The major problems with the formulation of liberty in the United States was precisely that it used non-liberty structures, such as Greek democracy or Roman republic to give it form. These undercut it from the beginning, and displayed a considerable lack of understanding in its nature and composition. The statesmen formulating the US Constitution (notably not Paine, Henry or Jefferson, for example), were those with erudite leanings toward old-world, non-liberty structures and moral justifications, premised in coercive political understanding. It is notable that those literate founders who understood liberty most thoroughly were neither Christian nor hypocrites, but independently-minded freethinkers – grasping for sociopolitical forms that would protect and advance that quality of mind. Although they were the driving force of liberty within the Euro-American community, they were a very small minority. Without them, there would have been no revolution and no unusual "bill of rights" or other such concepts. But the source of these concept derived from the Native Americans, and European ideals and values overruled them on all the key points of design, intent, and purpose.

I have been having an email correspondence with a good friend of mine in Malaysia. She speaks English fluently, though her native languages are Chinese and Malay. What she does not grasp is the difference in thinking processes. Her mind works in a different manner than mine, even when she is speaking fluent English. The difference is that between the Chinese/Japanese pictographic language and the rote memorization required to learn (to write/read) that language, such that Sino children appear very advanced in their early years, but the mental processes of reasoning does not develop at a similar pace, and adults can be lacking in simple common sense; conceptual thinking is often beyond them. There is more to it than this, and I did much research back in 1992, when I was living in Taiwan and teaching English. My point is that the mental processes/patterns are different, due as much to different language forms as to different cultural experiences.

A similar difference occurred in America between its discovery/colonization and the Declaration of Independence. During that period, the Europeans lived amongst the native population. The cultures mingled and absorbed much from one another. Per usual, the Europeans had less to share than the natives. They were also (being "morally superior") averse to learning from the natives. However, due to the necessities of survival in that country, they needed to learn from the natives and – for the first few centuries – to treat the natives with respect. The Natives lived separately, but in and around the Europeans – helping them, trading with them, teaching them, forming military alliances with them, and learning of them (if not from them). What the Europeans learned was very little didactically, and very much experientially, by a process not unlike osmosis.

These were two different cultural mindsets, views, ways of thinking and processing information, as well as radically different social organizations. More different than my Chinese/Malay friend and myself. Even though her knowledge of English does not give her access to how our thinking differs, when we are together and talking in person, she begins to get the flow of that process. I have noticed in several stimulating, late-night conversations that she reaches a point where she seems to shift gears and to understand how to think in the same independent and imaginative way that I do in such conversations on ideas ... and then, for her, she says, it's like flying. This isn't something that can be mechanically taught – it is, like that of infants learning behavior (and language) from their parents, almost a process of osmosis – just by being around it and doing it, without deductive thought, but with an inductive/intuitive understanding.

The "thinking" of the American settlers was affected by living in and amongst Native populations more than they could even begin to imagine – or acknowledge. The culture and sociopolitical forms that they brought with them from Europe were too much to disown as a primary frame of reference. But the Native philosophies and sociopolitical forms mixed in with these, such that the European ideas themselves were not changed outwardly, but the settlers began to think about these ideas in a different manner. Formally, they were just as respectful as always to the European ideas, ideals, morals and institutions. But, informally, they began to think outside the European box, even as they lived by the European guidelines. Very little has changed in that respect, except that the original liberator (in spirit) from the crippling ideas of altruism and other European values began to become suspect to the Euro-Americans (especially the new arrivals, who, not needing them, only saw the inferiority of the Natives), and the Natives became the enemy, deserving genocide (in direct consequence of the threat of superiority they posed to European values).

The Native Americans were not necessarily superior to the Europeans in all respects. They had greater health, greater freedom, and greater awareness of their environment. They were not utopists, as were the Europeans, and their manner of processing information was different, and considerably more inductive. But, by their influence in and upon the European colonists, they weakened the European memes enough to change the course of history. But only by a little. The consequence was that second or third generation colonists were able to "think the unthinkable" from the perspective of European memes.

Tom Paine was the decisive inspiration for the Revolution, but his "out of the (European) box" American philosophy was rejected by Europeans, and even stirred resentment from most Euro-Americans who still clung to their European roots. They could understand what and how he was thinking, but they resented him for making plain how distant they were from those roots ... and how far they had drifted from the "correct European path". So, while his initial pamphlet substantiated their quest for independence politically, his later pamphlets were abhorred by these same people as a rejection of their roots, their blood, and their cultural memes ... as bad as "going native."

What the early European colonists and settlers in America received by osmosis from the Natives, in addition to the benefit of being physically distant from their European cultures, was an awareness of the possibility of greater liberty than Europeans had ever even conceived. There was something very distinctive in several of the North American tribes ... political and social arrangements that had never been seen anywhere on the planet before. The incredible husbandry of the American plains and the great herds of buffalo (which were "wild" only in the loosest sense), as well as the awesome terraforming of the Pacific Northwest, bespeak a very advanced people ... with, yet, some of the simplest political forms, including democratic/consensus councils, matriarchal leadership/guidance, political equality of the sexes, private property rights, sovereignty of individuals, smallish, interconnected communities, and individuals who were both fiercely independent while, yet, extremely responsible members of their communities. And all of this without altruistic concepts of duty or self-sacrifice, without irresponsible greed or hedonism, without either European vices or European virtues ... a fundamentally different culture/meme.

Whatever the Europeans learned from the Natives in a mechanical/empirical sense (and much of what is recorded) is very similar to my Chinese/Malay friend's grasp of the English language. But the European record of such information is designed to make these people comprehensible to an European mindset by reference to empirical data, plus the illusion that we can truly understand people (or nature) by reference to such data. But we miss the spiritual dimension – and most of the mental processes. We understand what such people did (some of it), but we have very little grasp of why they did these things or how their minds worked ... all we have is reference to our own mindset by way of explanation. Or, if we are lucky, sensitive and intuitive, then we may learn something of this process by living alongside such people over a period of time ... perhaps even being raised in a community in which such people play an integral, vital part, as was the case in throughout colonies from the 1600s through the 1700s.

The North American Natives had an enormous impact upon Europeans from the beginnings of settlement, both in America and back in Europe. As John Mohawk comments in the book The Indian Roots of American Democracy (ed. Jose Barreiro):

"But the principle that law should rule was not born in the courts of Europe, was it? The principle that law is sacred was not born in Greece or Rome. The principle that law should determine our agreement among ourselves to act in a way that brings safety and freedom to us all was argued between Indians and European explorers in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It was argued between the Indians and the people that the Jesuits sent into the Indian country. It was carried over to France by writers and by voyagers. It was argued in France and it found its way back to America when the Americans heard it from the French." [John Mohawk, "The Indian Way Is a Thinking Tradition," in Indian Roots of American Democracy, Jose Barreiro, ed., Akwe:kon Press, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1992, p. 26]

Critical components of liberty found their way back to the Euro-American in diluted, Europeanized form, and then, having been "vetted" by European "authorities," were given credence by the settlers, who were already inclined in that direction due to their experiential association with the Natives, but who were still dependent upon European memes and authorities.

This aspect of the American experience is much discounted in our Euro-America histories and summaries. Indeed, the later extermination of the American Natives played such an important and definitive role in American history, that we intentionally omit many of the early references to the American Natives – for much the same reason we were compelled to exterminate them: resentment, fear, and hatred of the very qualities that we presume are European, but are actually Native American – including the rejection of altruism, the rejection of Christian institutions of religion (though not of Christ nor any other prophet), the reverence for individualism and individual independence, and liberty.

"As they were standing on the shore watching these people come ashore, the Indians carried with them a tradition of meeting and democracy, of free speech, of free thinking, of tolerance for each other's differences of religion, of all those things which got attached to the Bill of Rights. All those things that we say are truly American were born on this soil generations before Columbus ever set sail.

"If the Indians hadn't been on that shore, if there had been no one living in the woods, do you really believe that all those ideas would have found birth among a people who had spent a millennium butchering other people because of intolerance over questions of religion, killing people who suggested that the earth was not the center of the universe, burning people who said that the sun was only one little thing in a whole bunch of stars, killing people who said they did not want to send their taxes to Rome? Do you think that tradition would have found its way, by itself? I think not." [John Mohawk, Ibid., p. 25]

These traditions were being both developed and trashed by the Europeans simultaneously, re-phrased in European terms, and referenced to European philosophers and religion (with not a little rewriting of history to make this appear convincing). But it was a mixed premise from the beginning. As fast as Euro-Americans developed the idea of liberty, they pell-mell derailed it at the same time, with fresh-blood from Europe the foremost destroyers of the concept, with their memes of utopia and their institutions of perpetuating these destructive memes (government, religions, universities and corporations).

"It was our grandfathers who took your grandfathers by the hand at the Treaty of Lancaster in 1774, and urged them to form a union such as ours so that they may prosper. It was Benjamin Franklin who took notes at that treaty and became inspired to such a union....

"Your people went on to develop the Constitution of the United States encompassing the symbols of our constitution, the bundle of arrows symbolizing the new thirteen states, the leaves of the pine tree, and the eagle that we place upon the tree of peace. This and more we share as common history." [Oren Lyons, "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave," in Ibid., p. 34]

Yet, in the end, liberty is neither here nor there. Euro-memes wiped it out. If Europe can be said to have been influenced by America in the past 250 years, it is with a version of liberty which has been much Europeanized, civilized and sanitized such as to have boiled away all the nutrients in the original Native American pot.

"In a fascinating psychological choice, the Founding Fathers rejected their own tribal histories and adapted the ways of the Romans and Normans who had conquered their ancestors. No matter how much they admired their ancestors, they had to give the Romans and other conquerors their due, for the ultimate lesson was that societies like Rome won, and that less-centralized peoples, be they Germans, Saxons, or American Indians, lost.

"The analogy between the Roman conquest of northern Europe and the white conquest of America was older than the Enlightenment and lay at the very roots of English colonization." [Robert W. Venables, "The Founding Fathers: Choosing to be the Romans," in Ibid., p. 99]

This "fascinating psychological choice" was simply the meme that had no experience with and no value of the concept of liberty. Liberty got nothing from European philosophy, religion, political forms or culture, all of which steadily conspired to destroy liberty in the same fashion and for the same reason that Euro-Americans were compelled to destroy the cultures and the people of the American Natives.

It does not even matter – any longer – whether the American Natives had anything particularly superior to the Europeans, or to the Euro-Americans. I think they did. If it was not fully realized as a well-defined sociopolitical system (on what? European lines?), it was still superior to anything that they Europeans had in 1500 ... or in 1600 ... or in 1700. As writer Robert W. Venables, elucidates:

"Indirectly, images of the Iroquois were philosophical and aesthetic symbols. The Europeans and colonists perceived these symbols through the prisms of their own European-oriented philosophies and expectations. The Haudenosaunee represented admirable political and social qualities, and thus the Haudenosaunee became symbols within the colonial culture of widely held ideals such as "liberty." The colonists' cultural perspective of the Haudenosaunee and other American Indians came into special focus with the philosophies of the European Enlightenment." [Robert W. Venables, Ibid., p. 69]

Nor does it matter, to me, that the American Native sociopolitical forms would strike me as rustic and mostly incomprehensible from the perspective of one who is familiar with the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and other salient documents staking out some of the parameters of liberty ... still less for someone who has tried his own hand at defining the essential ingredients of liberty in my various writings, especially perhaps the distilled Contract for Liberty.

What matters to me, is that if I were going to the source of liberty – to learn something new, relevant, and deep about liberty – then I would go to the North American Natives ... if that source had not been exterminated by genocide and corrupted by European-style concentration camp life that wiped it out and turned the fountainheads of liberty into eviscerated zoo animals and stuffed museum artifacts.

In my travels abroad, throughout much of the third world, I found very few worlds that could promise as much as the Native Americans once held. Of course, everywhere that I could travel had already been much trafficked by Europeans – studied, re-interpreted, revised, rebuilt, and corrupted. What survives are only a few bits and pieces that were overlooked by the European exterminators/missionaries/ngos.

I do not hold the Native American cultures or their sociopolitical systems up as an ideal, even though it was the source-pool for whatever liberty we have hacked out of the bushes of this planet. I would not harken-back to what they had. I would acknowledge that it was the critical contribution to the development of the idea of liberty on a world scale – and the beginning of a species-wide discussion of liberty, even though we still have very little comprehension of that experience.

In a key passage, Oren Lyons notes:

"Sovereignty, then, began with the individual, and all people were recognized to be free, from the very youngest to the eldest." [Oren Lyons, Ibid., p. 32]

How much simpler can it get? If they had that, then they had more than the Europeans, Romans or Greeks had ever imagined possible. True liberty.

Liberty is not a mechanical thing any more than a language is a mechanical thing. I cannot explain liberty to someone who has not lived it. I cannot even "show" it to them, for it is not a thing that can be seen, touched, tasted, or felt. Its material consequences are irrelevant to its rationale, purpose or design. The understanding of liberty comes from having experienced it and that experience is not a solitary one, but a social one, and, hence, to have experienced it in conjunction with others.

We all have glimpses of liberty in our lifetimes. For most of us, this happens occasionally during childhood (and for too many it is a concept of "freedom from" the brutal and disrespectful indoctrinations of childhood). For others, it may come during travels, where we are in association with people who do not think "like us," but have different mental patterns and different sociocultural memes. (Whether the patterns/memes are inferior or superior is irrelevant to the affect it has on the primacy we give our own memes: this human nature "meme" of ours is not hardwired – is not, in any essential manner, "human nature" at all, but, rather, an optional social contrivance.) Perhaps literature, film or art may be able to give some of us a glimpse of some of the parameters of liberty, but, as these are framed in cultural terms (and, hence, utopian terms), both the impact and the relevance of such portrayals are most always delusional, actually diverting us from confronting liberty and leading us back to the utopian fold.

There are other experiential "glimpses" of liberty that can come from belief in the existence of liberty, as a myth, which, when surrounded by other believers, can give the illusion/experience of living in liberty, even when none of the facts support it. Thence, a sense of mutual respect, based upon mythical political forms, can evince a delusional reality of liberty, even though all the forms fail to substantiate it in fact. This can cause many people distress and depression when they awaken from such a fictional delusion (and most of them want only to pull the blankets back over their tousled little heads and go back to the comfort of dreamland).

There is, initially, a great wail of disappointment "I was lied to!" followed by a continual sense of bewilderment, but, for most, the continuing reaction is denial of the betrayal (including denial of both the dream and the reality). We can see this clearly in the reaction of the American public to its own government's perpetration of 911, and their support of the genocidal destruction of other cultures in denial of their betrayal by their own culture, government, indoctrination, memes, and religions – which are all, by this point, thoroughly old-world (European) and have not been represented, truly, by liberty even from the beginning, except as an illusion that was never fully understood (which would have mandated a complete rejection of European philosophy then, even if it had not resulted in embracing any other culture, since liberty is characterized by individual independence, not clinging to the clan).

I do not really understand how or why I am given the understanding of liberty that I possess and attempt to express. I understand it as a kind of primal thing that nearly defies explanation or communication. It undoubtedly comes out of my experience, but where or how, I cannot easily pinpoint. A great deal, of course, comes from my travels. When I awoke to certain realities on the nature of the human being during my travels, I seemed to question, doubt and reject a lot of my previous cultural indoctrination, excepting the experience with the myth of liberty. I understood that it had been a myth and not a reality, but I had experienced it – up to a certain age – as a reality, and I found nothing in my third world explorations to reject the possibility of liberty, only its dimensions and design as evidenced in the "first-world." (This first-world is an European world, even accepting parallel philosophies in Japan, China, USSR, etc ... "western" means "european," and that includes the uSA and Canada, culturally and sociopolitically).

People hear what they are ready to hear and capable of hearing. The Euro-Americans of the age could hear Paine's "Common Sense," but they could not hear his "Age of Reason." So it goes.

In the book, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650, a history by J.H. Elliott, the author notes this difficulty of coming to terms with vast cultural differences:

"... it may well be that the human mind has an inherent need to fall back on the familiar object and the standard image, in order to come to terms with the shock of the unfamiliar. The real test comes later, with the capacity to abandon the life-belt which links the unknown to the known.... Their own dawning realization of the wide divergence between the image and the reality, gradually forced them to abandon their standard images and their inherited preconceptions. For America was a new world and a different world; and it was this fact of difference which was overwhelmingly borne in upon those who came to know it. 'Everything is very different,' wrote Fray Tomas de Mercado in his book of advice to the merchants of Seville; 'the talent of the natives, the disposition of the republic, the method of government and even the capacity to be governed.'

"But how to convey this fact of difference, the uniqueness of America, to those who had not seen it? The problem of description reduced writers and chroniclers to despair." [J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650, Cambridge University Press, London, 1970, p. 21]

A very similar difficulty to that of trying to describe liberty. Through the despair in attempting to communicate liberty is much greater.

I read through "The Indian Roots of Democracy" again while preparing this article. And I ... I wept. Although not for "paradise lost," but, rather, for an idea stumbled upon and trampled, even by those who realized its value.

"They found here in full flower, free nations guided by democratic principles, all under the authority of the natural law, the ultimate spiritual law of the universe. This was then the land of the free and the home of the brave." [Oren Lyons, Op Cit, p. 33]