In ancient times, the Chinese had a concept that they called the mandate of heaven. Heaven in their thinking was the source of the order we see in the world, both the natural world and the human world. Chinese governments until modern times had always been autocratic, but their philosophy of government early on tackled the problem of unjust rule and the societal strife it created. They did that by instilling in rulers and the political elite this idea of the mandate of heaven.
When a ruler was unjust, capricious, and unwise, his lack of ethics went against the natural order of human society, which is source of the Confucian concept of morality. When that happened, the government would lose legitimacy. The people rebelled, corruption became rampant, and civil wars would erupt when military leaders attempted coups. They would say that the government had lost the mandate of heaven. No longer having heaven's blessing was another way of saying that the government had destroyed it's ability to govern, having lost the trust and respect of the people.
The disorder we see in America today reminds me of this lesson that the Chinese learned about 2,500 years ago. When the government is unjust, when society isn't equitable, and when corruption is allowed to become rampant, then disorder and strife happens. Those rebellions can be put down with heavy-handed tactics, of course, but that doesn't solve the problem, and so the rebellions continued to happen periodically and grow worse and worse.
America is a troubled society. We have allowed ourselves to become divided along ideological and ethnic lines to such an extent that people no longer communicate or understand each other. Even worse, communication more often than not devolves into cathartic explosions or sarcastic dismissals of whatever another person says. This inability to communicate and cooperate, even to agree on basic realities that exist around us, has made our society incapable of dealing with basic problems like economic inequity, corruption among the political elite, the ethical collapse of our culture, and the continuation of ethnic scapegoating and repression.
All of this has lead to a loss of legitimacy of our basic institutions of government and law enforcement, and little is being done to reverse the trend. We really need to stop it, not shrug and let it continue.
How do we stop it?
1. Remove partisanship from government. Political partisanship may be unavoidable when we have a political system based on competitive elections, but it has no place in governance. Politicians who are disgraced should resign or be removed, period. It doesn't matter which party they belong to or who's in control of which branch of government. By the same token, incompetent and abusive politicians and party leaders need to be ejected from the system regardless of their party affiliation.
2. Remove the obstacles to justice. As an example, police who clearly break the law should be arrested and prosecuted like other citizens. Simply doing that would quell much of the unrest that we see today. It's simply incensing to people that they are instead protected from the ordinary due process. Often, they are simply fired and rehired elsewhere. Also stop and reverse the partisan takeover of the judicial system that has been ongoing for the past generation. Justice needs to be genuinely objective and unbiased.
3. Work towards a more equitable society economically. We simply cannot go on with the current trend we have today in which one elite group of people become ever more wealthy and entitled while other is reduced to an underclass who struggle to survive. Today we even have homelessness rising among professional middle class people who simply aren't wealthy enough to pay the stratospheric rents and mortgages in major urban areas.
If we, as a society and government, work towards just these basic goals, our society will become more stable rather than continue to degenerate. It's a choice we collectively make every day. Leaders have to start making some basic changes to restore the legitimacy of the government, and citizens need to discard their cynicism and make them do it.
Anyone who's read much history knows things can get much worse than this, BUT IT ISN'T INEVITABLE.
Americans need to shake the fatalism and cynicism out of their minds and uplift society. We have the tools to do it; we just need to stop following the forces that want us driven apart.
