A Cautionary Tale of the Human Person

A Metaphysical Parable Through Civic Ontology

At the center stands the human person; one side firm in his given form, the other dissolving as an outside ‘shaper’ tries to repaint him. This small figure with the paints represents the modern ideologue and the scientific technocrat, both acting as a false efficient cause, re-sketching human nature according to preference rather than truth. To the left is the world of right order; form, proportion, purpose, the domain of formal and final cause working together. To the right is the world of privation; the loss of form, the collapse of structure, the unraveling that follows when nature is denied. This is the choice The People face; hold fast to the shape that is given, or surrender it to those who would redraw it. A republic stands or falls on whether its people retain the form that is theirs or surrender it to those who would redraw human nature. Even a child can recognize a person who is starting to lose his shape. On one side he’s still strong and clear, but on the other side he’s fading, because a little ‘artist’ is trying to give him a new shape that isn’t really his. When you read in the literature from the subverters of Education that ‘Teachers must become trained as “Artists” you understand what’s going on’. Those con-artists are continuing to destroy the souls of millions of children and the very soul of the Constitutional Republic itself - as they were trained, weaponized and deployed to do.

In a town by a river where Reason held right,

Lived a folk who stood tall and walked clear in sight.

They knew what they were and the things they could be

For a person has shape, and that shape is to be.

Each stood with a straightness that nobody bent,

For truth was a plumbline that all could assent.

Their choices were choices; their word was their own;

A person was someone, not shifted or grown.

But deep in the alleys where fog hugged the ground,

A murmur began with a hollowish sound;

“You’re not what you are; oh, how frightfully quaint!

Your shape is illusion, your essence a feint.”

The whisper grew bolder and drifted like smoke:

“Why live in old forms? Let your boundaries revoke!

Don’t cling to fixed natures or truths that constrain;

Just change what you are! Redesign every frame!”

Some chuckled, some pondered, a few simply shrugged;

And soon every outline grew fuzzy and smudged.

Where once stood a someone now shimmered a blur,

A shape made of maybes, unsure what they were.

Their houses grew lumpy; their roads lost their right;

Their meetings grew misty far into the night.

For how can folk reason or settle a plan

If no one remembers the shape of a man?

At last the town gathered; though none stood too straight,

To settle what people might call their new state.

“Our rights!” someone cried. “Our duties!” yelled two.

But no one knew who was the one that should do.

“We need a clear meaning!” the mayor declared loud,

But his outline collapsed like a fold in a cloud.

His words tumbled out like soft feathers misplaced:

“I’m not even sure I’m a person,” he faced.

The laws lost their letters; the courts lost their stand;

The statutes slid off like loose paint from a hand.

For how can law bind, or why should rights guide,

When the one who is bound isn’t someone inside?

“Come back!” cried the elders. “Recall what is true!

A person has shape not invented by you!

Your being is given, not made by your whim!

So stand as you once did, right up to the brim!”

But many said, “No! We will choose what we are!

We’ll stretch into stardust! We’ll shrink into tar!

We want to be shifting, unfixed, undefined;

No limits from nature, no truth to align!”

The wind seemed to tremble, the bridges leaned low,

The clock tower tilted like soft, melting snow.

For when human shapes curve where they shouldn’t have gone,

The world built for humans can’t hold very long.

Then out from the fog strode the whisperer tall;

A man with no edges, no face one could call.

His shadow was oozing; his voice soft and deep:

“I’ll help you,” he murmured. “Just follow my keep.”

“For now that you see you’re not anchored or fixed,

Your wills can be molded; your meanings transfixed.

Your shapes are my clay in the palm of my hand;

Come, let me reshape you to suit my sweet plan.”

Some cheered and stepped forward, their outlines undone.

“He knows what we lack! He’ll make us all one!”

But “one,” in his language, meant hollow and thin,

A smooth, empty sameness with no self within.

Yet one little child with a plumbline of wood

Stood tall as she whispered, “This isn’t for good.

A person has substance no whisperer makes.

The truth has firm edges that no shadow breaks.”

She planted her heels and declared with her frame;

“I am not a maybe. I’m not just a name.

I’m someone created with reason to know

The truths that align me wherever I go.”

A murmur spread out like a ripple in glass;

“She’s right… did we lose what we once had en masse?

Our shapes were not prisons; they made us stand tall.

To be someone real is no prison at all.”

The whisperer scowled as their outlines returned.

For once shape is found, deceit’s power is burned.

He shrank back to mist, fleeing into the cracks,

For truth has a weight that no shadow attacks.

The town straightened streets, and the clock tower rose;

The people stood firm in the forms that they chose;

Not chosen by fancy or whim of desire,

But chosen by being, as truth would require.

They spoke in assemblies with courage and grace,

For knowing one’s nature gives words a firm place.

The laws fixed their letters; the courts found their guide;

For justice needs persons who stand from inside.

They thanked the young child for her vision so clear;

“That plumblined reminder brought all of us near

To knowing again what we lost in the fog;

The form of a human, not shapeless as smog.”

And so in that town by the river so bright,

They taught every child from dawn until night;

“Your nature is gift, not a toy to reshape.

Walk tall in your being; hold fast to your shape.”

For cities have futures, and nations stand strong,

When people know what they are all along.

But fog always whispers and shadows will creep;

So guard what you are, or your shape falls asleep.

Remember this tale when the world seems unsure;

Your being is constant; your nature is sure.

If ever a whisper invites you to slip,

Stand firm in your shape; keep a tight, truthful grip.

For those without shape are the easiest bent,

But those who stand real stay the way they were meant.

And the town by the river will long stay awake,

If the people within it remember their shape.

Accompanying Study Notes for Parents, Teachers & Civic Leaders/Public Servants

My own 4 (now teenage!) children used to love it when I read Julia Donaldson stories to them. That classical tradition of the rhyming fable is so effective aurally for forming recognition, memory and understanding. As a parent, you know what happens, even before your child can ‘read’, when you tease and alter one of the rhyming words to see if they notice - and oh boy do they - correcting you in an instant! Then you feign forgetfulness and have them complete the sentences you’ve ‘forgotten’ and all this, before they’ve learned to decode ‘words’ on a page. The deepest lessons of these timeless tales is already absorbed and understood - demonstrable when you recall and recite key phrases as they resonate with everyday situations arising. That ancient oral tradition of story telling is not the modern John Dewey ‘Narrative Pedagogy’ by which social engineering occurs and nor is it a mere childish story of whimsy. My own meagre nod to Julia Donaldson’s timeless craft (I am not a writer!) is the means for me (as an analyst and forensic clinician in the Field of Civic Metaphysics - which doesn’t have an institutional home/working base yet) to form our younger generation in the necessary ontological preconditions of liberty. Probably not just our younger generation, but their parents and grandparents too, who’ve suffered the Theft of Education since the inception of Government Schooling itself. Let’s face it - we all need the Civic version of ‘The Gruffalo’ to remind us of what our ancestors knew, embodied and what The Founders warned must be stewarded from one generation to the next.

It was a recent incident with one of my teens (complaining about this and that) that had me at the time, quoting from Julia Donaldson’s ‘A Squash And A Squeeze’ and it conveyed everything in an instant! The eye rolling came, but the lesson was immediately understood. It set me thinking about whether the seemingly abstract but necessary to understand Field of Civic Metaphysics (especially its Aristotelian foundations) could be presented in a more relatable and memorable way. This was the motivation for writing ‘The Cautionary Tale Of The Human Person’.

The ‘town’ in this tale represents a constitutional republic built on popular sovereignty. The ‘shape’ of the people symbolizes the ontological reality of the human person which is enshrined within the Declaration of Independence, in accordance with ‘The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’, that each individual person has and participates in; fixed nature (being), rational agency (conscience and will), objective (created) moral order, real responsibility, real choice and participation in truth. This is the anthropology on which self-government rests, drawing on the foundational metaphysics of Aristotle, Aquinas, Richard Hooker, Thomas Reid, James Wilson, John Witherspoon and James Madison among other American Founders and those informing them.

The ‘whisperer’ is nominalism/constructivism, the metaphysical and philosophical premises positing that human nature is not given and discovered, but invented and projected - the dominant paradigm in Academia and Education for over 2 centuries now. Once nominalist and constructivist theories and the practises derived from them enter a polity, people cease to understand themselves as agents and become organisms, roles, identities, or psychological patterns. This collapses deliberation, law, rights, accountability, consent and sovereignty because agency disappears. The blurred outlines in The Cautionary Tale represent citizens who have lost the foundations in metaphysical realism necessary for civic life. The ‘council’s collapse’ represents the breakdown of reasoned public deliberation and the ‘melting town structures’ represent the institutional decay that follows when the polity no longer knows what a human being is. The ‘whisperer’s help’ symbolizes technocracy, managerialism, or authoritarian metaphysical capture; once people cease to be agents, they become materials for manipulation.

The child in The Tale with the plumb line is the restoration of realist anthropology; the smallest insight capable of re-anchoring the entire civic order. Truth, once reasserted, causes the whisperer (nominalist and constructivist premises) to flee; conveying that false metaphysics cannot withstand realist ontology once recognized (and this is where civic anamnesis and stewardship comes in). The town’s restoration shows the re-establishment of; law, rights, responsibilities, civic deliberation, institutional integrity and popular sovereignty. This is a metaphysical lesson in narrative form. Stylized (as I said) in the manner of the Tales my own children used to enjoy and that they can still recall many moments from, thanks to the rhyming prose. So I hope that the lessons of this Civic Tale also have the capacity to ‘stick’! My purpose is to convey in an interactive, engaging way as possible, that a Constitutional Republic lives or dies on its embodied ontology of the human person.

The final stanza of The Cautionary Tale Of The Human Person is not merely a poetic resolution; it is a compressed expression of the three pillars of the functioning constitutional order:

🔥Teleology

🔥Eudaimonia

🔥Civic Anamnesis

These terms are classical, but the realities they name are universal (for all men; for all time) and essential (not political or ideological) for self-governance. See how the stanza brings them to life in narrative form:

Teleology - “those who stand real stay the way they were meant.”

Teleology refers to purpose, the end or fulfilment built into a thing’s nature.

A sycamore seed is meant to become a tree and a person is (by their given, created essential nature) meant to live as a rational, moral agent. Not (as the Founders stated in their own words) to live as a ‘dog or a horse’ - confined to the stunted developmental level of mere instinctual impulse and compulsion of will. When you understand why the architects and financiers of State Education from its very inception and roll out, were behaviourists specializing in methods of Animal Training, you understand what was going on and the relationship of this strategically and tactically to undermining and negating the American Constitutional Republic - functionally destroying it from within, over successive generations, while rhetorically marketing that as All-American Progress!

The line in The Cautionary Tale “stay the way they were meant” gently asserts that the human person has a nature not of their own making, a shape that does not originate in desire and a purpose that is neither imposed by the State nor invented by the self. This directly refutes all ideological presumptions. It is recta ratio in poetic form; the right alignment of reason with what is real. A community cannot deliberate toward the common good unless its members first understand that there is a good toward which they are ordered. Teleology is not restriction; it is intelligibility. Without it, civic life dissolves into will, appetite and manipulation.

Eudaimonia - the flourishing proper to human nature

Eudaemonia is often translated as ‘happiness’ and its meaning is is not ‘pleasure’ or ‘positive feelings’, but rather, flourishing; the state in which a being achieves the fulfilment proper to its nature. The Cautionary Tale Of The Human Person reveals eudaemonia by contrasting those ‘without shape’ (those who have lost their nature), with those who ‘stand real’ (those who live in accordance with it). The former are ‘easiest bent’ (susceptible to pressure, indoctrination, deformation/demoralization). The latter ‘stay the way they were meant’ (they stand in the truth of what they are). This is the heart of eudaemonia; living in accord with your given created nature produces stability, clarity and civic resilience. In civic terms, a people who know what a human being is are capable of self-governance. A people who do not are prepared (often unknowingly) for subjugation. I wrote about that over a year ago here:

The Constitution & Our Constitution - Symbiosis

Civic Anamnesis - “remember their shape.”

Anamnesis means remembrance; not recollection of information, but remembering one’s nature, purpose and place within a moral order. The final line in the tale; “If the people within it remember their shape” - carries the full weight of civic metaphysics. It means remembering that human beings are agents (not organisms) and thereby, rights arise from nature, not from government. Remembering that law binds because truth binds and that self-governance depends on the integrity of the person. That is why The Cautionary Tale is about that Human Person upheld in the Declaration of Independence as imago Dei and thereby, with rights which are inalienable (not of contracts, permissions, grants or consent). It means remembering that no republic can survive the engineered forgetfulness (amnesia) of what a human being is. This is the civic equivalent of memory in Plato and prudence in Aristotle; a community that remembers its anthropology remains free; a community that ‘forgets’ or rejects it becomes governable by external will. Civic Anamnesis through applied Education, Law and Governance is the antidote to technocracy, ideology and the Whisperer’s fog - but it needs the full weight of Education, Law and Governance in accord with its telos.

Why This Matters for Civic Leadership and Education

This final stanza distills what centuries of political philosophy and constitutional theory struggle to express; the health of a republic depends entirely on whether its people know what a person is. Teleology provides the causal purpose. Eudaemonia gives the person a horizon of flourishing. Anamnesis gives the person (and the polity) the memory of their shared essential nature - not their collective religious practise or their shared political or ideological affiliation - but their shared essential created nature; imago Dei, the potential nurture, development and flourishing of which was The Founders’ telos for Civic Education for the Constitutional Republic - Eudaemonia; the ‘Happiness’ of the ‘pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness’ enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. This is the Classical Education the Founders themselves inherited and which they insisted must be stewarded from one generation to the next, as the duty of self governance, in order that The People remain vigilant and defend their Republic from the tyrannies of enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Teleology, Eudaemonia and Anamnesis together form the metaphysical foundation of civic virtue (embodiment of moral agency), public deliberation, constitutional limits, resistance to manipulation and the entire architecture of popular sovereignty. A community that preserves this will flourish. A community that is engineered to ‘forget it’ has not and will not. This is why the story ends with a warning and a hope that only if a people remember their shape, can their republic remain ‘awake’; a sovereign republic, rather subsumed within the global totalitarian system under scientific technocratic management. However, a document alone (Constitution, Declaration…etc) can ‘do’ nothing if the People it serves fail to understand and embody, to uphold and defend its principles and premises in action throughout all civic infrastructure. Below is the precise mapping of the three classical pillars (teleology, eudaemonia and civic anamnesis) to the actual phrases of the Declaration of Independence that explicitly or implicitly articulate them. This is not a general interpretation. These are the exact phrases in the Declaration that carry each metaphysical function.

TELEOLOGY

Where the Declaration articulates final causality (the purpose/end for which man is made and for which political life exists). The following phrases in the Declaration anchor human purpose in the moral structure of reality.

🔥“Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”

This is the Declaration’s foundational teleological phrase. Nature has inherent order. That order is not random; it is structured. “Nature’s God” is the source of its purpose. Human beings have a nature that is meant to function in certain ways.

🔥“Endowed by their Creator”

Endowment means given purpose, not constructed. Creator means the source of final cause. This conveys that human beings have a nature with intrinsic directionality, a purpose that precedes political arrangement and rights that flow from that purpose.

🔥“To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”

This is teleology applied to political order. The end (telos) of government is to secure rights. Rights are grounded in human nature’s purpose. Therefore political authority has a defined end, not arbitrary scope. This is Aristotle through Aquinas through Thomas Reid through James Wilson - in one line.

EUDAEMONIA

The Declaration names the conditions of human flourishing, both individual and civic. The Declaration does not use the word ‘happiness’ in the modern emotional sense. It uses the specific classical term; happiness and that is flourishing, which is teleological; eudaimonia.

🔥“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”

This is explicitly a eudaemonic formula meaning; Life is the basic good of existence. Liberty is the condition for rational/moral agency. Pursuit of Happiness is the pursuit of flourishing according to one’s nature. This phrase is not about pleasure. It is about the ability of each person to actualize their given created essential nature within a moral order. Now recognize and understand the difference between that and modern psychological (Tavistock & SRI Changing Images of Man) Mazlow and Jungian informed ‘self-actualization’. They are metaphysically and ontologically oppositional to The Declaration’s ‘Happiness’. Jefferson drew the term ‘happiness’ from; Cicero (summum bonum), Aristotelian eudaemonia and Witherspoon/Wilson/Reid’s moral faculty tradition. So, the original meaning of that phrase in the Declaration is human fulfillment in accordance with given, created nature - not the social constructions and personal self-development apotheosis of man.

🔥“Safety and Happiness” (in the grievances and in the concluding paragraphs)

Here ‘happiness’ once again is a specific classical technical term. A people flourish when their institutions align with the Constitutional Republic’s moral order which is teleological, not constructivist. This is eudaimonia at the civic scale.

CIVIC ANAMNESIS

The Declaration implicitly appeals to memory, heritage, lineage of rights and self-awareness of the people’s nature and source of authority. Anamnesis is the remembering - recognition (and comprehension) of what one is, not merely a recollection of historical and technical facts. The Declaration invokes it in several key passages.

🔥“We hold these truths to be self-evident”

This is the great act of civic remembrance. To ‘hold is to retain, remember, to preserve, conserve, to steward, convey, to uphold and defend. ‘Self-evident truths’ are truths already known in the moral topography of the human person. They are not preference or projection. The people remember (recognize) the structure of reality through nurture, education and shared civic practise. They recall what rights are and where they come from. Do shared traditions and faith play significant roles here? Yes, very much so. However, these truths are ontological, foundational to the human person as imago Dei, transcending specific denominational theological dispute. This is civic anamnesis in its purest form.

🔥“All men are created equal”

This phrase is not empirical description; it is a remembrance of the original condition of humanity under Natural Law. It recalls equal dignity, essential nature, moral agency, equal accountability and sovereignty. This ‘created equal’ memory is the civic ground of the republic.

🔥“Their just powers from the consent of the governed”

Consent is meaningless unless the people remember they are the source of sovereignty, their agency, their natural equality and their prior rights. Consent only works in a community with anthropological memory. When that memory is engineered out of a population through nominalist derived constructivist education philosophy, pedagogy and practise - ‘consent frameworks’ become yet another very seductive tool of control and the practical means to relinquish individual agency, despite all marketing rhetoric to the contrary.

🔥“Appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions”

Rectitude means right order. This line is an appeal to a remembered (defended, upheld, stewarded) moral structure that the people recognize and acknowledge themselves to be under. It is the shared civic anamnesis of moral law, accountability, right reason (recta ratio) and the Creator as source of order.

🔥“Reliance on the protection of Divine Providence”

This is a recollection of the metaphysical context of human action and destiny. It affirms human contingency, moral dependence and the remembered (recognized, acknowledged, upheld, defended) reality that human affairs unfold within a rational moral order. Again, this is the shared civic anamnesis of the structure of reality, not sentiment or sectarian pronouncement.

For all of us who (if we admit it) are big children and have never had the benefit of this civic formation (have never attained our ‘age of reason’ in civic self governance terms, thereby lacking moral agency, but probably excelling in procedural compliance - and woe to us following the lessons of 2020 onwards) - I would like to develop what I’ve started in a small way here on substack and on X, in collaboration with others across domains and sectors who recognize the necessity of this work and I need an institutional/organizational working base, I need to be resourced, my work funded and operationalized in a way which can rapidly counter (at scale) the parasitic infection we’ve all been subject to. A working base for civic metaphysics is not political, but pre-political and the very foundational bedrock of what it was that the Founders established for all men, for all time. A centre for research, training and development which will equip public servants, public officials, teachers, policy makers and parents to recover, restore and reclaim the Constitutional Ontology of the Human Person in theory and in practise, throughout civic infrastructure. I’ve worked steadfastly these past 4 years on developing the body of work for precisely that.

While my clinical forensics on Education subversion and civic metaphysics are not strictly theological; they are metaphysical and ontological. Theology sits inside those categories, it doesn’t define or exhaust them. You can have different theologies that still share the same underlying ontology of man and you can have the same outward ‘Christianity’ with opposing metaphysics underneath it and indeed it is THIS which was the primary vector of infiltration, parasitical ideological infestation and infection of the civic body - precisely through the theological seminaries, in addition to the academic humanities etc. That’s the core problem and why I’m consistently careful to delineate between theology and metaphysics & ontology; architecturally/operationally speaking.

Even inside one denomination, once the metaphysics shifts; from man as rational agent to man as organism, from law as discovered to law as constructed and from nature as given to nature as self-authored - the theology mutates in order to accommodate the new ontology. The vocabulary survives; the substance reverses. This is exactly why I educate on the subversion strategies and tactics on metaphysical inversion and the denial of the created ontology of man. Founder James Wilson wasn’t arguing for a sectarian theology - he was defending the metaphysical conditions of agency that make any theology, any law and any self-governance possible. The Founders didn’t require agreement on the Trinity, sacraments, liturgy, or ecclesiology. They required agreement on something deeper and prior - What is a human being? The essential given created nature of the Human Person. Is truth real? Is moral law objective? Is man a cause of his own actions? Those aren’t denominational doctrines. They are conditions of intelligible law and I have found the scholarship of Daniel N Robinson invaluable in assisting with this.

You can have Baptists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Catholics, Jews and even non-believers in the same polity if they share that common anthropology. The moment you introduce a metaphysics in which man is self-created, or determined by systems, or infinitely malleable, or reducible to psychological impulses, the Republic collapses - no matter what theology is professed. This is why it’s misleading to say the unity was ‘Christian’ when the subversion itself initially came in through heretical streams of so called ‘Christianity’. The unity was metaphysically realist. Christianity helped sustain that realism culturally, but the operative category was metaphysics, not denomination. And it is precisely why the Republic is fracturing now (with much Media Influence Operations assistance) - not because a shared theology was lost, but because the shared ontology of the human person was lost, subverted, negated and rejected. Once that goes, everything else - law, rights, responsibility, deliberation, liberty - goes with it.