Rebecca M Rowan Forté
2 min readJan 28, 2020

Can we stop referencing the "framers/founders" as if they are eternal gods to be worshipped? (US centric post)

Like...

Ok cool. They made some advancements in political technology.

But I find it wears to constantly hear about what the "founders" would think or want. Slavery alone is a monstrosity. And they had the moral reasoning to know it. If that weren't so there wouldn't have been such disquiet and pushback and justifications.

Take the good ideas and toss the rest. Pull from various ideas. Realise that your mind is fully capable of asking what we should want or what is correct right now without referencing the dead. Do you suppose those founders did what they did by referencing only what came before, by thinking the past had the answers, by thoughtlessly and blindly revering previous thinkers? Of course not.

Neither should we. It makes sense to draw from previous efforts and social experiments and thinkers, but only as a part of a whole potluck of ideas.

We are better than them - though still a long way to go - and that is as it should be. We should always be improving and doing better. And boy we could easily be doing a lot better right now. Just like they had the moral reasoning to know better on slavery, we have the moral reasoning to know better about our own slavery (prison systems, wage slavery), to know better than being okay with this level of unmet needs, of homelessness, hopelessness and so on.

Humans are successful not because we do things alone, but because we band together. Yet we have made a virtue out of ultra hyper-capitalist anti-social behaviour. We know better. In our bones we know better.

Rebecca M Rowan Forté
Rebecca M Rowan Forté

Written by Rebecca M Rowan Forté

Intellectual hummingbird tornado, anarchistic, obsessed with black holes, politics, all -ologies, myth, and a jack of all adjectives. entp e7 SX/SO