If you are still reading this you are not likely to be an authoritarian therefore I suggest you do as Solomon did which was to ask God for wisdom as the best possible gift one could ever have. We need to challenge out fellow citizens as did the Lord Jesus and as did Socrates. We do well also to bear in mind what happened to them. The price of being free in our minds might well be one of suffering.
It is right that we should support our government but to be critical of it as well. Governments tend towards the authoritarian and they do not like to be criticised. Criticism, however is good for them and, as good citizens we are responsible to want the best for our government and our fellow citizens.
Governments are required to protect the people they rule over. The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans explains that they are there to deal with evildoers and to enable the people to go about their legitimate business without interference or molestation. For this reason governments are allowed some sort of military and police force. Thomas Hobbes the English Philosopher of troubled times argued for an absolute monarch. Since no one, he argued, acted against his own interests, and the interests of the monarch, if he was to prosper, were the interests of the state, then clearly an absolute monarch was the answer.
Later developments and later thinking have changed things and the British Head of State is a constitutional monarch, while government is conducted by a Prime Minister aided by ministers chosen from senior elected representatives of the people. This gives a democratic check on the legislators and the executive, as well as the check supplied by the judiciary, as the judges interpret and apply the law.
The Social Contract is the idea that we all have to give up a little of our freedom to the law and to the government in order that the government may enforce the law and we can go about our business freely. In his Second Treatise of Government John Locke argues for a form of social contract. He says: “Secondly, political power is that power which every man, having in the state of nature, has given up into the hands of society, and therein to the governor whom the society hath set over itself, with this express or tacit trust, that it shall be employed for their good and the preservation of their property.”
The above does not differ from the instruction of the Apostle in the letter to the Romans, but agrees with it. The Apostle, however, words his argument to agree with his point that Christians ought to seek the well being of any ruler who is set over them whether they be a democratically elected government or a Nero. Where contracts, however, are broken as when conditions of anarchy are not dealt with and disorder and lawlessness are not corrected, only more disorder results. To rebel against an ineffective government is to encourage the disorder. We must at all times seek the best for out government even if it is a bad one since, by anarchy, a bad government may become a worse one.
Finally a quote from a famous speech on democracy is appropriate here. The funeral oration by Pericles, the Athenian statesman, is perhaps the finest piece of oratory up to Martin Luther King's oration for equality and justice. These are not rivals but stand together, one from the ancient world and one from the modern. We might do well to learn them by heart.
“Let me say that our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbours. It is more the case of our being a model to others,… Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty…. We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbour if he enjoys himself in his own way...
We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deep respect.” (Thcydides, p145)
