The cartoon above is funny until you realize that it also illustrates the difference between public and private control of knowledge, positions respectively held by America's left and right-leaning political ideologies.
By logical extension and an awareness of current events, it also suggests that private ownership of knowledge can be, and is in fact used to undermine the rule of law and to rob the people if their constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms.
I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.
--Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:278
The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.
--Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526
No comments:
Post a Comment