The Moral Imperative
By Tom Wilson

What compels people to do what's right? The Law? Well, law only works ifpeople want to obey it. Again, what compels people to want to do what's right, to obey the law?

The reason this is an important question is that lately people and institutions we have previously trusted seem to be driving over a cliff, and taking peace, prosperity, morality, and society over the cliff with them. Examples abound: the worldwide financial meltdown which devours our hope and substance; government's role in shaping and/or mishandling that meltdown; Islam's stealth jihad in America; the coming war with a now nuclear-armed Iran- there's plenty to worry about.

In such troubled times, who can we trust? People who just say they are trustworthy?

It's obvious that our family affairs, our society, our commerce, our world, cannot operate without the telling of truth, without our devotion to the telling of truth. Where does that devotion come from? From a personal "moral imperative." Some people have it; some people don't.

In a pre-modem America, most people drew their moral imperative from God. It wasn't some radically evangelical idea, but God had always watched over America, and He was probably watching over you too, so you'd better do what's right. Pretty simple. God was the source of a personal, social, and national moral imperative.

In a post-modem America, many of us have pretty much told God to go hang out somewhere else, or convinced ourselves that the transcendent reality of God is a scientific impossibility. Enough people feel that way now that our behavior and institutions are becoming first: amoral, and consequently, immoral, and we and our institutions are failing as a society.

A devotion to ''the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" is essential in establishing both justice and reality. Now our information experts: our media, educators, and politicians, are devoted to ''the spin, the undetectable spin, and nothing but dodging the reality." There have always been masters of selective information, which, however factual, is selected to manipulate: to lie by telling some truth. A national government "of the people, by the people, for the people" has largely become a national government of, by, and for the spinners- the monied elites, the social engineers, the special interests. It has become parasitical; it does not make prosperity, but takes prosperity away. Soon it will cease to provide for the common defense; it will no longer insure domestic tranquility; it will attack inalienable rights.

We are nationally financially bankrupt because first we have become morally bankrupt. What's the answer? Look higher. If our moral imperative comes only from the self, we become perfectly selfish. If it comes only from the human collective, from social pressure, from our desire to fit in, to be other-directed, to be politically correct, we become cogs in a machine we no longer control. Americans have always transcended the human collective, and reached upward and inward. It's who we've been, and need to be again.

Tom Wilson is an Advisory Board member of the Defender’s Council of Vermont