The national interest as self-interest is intrinsically selfish but the center of its will lies illumined in the life of the national community. A community must be self-interested else it shall not last long.
All human beings are naturally self-interested creatures the same with all creatures in God's creation.
We must be or else, we have a problem. There is no backing out of being. No physical coming back to the womb. Else, life and living itself can not progress and evolve.
Self-interest here is not an evil, lack of it is.
Now, there are forms of self-interest greater than the person of the self.
An example of this is the institution of the family. Man and Woman as a unified whole is invested in a form of self-interest that is distinct from Man and Woman as their individual persons.
Religion regards this union as sacred and it is.
Religion blesses those who bless life even at its conception and regards with holy esteem those who receive with the welcome of peace the life of those who are born to this world.
Nations regard this union as necessary.
Ours is the trust that protects and prospers the life of the family and the communities that bless, provide for, and accept tribe and family with a greater welcome of peace.
- selah -
Family is our basic introduction to life in the national community.
It forms the ground of our civics.
As individual citizens we must know without our fathers and mothers who as Family gave to us the choice we could not make at birth, we would simply not be.
No babe is born with a freedom that is complete. In fact, we were the least free among God's creatures at the very moment of our birth. As babes, not one of us could even make the choice to live.
It is family who gave us the choice to live.
And these choices often come at the expense of other choices that our fathers and mothers willingly subordinated to that form of self-interest greater and maturer than what their persons usually demanded of them as individuals alone.
Regardless of how everything proceeded from that moment therefore, to honor thy father and mother is pre-requisite to the knowledge of life in the national community.
The common instruction to the value of the choices we make in community - we learn simply from the action of family and as not all families are the same, we honor father and mother still for that one choice they had to make for us as babes.
For none of us could ever truly make that choice. Nor boast about it without sin.
So in civics it is the same; that those of us who are without choices is served in society by those of us who are able to make those choices - to live - so that none of us should ever be so poor so as to live without liberty or be so fated by the random nature of this world to endure without hope or live without peace.
- selah -
I think the saying that those who have least in life should have more in law is one better illumined by the first principle of sufficiency through reliance. And this principle better understood simply by honoring our fathers and our mothers in the light of the right remembrance.
Through life in the family, love and memory is from generation to generation brought forth into the nation so that in our civics, we may make good choices in each other's behalf - that all of us in the land may live long and the nation prosper in peace.
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