The four C’s of democracy

It could also be called the Law of Four C’s:  community, chaos, conscience and cops that is authored by Chuck Colson.  A community or society that practices democracy can only function in peace if conscience and cops are utilized.  Community is like a human body.  A human body has two defenses against diseases: inner immunity and medicines. The first one is natural and the other artificial. The first one is preventive and the other is remedial.  If it loses its inner immunity to disease, it needs medicines or surgery, which is basically propping it up from the outside, to compensate for its inner disintegration.

Chaos is the equivalent of a disease of a body to a society.  Chaos is when there is no rule of law, and anyone can commit a crime and does not have to answer for it.  It can be equated to anarchy which is defined as a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority much like the case of a country in Africa which is Somalia.  Somalia has no central authority of government and is ruled by tribes.  If you commit a crime within the tribe, you are rendered tribal justice.  But if you offend another tribe or commit a crime against them, a tribal war could be triggered, since there is no central authority to referee both tribes.

The two defenses of society against chaos are cops (outer shield or the medicine to a body) and conscience (inner shield or the immunity of the body).  The cops are mandated by civil law to enforce the law against violators thus protecting the weak from the bully or the strong.  The inner shield is the moral law, not made by man, but discovered and enforced spiritually by conscience.  Conscience is the knowledge of the moral law built within man by God such that man knows that acts such as rape, torture, murder, dishonesty, stealing is wrong or evil even without the knowledge of Scripture or a moral authority teaching it.  Conscience is common to all men regardless of race, era and culture, and often times referred to as the “voice of God” within man.

The inner shield is made of freedom; the outer shield is made of force.  The inner shield is motivated by love, love for the good.  The outer shield is motivated by fear, the fear of punishment.  And love is free, while fear is unfree (or forced to act out of fear).  Cops and conscience are complimentary.  The need for each one decreases, as the supply of the other one increases.  The more conscience a community has, the fewer cops it needs; and the more cops it has, the less conscience it needs to rely.  But if it has more cops, it loses its freedom to do the right thing out of love, but does it only because of fear of punishment, which happens in totalitarian countries such as China and North Korea.

America’s Founding Fathers that authored democracy in the U.S. of which the Philippine democratic form of government is patterned from, explicitly said that, the free democracy they designed is only for moral people.  Or the foundation stones for a democracy are consciences.

But there’s a paradox in democracy, although it is founded on the premise of strong moral consciences, it can also produce weak ones by its very permissiveness or by giving it a lot of freedom to its citizens.  It’s maximization of freedom (that is, freedom from cops) depends on its willing submission to conscience, yet this freedom from cops tempts people to freedom from conscience too.  This is what is currently happening in the United States where too much freedom (legalization of abortion, divorce, etc.) has created the chaos of the so-called culture wars that pities the liberals against the conservatives or the left wing versus the right wing of the populace.  The liberals call for freedom from religious morality which is equivalent to freedom from conscience.  And they advocate for abortion, and LGBT movement that promotes sex change for kids as young as 12 years old without their parents’ consent, which the conservatives are vehemently against.

How did America come to abandon the dictates of its conscience? And how can we Filipinos learn from their unfortunate situation?  The answer is to strengthen society’s conscience so as not to get into the notion that the pursuit of happiness is found in more freedom. On the contrary true happiness is achieved through the pursuit of more virtues.  For real freedom is not found in committing sin because sin enslaves (makes us sin-addicts and hinders our growth in character) but in the freedom to pursue the opposite, the morally good, or the virtues (such as hard work, compassion, justice, humility, discipline, obedience, etc.) that makes us attain the best version of ourselves, or being the best of what we are capable of, of which spiritually speaking the Church calls a saint.