The last article was about Natural Laws. All of the natural laws together give rise to Natural Order. Natural Order exists regardless of mankind. All humans have control over, regarding Natural Order, is whether they will abide by it and get to experience it, or try to resist it and ultimately fail.
There is another type of order which applies to human organizations of any kind and size, from families all the way up to entire societies. This type of order is called Divine Order. Divine Order is the result of designing and using the structure and rules of an organization in a manner which most enables all involved to fulfill their highest potential. It should also enable all lifeforms to experience Natural Order. “All lifeforms” means not only those directly involved in the organization. The purpose of the leadership and rules of the organization is to preserve Divine Order in a manner which is aligned with the organization's purpose.
The Principles of Divine Order
The four principles which comprise Divine Order are Freedom, Equality, Responsibility, and Fraternity.
Freedom refers to an individual's ability for sovereignty. To preserve freedom, only those limitations absolutely needed to preserve Divine Order should be imposed. Limitations on human behavior are generally known as rules or laws. In a Divine Order it is recognized that any limitation on a human's inner life is almost always detrimental. The resulting fear-based blind conformity generally causes people to fall short of their potential, since humans were not meant to be fearful animals.
Equality refers to equality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity means that individuals are not blocked from any opportunity except by their own inability or lack of will to take it. All tasks and positions should ideally first be given to those both best able to and most willing to perform them. These best individuals are at liberty to share their tasks with willing others in order to teach and train those others, as long as such training will not lead to problems in the organization. These best individuals are likewise at liberty to delegate their tasks to others if they believe the job will still be done sufficiently.
Responsibility refers to several things. First of all, every individual must accept the consequences of their intentions, which includes having to take some kind of action to realize those intentions. Second, every individual in an organization has duties which must be undertaken to both maintain their place in the organization and also keep the organization running functionally. Third, every individual should know their present abilties and limitations which they have yet to bypass. In turn, no individual should be asked to do what he cannot do. Likewise, unless there is common agreement that the purpose of the task is learning, then no individual should offer to do a task at which he is very likely to fail. This guideline should be more strongly enforced the larger the consequences of failure would be. In Divine Order we do not wish to keep opportunities out of people's hands unfairly, but neither do we wish to unnecessarily disrupt order, such as through some kind of unintended injury or destruction.
Note that in the context of Divine Order opportunity refers more so to an opportunity to experience oneself and self-realize, as opposed to an opportunity for material gain.
Fraternity is synonymous with brotherhood. There are several levels of brotherhood. The first is a basic natural law, which is the unavoidable connection between all things in reality and the consequent fact that all things affect one another. The next level of brotherhood is the grouping of all those beings which attempt to adhere to the same principles. In my conception of “the Spiritual War,” Economic men (adherents to materialism) belong to one group, and in the other group are spiritual men along with all other forms of life. If individuals from different groups belong to the same organization then they will likely both feel that individuals from the other group are in their way. Many human organizations do in fact include individuals from both groups, such as all of human society. The only way differences in principle can be overcome at all is by having unifying goals, which are also known as super- goals. When America was established, both the founding fathers (and people such as farmers and soldiers) and the colonial merchants agreed that they desired independence from Britain. In this case the will of fundamenally different people was unified, so that will became reality. This is an example of the principle of fraternity prevailing via a unifying goal.
Examples of Divine Order
There are examples both of the individual principles of Divine Order, as well as examples of various organizations and in what way they align with the principles.
Examples of the Individual Principles
I idealize the principle of Freedom when teaching someone something. The goal is to give them just enough information and plenty of space to figure out the answer or solution for themselves. The situation I seek to avoid is my words or example being copied verbatim, with no internal understanding of the skill or knowledge having developed. This means that the person is “just going through the motions” and has not truly learned the mechanics nor essence of the matter at hand. I try to steadily provide more information and demonstration of an example the more apparent it is that this is needed.
Equality of Opportunity is easily observable on a secondary school cross country team. In cross country the top five runners on the team score and the sixth and seventh runners can cause the top five runners from other teams to score more points. The scoring is much like golf in that the lowest score wins. The winner of the race scores one point, second place scores two points, and so on. The lowest possible score is 15 points, because 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15. While only seven runners count, virtually every school program I am aware of does not limit the number of runners who can join a team. My own high school team had an average of 20 runners every year, and the boys' team average size was at least 25. Not only does everyone get to participate on the team, but everyone gets to race, too. This fact does not encroach in any way on the role of the top seven runners. Not only that, but everyone getting to race means that everyone has an opportunity to finish amongst the top seven and count for the team. This means that the top seven is not static: instead, it is determined day-to-day. There is no way to advance one's position on a cross country team besides running faster than a teammate: money and social connections are absolutely powerless. I led my high school team for two seasons and roughly the first quarter of a third season. I faded due to health problems (as I described in Welcome to the Void as well as How I Regained My Running Speed). My abilities faded and thus my position on the team fell, from first to about seventh by the end of the season. Because demonstrated ability is the only factor that determines one position on the team, there was not anything else which could prevent this demotion.
In an organization like the modern military, where there are numerous specialized jobs and the success of all jobs is interdependent on one another, it is paramount that every individual involved takes Responsibility. If they do not take responsibility for their duties then someone else could bein danger. Likewise, no one is expected to do a job they have not been trained for (I don't know for sure that this is true, by the way, but if it is not I imagine that disaster is very likely if not inevitable). Sustaining morale is an important duty of all members of the military because without it the will to fight, protect the country, and attempt to secure each other's survival diminishes. It is ideal that civilians also consider themselves responsible for sustaining morale, though at least in America this duty seems to have faded. It does not help that a large portion of the populace questions the necessity of the military's actions (and it is hard to convince them otherwise when war has not been waged on this soil in almost 140 years and the overseas conflicts we have recently engaged in seem to have no tangible effect on our national security).
A small-scale example of Fraternity is a couple remaining married for the sake of providing their children with a stable and reliable private life. The man and wife might both have the desire to separate, but they regard the interests of their children as a higher priority than their own individual interests. Their marriage is thus maintained by a unifying goal. Once the children reach legal adulthood (age 18) then the parents might legitimately consider divorce.
Examples of Divine Organizations
Partial Example: Ancient Sparta
Ancient Sparta was strong in the principles of Responsibility and Fraternity: every man, woman, and child was expected to fulfill his or her clearly-defined duty to the nation. As for Equality, people deemed as physically “deficient” were not given a chance to live. However, at that time and place it was probably difficult to accommodate the physically disabled, and many such people might not have survived long anyway. The only solid criticism, then, is that the Spartans might have judged people's capabilities far too early in life: after all, how can one know that an infant will be physically deficient unless it has obvious defects? Otherwise, all of those Spartans who did live did so without any advantages over one another which did not pertain to ability. The Spartan way of life was based on preparation for warfare, and few men could escape this by way of money or privilege of birth. (By the way, I realize it is possible that the Spartans did in fact only sacrifice those infants who had obvious defects, and the radically different attitudes of modernity might have caused the description of this practice to be overblown.)
As for the full example, I would purposely like to save that for another article. Likewise, note that I closed Finding the Original Intention of America by stating that the difference between the American Revlution and the French Revolution is that the American Revolution was far more orderly. I intend to discuss how the original intention of America was to establish a country based on Divine Order.
Overall, the ultimate goal and potential of Divine Order is to enable all beings to experience the highest level possible of self-realization, both as individuals and in the context of belonging to the same whole.