American Truth Restored

Five Thousand Year Leap

This awesome book has been divided into 28 thirty to forty five minute video lessons designed to be presented on line, over the Internet. We will be giving one lesson each week along with all of the written helps including the quizzes. We recommend that each of our members obtain the book in order to get the most from these great lessons. The book is available in bookstores for about $20.00 or our members can order one from us for just $10.00 plus $5.00 postage.

Introduction

Colonies of civilized human beings have been emerging and disappearing on the continental fringes of the Planet Earth for over 5,000 years. Each of these ganglia of civilized mankind had similar aspirations, but none fulfilled them. At least, not in their fullest dimensions. Some built cities for over a million people that now lie buried in the skeletal debris of the Sahara sands. Others built cities that were even larger in Asia and South America but snakes, rodents, and entangled vines are about all that live today in the ghostly grandeur of their ruined past.

A New Beginning

It was in A.D. 1607 that another such attempt was made to lay the foundations for man's most modern civilization. Undoubtedly the annals of humankind will ultimately show that this one turned out to be different. The settlement was called Jamestown after his royal highness, James I, king of England. It was the first permanent colony of England on the North American continent. The settlers of Jamestown had been assigned the task of establishing an Anglo-Saxon foothold in the hot, humid, and totally hostile wilderness of what we now call Virginia.

Shades of the Primitive Past

The most striking thing about the settlers of Jamestown was their startling similarity to the ancient pioneers who built settlements in other parts of the world 5,000 years earlier. The whole panorama of Jamestown demonstrated how shockingly little progress had been made by man during all of those fifty centuries.

The settlers of Jamestown had come in a boat no larger and no more commodious than those of the ancient sea kings. Their tools still consisted of shovel, axe, hoe, and a stick plow which were only slightly improved over those of China, Egypt, Persia, and Greece. They harvested their grain and hay-grass with the same primitive scythes. They wore clothes made of thread spun on a wheel and woven by hand. They thought alcohol was a staple food. Their medicines were noxious concoctions based on superstition rather than science. Their transportation was by cart and oxen.

Most of them died young. Out of approximately 9,000 settlers who found their way to old Jamestown, only about 1,000 survived.

Why Jamestown Was Different

But potentially, Jamestown was different. It was in Jamestown that communal economics were experimentally tried out by these European immigrants, who found them to be worse than Plato had described them. Eventually, it was in Jamestown that a system of free enterprise principles began to filter up through the years of "starving time" to impress on the settlers those dynamic ideas which were later refined and developed in Adam Smith's famous book, The Wealth of Nations.

It was among these early settlers of Virginia that a sufficiently large population finally congregated to permit the setting up of the first popular assembly of legislative representatives in the western hemisphere. The descendants of these Virginia settlers also produced many of the foremost intellects who structured the framework for the new civilization which became known as the United States of America. From among them came Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence; James Madison, “father" of the Constitution; George Washington, hero general of the War for Independence; George Mason, author of the first American Bill of Rights in Virginia.

Virginia was the largest of the thirteen colonies, half-a-million inhabitants, and she furnished four of the first five Presidents of the United States.

Two Hundred Years Later

Soon two whole centuries had passed into history. 1976, the "noble experiment" of American independence and free-enterprise economics had produced some phenomenal results.

One need not be an American citizen to feel a sense genuine pride in the fantastic list of achievements which bubbled up from the massive melting pot of humanity that swarmed to the shores of this new land and contributed to its mighty leap in technical, political, and economic achievement.

The spirit of freedom which moved out across the world in the 1800s was primarily inspired by the fruits of freedom in the United States. The climate of free-market economics allowed science to thrive in an explosion of inventions, technical discoveries which, in merely 200 years, gave the world the gigantic new power resources of harnessed electricity, the internal combustion engine, jet propulsion, exotic space vehicles, and all the wonders of nuclear energy. Communications were revolutionized, first by the telegraph, then the telephone, followed by radio and television. The whole earth was explored from pole to pole to the depths of the sea. Then men left the earth in rocket ships and actually, walked on the moon. They sent up a space plane that could be maneuvered and landed back on the earth.

The average length of life was doubled; the quality of life was tremendously enhanced. Homes, food, textiles, communications, transportation, central heating, central cooling, world travel, millions of books, a high literacy rate, schools for everybody, surgical miracles, medical cures for age-old diseases, entertainment at the touch of a switch, and instant news, twenty-four hours a day. That was the story.

Of course, all of this did not happen just in America, but it did flow out primarily from the swift current of freedom and prosperity which the American Founders turned loose into the spillways of human progress all over the world. In 200 years, the human race had made a 5,000-year leap.

What About Progress in Reverse?

Unfortunately, every new generation of human beings seems to feel the instinctive and passionate necessity to reinvent the sociological wheel. The physical sciences capitalize on the lessons of the past, but the social sciences seldom do.

In political and social relations, a single generation will sometimes duplicate the same error half-a-dozen times. Too many human beings are doing it today.

They are muddling their lives with drugs, riots, revolutions, and terrorism; predatory wars; unnatural sexual practices; merry-go-round marriages; organized crime; neglected and sometimes brutalized children; plateau intoxication; debt-ridden prosperity; and all the other ingredients of insanity which have shattered twenty mighty civilizations in the past.

These elements of social decay can have a devastating impact on the highly technical and delicately interdependent civilization which freedom and prosperity have brought to mankind.

Time to Get Back to Basics

The goal of life is not really space travel, backyard swimming pools, glider planes, entertainment extravaganzas, big, ast cars, or thrill pills. What human beings are really seeking is individual happiness, self-realization.

Human happiness thrives only in a certain kind of environment. The prerequisites for that environment are being destroyed. Many millions of people do not understand what is happening to them. They just know they are not genuinely happy.

The answer to most of the problems is comparatively simple. Return to fundamentals. Get back to basics. Nothing in this life is ever going to be perfect, but it can be much more gratifying and a lot less dangerous if we can get back to the fundamentals that provided that amazing 5,000-year leap in the first place.

That is what this book is all about.

The 28 Great Ideas That Are Changing the World

There was hardly a single idea which the America Founding Fathers put into their formula that someone hadn't thought of before. However, the singularity of it a was the fact that in 1787, when the Constitution was being written, none of those ideas was being substantially practiced anywhere in the world. It was in America that the Founding Fathers assembled the 28 great ideas that produced the dynamic success formula which proved such a sensational blessing to modern man.

Now that many of those precious principles are fading into oblivion and scores of unnecessary problems have rise to plague humanity, it should be in America that the banner of human hope is raised again.

Of course, we should remind ourselves that it took the Founders 180 years (1607-1787) to put it all together, and they made numerous mistakes along the way. Nevertheless when they finally put the new charter into operation George Washington was able to write after only two years: The United States enjoy a scene of prosperity and tranquility under the new government that could hardly have been hoped for. (Letter to Catherine Macaulay Graham, 19 July 1791; John C. Fitzpatrick, The Writings of George Washington, 39 vols. [Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1931-44], 31:316-17.)

The next day he wrote to David Humphreys: Tranquility reigns among the people with that disposition towards the general government which is likely to preserve it .... Our public credit stands on that [high] ground which three years ago it would have been considered as a species of madness to have foretold. (Ibid., pp. 318-19.)

Not only did it change the United States, but within a few years it aroused the admiration of the whole world. Experience proved these principles were sound. They are sound today. In our modern space-age of Third Encounters and Superman, the Founders' thinking may sound terribly old-fashioned and even pre-Victorian, but their principles have the advantage of an impressive track record of empirical proof that they are practical and true-eternally true. That is their primary credential.

Our purpose is to present the Founders' 28 great ideas in their original simplicity and mostly in their own words. After all, it is their story. They are the ones who made the fantastic 5,OOO-year leap possible.