Dr. Os Guinness at Socrates in the City: "A Free People's Suicide" [how prescient in light of the Donald Trump phenomenon!]

"A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future" 

Author and social critic Os Guinness

September 13, 2012

[Before starting his talk on Freedom, Os made remarks about the Religious / Christian Right that are worth capturing in print: (i) theological unfaithfulness, (ii) political ineffectiveness, and (iii) cultural counter-productiveness.  "The Religious Right is one of the main factors stoking anti-religious, anti-Christian sentiment..."]

Os Guinness

Freedom and Its Future

Another brilliant talk. 

"...always free, free always"

Three Tasks:

1. Winning freedom.

2.  Ordering freedom.

3.  Sustaining freedom - by far, the hardest.

- Yes, Constitution, but more... AND

- "Golden Triangle of Freedom": (i) Freedom requires (ii) virtue, which requires (iii) faith, and faith requires freedom.

Three Menaces to Freedom:

1.  External menaces.

2.  Polybius "corruption of customs" "habits of the heart"

3.  Passing of time, "the injury of time" for fall of Rome.

Three Shifts from Founders:

1.  Privatization of religion.

2.  Rise of "proceduralism" or "legal secularism" (Rawls)

3.  Rise of "post-modernism" (no truth, will to power)

Contemporary Menaces:

1.  Alienation of leaders.

2.  Breakdown of transmission of American virtues

e.g. public education (custodians of handing down American virtues), immigration (citizenship education)

3.  Corruption of customs.

More talks at CIVIC EDUCATION