
OK, we agree that clinging for protection is great, and clinging to protect someone is great. So why have we lost the general rule about sticking together as a country? I am guessing that it’s a result of what was noted above: fear has set in, and the hate response is automatically beginning to flourish.
It’s easy for media people to dwell on this in terms of the several countries that are at war. You’ve got to hate X and love Y. You must approve of maximum air strikes against X or whomever. Possibly the human brain (and some animal brains) have a ‘final common pathway’ arrangement. No matter what’s going on, it’s always best to stick with the right group. I find this almost hilarious when it is attributed to membership in a political Party.
The other day, the US Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, held back a vital vote (on the unconstitutionality of Trump’s war-making) so that his Party would not lose. His Party is my Party, Republican. If there is any plank in our platform that has always been taken as firm, firm, firm, it is adherence to the words of the Constitution. The said words, at Article I, sec 8, promise that it is Congress, not a president, that may authorize war.
It really is frightening to me that Republicans are doing what we Republicans a couple of years ago were disgusted to see Democrats doing – making decisions by keeping their members in line. If that isn’t the exact opposite of the ‘people’s’ control of Congress, I don’t know what is.
The same is going on with the forbidding of campus speech against whichever religion someone has decided to nominate as the enemy. Wow. On a campus! But at least a Harvard grad of the Class of ’26 gave a superb speech entitled “Listen as if you might be wrong.” He talked about his European Jewish grandfather’s respect for his other grandfather, a Pakistani Muslim.
It was a wonderful relief to hear him talk sense. It was also good today (June 6, 2026) to hear Columbia U professor Jeffrey Sachs say “We can’t live like this, killing masses of people. It’s ridiculous We must stop.”
In sum, we must stop. We were able to put our minds together to invent machines, weren’t we? We were able to put our minds together to liberate women from their subordinate position, during my lifetime. We can put our minds together to overcome the three obstructions to common sense that are now having a field day. I listed them as: loss of interest in the Constitution, accumulation of massive wealth by a few, and individuals’ attempt to shelter with a group that they think (irrationally) will save them.
Last Chance Gas Station
There’s a danger that this whole thing will collapse. There’s also a danger that we will starve. (How do you think Mao Zedong did it to tens of millions of citizens in his society?) But there is also a chance people will distance themselves from the panic and apply they old gray matter.
I find very helpful the writings of British Prof Philip Allott. He always assumes we can invent change for the better. We could even make a “Eutopia.” This entails rescuing ourselves from the habit of seeing “the is” as fixed and more real than it is. He calls this imagined reality – with which we deal all day –” Istopia.” I’ll quite paragraph 4.33 of Allott’s book Eutopia:
“Time and space are certainly fundamental coordinates of Istopia, the parallel universe that the human mind has created using the word is. We are able to assert the essence and existence of anything that we can imagine, using the verb to be to suggest that an infinity of non-physical things have an essence and existence analogous to the essence and existence of things in the physical universe.”
Thus, we can say “Paris is the capital of New York,” which is not true. And we can say “Paris is the capital of France,” which is true. In either case we are attributing a notion of reality. So, Allott says, please don your thinking cap and do this deliberately. Set a goal – how about peace? – and figure out what is needed to ‘realize’ it.