Beware Our Idols and Lift the Lens
- Brainz Magazine
- 17 hours ago
- 9 min read
Written by Justin Edgar, Coach
Justin Edgar is a life and breathwork coach and creator of The Art of Creative Flow, blending entrepreneurship, education, and mindful somatic practice to help individuals, leaders, and teams move beyond struggle and burnout to reconnect with clarity, vitality, and purpose.
We often speak of the Founding Fathers as if they were carved fully formed from marble, paragons of virtue, united in purpose, pure of intention. But history, when viewed without the haze of nostalgia, tells a far more human story.
Yes, the Declaration of Independence is an extraordinary document. Yes, the Constitution carries undeniable genius. But the men who authored them? They were as conflicted, self-interested, and politically opportunistic as many we see in public life today.
Some among them, Benjamin Franklin, perhaps John Adams, lived closer to the spirit of the ideas they penned. Franklin was a philosopher of uncommon breadth, a genuine lover of wisdom, and one of the clearest moral thinkers of his age. Adams, though blunt and often unpopular, was fiercely principled and remarkably resistant to the temptations of power.
Others were more complicated. George Washington, though deeply enmeshed in elite privilege and compromised by enslaving others, also relinquished power voluntarily, something almost unheard of in his time.
Thomas Jefferson, brilliant and visionary, espoused equality while substantially benefiting from systems that denied it. Alexander Hamilton, for all his brilliance in establishing the financial system, believed unapologetically in strong central institutions that would favour stability, and inevitably, the interests of those already in positions of influence.
John Jay likewise viewed political power as something to be entrusted primarily to property holders. None of this makes them villains. It simply makes them human. Which begs a different question. Why do we glorify the individuals rather than the ideals? Why do we assume noble documents must have been written by noble men?
Maybe it is because we are still learning to separate the message from the messenger. And maybe it is time we did. Across the world, archaeological sites older than recorded history show evidence of human societies that lived in relative harmony. No weapons, no mutilated bones, no signs of systemic conflict. These cultures pre-date our textbooks by thousands of years, yet they seemed to understand something we keep forgetting.
A civilization is shaped not by its heroes, but by its worldview. Not by its leaders, but by the lens through which its people perceive life. And when you humanise this, you discover that what we call “worldview” is simply the collective psyche, the sum of our shared assumptions, stories, fears, hopes, and ways of making meaning. Over time, that collective psyche crystallises into what we recognise as culture: the habits, norms, values, and emotional tone through which a society orients itself. Change the psyche, and you change the culture. Change the culture, and the systems follow.
The ancients encoded their wisdom in symbols, stories, and archetypes. The Founders encoded theirs in parchment. We, today, encode ours in systems that too often mirror the very self-interest we wish to transcend.
Perhaps the issue is not that modern politics is broken. Perhaps the truth is more uncomfortable. The system has never truly worked, at least not in the way we might have hoped it would. It has produced progress in some domains, yes, but it has never delivered the harmony, dignity, and shared belonging that our species longs for. So maybe it is time to lift the lens.
To stop idolising the past and start learning from those who came before the past we remember. To move beyond personalities and return to principles. To recognise that it is absolutely possible for humans to live well together, for we have done it before. And the clues are everywhere for those willing to learn the language of metaphor, the grammar of symbols, the architecture of meaning encoded in myth. And perhaps this is where the ideals of the Enlightenment themselves can guide us forward.
The French articulated them simply, liberté, fraternité, égalité, freedom, fellowship, and equality. Values Franklin knew intimately, Adams admired deeply, and Jefferson echoed, at least in theory, through “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
These were not merely political slogans. They were early attempts to articulate the three foundational human needs in a form that a society could honour within the collective.
Liberté connects with our need for agency, to act, to choose, to participate as a creator in one’s own life. In essence, to author one’s own life.
Fraternité connects with our need for belonging, to be understood, to exist in mutual recognition, and to be held in right relation.
Égalité connects with our need for dignity, to stand equal in worth to all others, in the assurance that every human being holds equal entitlement to take part in the great project of creation.
Seen this way, these values do not merely align with social aspirations, they echo something much deeper. They mirror both essential human needs and the three foundational Universal Design Principles that govern harmony and evolution throughout the cosmos.
Everything is creation. Before something, there is nothing. In between nothing and something lies an act of creation.
All creation occurs through relationship. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in action.
Because all creation occurs through relationship, we must therefore do no harm. We choose to enact in ways that create mutual beneficence.
We can see these principles everywhere if we choose to look. We gaze into the night sky, and we do not witness chaos. We see a symphony of relation, planets in elegant orbital dance, stars co-moving in gravitational embraces, galaxies sweeping through space in spirals of astonishing beauty.
The dynamism is immense, even extreme in magnitude.
Earth spins at 1,600 km/h, completing one rotation every 24 hours.
Every half-year, it tilts 44 degrees, breathing heat and cool across hemispheres.
It races through space at 107,000 km/h around the Sun.
Our solar system moves at 720,000 km/h around the galaxy.
And the Milky Way itself travels at 2,100,000 km/h through the cosmic sea.
And yet, with all this unimaginable velocity, harmony prevails. Not through control, not through domination, but through right relationship, each body respecting the integrity and path of the others. This is the quiet teaching the cosmos offers. Coherence emerges not from rigidity, but from relation. Not from stasis, but from dynamic balance. Not from domination, but from proportionate participation.
When liberté, fraternité, and égalité are understood through this lens, they cease being political slogans. They become recognitions of the same principles that shape stars and galaxies, and sustain our deepest human longings, the freedom of agency, the sharing of understanding, and the experience of harmony through loving regard for oneself and the world at large.
These are not soft ideals. They are the operating instructions of the universe. And perhaps that is the simplest explanation for why ancient societies, those grounded in symbolic and ecological alignment rather than legal complexity, were able to live with such coherence. Their societies did not rely on labyrinthine rulebooks or endless legislation. They patterned their cultures not on hierarchy, but on harmony that kept communities in right relation with one another and with the world around them.
Consider Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey, dating back nearly 10,000 years. A massive ceremonial site, older than Stonehenge and older than the pyramids, built by people who, as far as we can tell, lived cooperatively and with strikingly little evidence of conflict or domination.
No weaponry.
No fortifications.
No signs of systemic violence.
Just sophisticated architecture, symbolic art, and an orientation toward the sacred.
Perhaps this is the clearest clue of all. When a culture is grounded in simple, universal principles, harmony becomes the default, not the exception. And perhaps this is where our modern longing meets ancient truth. As Gandhi reminded us, there is no path to peace, peace is the path.
But like all paths, it must be walked inwardly before it can ever be expressed outwardly. What we cultivate within becomes what we perceive without, the quiet law of reciprocity at work. This is captured rather emphatically in the philosopher and mathematical prodigy Blaise Pascal’s assertion that “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
And this invitation to cultivate inner peace is not merely a spiritual ideal, it is a practical responsibility. For a society cannot exceed the consciousness of the people who comprise it. Outer peace is never imposed, it is expressed. It emerges when enough individuals learn to sit in stillness, witness their own inner landscape, and develop the emotional and perceptual clarity required to live in right relation with themselves and the world.
This has always been humanity’s quiet work. Long before constitutions, parliaments, and political philosophies, the wisdom keepers of every age understood that the quality of a civilisation rests not in its institutions but in its inner life, the stories it tells, the symbols it honours, and the state of being it cultivates within its people. And nowhere is this wisdom more faithfully preserved than in the arts.
Across cultures and centuries, it is the artists, the bards, the poets, the philosophers, the musicians, who have carried the perennial teachings of how to live well. Shakespeare knew it. So did Rumi, Lao Tzu, Maya Angelou, and countless unnamed storytellers who understood that we learn not only through reason, but through resonance.
Perhaps this is why music touches us so deeply. It is not merely entertainment, it is a mechanism of remembrance. A melodic echo of the inner ideals we instinctively recognise as true. Songs like Imagine and One Love do not move us because they are catchy, they move us because they speak to something ancient within us, something we long to live but struggle to embody.
Yet over time, even the most profound wisdom can become wallpaper. Lyrics that were once invitations become bumper stickers. Melodies that were once calls to unity become background noise. And in that fading of attention, we lose something quietly essential, the courage to live in alignment with the truths we claim to love.
And still, the clues remain. Artists like Lennon, Marley, and Marvin Gaye, Coltrane and Leonard Cohen, and rock legends like Led Zeppelin and Pearl Jam, all musical sages whose work reads like scripture for the modern soul, continue pointing us toward what is possible when we choose wise relation with ourselves and one another.
Maybe the real work now is simply to listen again. Not with our ears, but with an open mind and some open-hearted awareness. Not as jingles, but as invitations. And perhaps this brings us back to where we began.
We idolise the architects of our political past not because their lives were perfect, but because the ideals they gestured toward still call to something noble within us. Yet ideals do not live by admiration alone. They live through embodiment, through the choices we make, the systems we tolerate, and the conscious awareness we bring to the smallest details of daily life.
To “beware our idols” is not to reject them. It is to recognise that the frameworks they offered and the values they shared can only be completed by us. For every generation inherits both the stories its culture tells and the structures it upholds.
And too often, we accept systems that reflect our fears rather than our possibilities, systems built on scarcity, suspicion, and the quiet belief that human beings must be managed, not trusted. But nothing in nature supports such cynicism.
The cosmos itself functions through trust, a trust grounded not in naïveté, but in right relationship. Every force, every orbit, every movement participates in a larger harmony that asks only this, play your part well, and allow others to do the same.
In this light, the question is no longer, Why were our ancestors not better men? The more vital question becomes, how will we respond to the inheritance they left us? Will we live beneath the ideals they inked, or rise to meet them?
Gandhi understood this with crystalline clarity, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” This lays the foundation for the very world you inhabit to change with you. It is the beginning of every cultural shift, every groundswell, every movement that reshapes the world from the inside out.
If we long for societies grounded in dignity, harmony, and right relation, then we must cultivate those qualities within ourselves, patiently, imperfectly, wholeheartedly. For outer peace is simply inner peace, expressed at scale.
And so the invitation is simple. Lift the lens. Examine the stories you carry with curiosity. Notice the systems you support. Dare to embody the values you admire.\ Become the citizen your ideals require.
As Bob Dylan aptly noted, “the times, they are a changing”, and we each hold the quiet power to guide their direction, becoming architects of the world we wish to live in through the values we choose to embody.
Read more from Justin Edgar
Justin Edgar, Coach
Justin Edgar is a life and breathwork coach, speaker, and creator of The Art of Creative Flow, a transformational program helping individuals, leaders, and teams move beyond burnout and reconnect with purpose, creativity, and resilience. With a unique background spanning financial markets, Montessori education, wellness entrepreneurship, and somatic practice, Justin brings rare depth and insight to his coaching. His work empowers clients to harness clarity, intuition, and creative flow as tools for personal and professional breakthroughs.
