CONSCIOUSNESS CONSCIENCE WEALTH

CONSCIOUSNESS, CONSCIENCE, WEALTH Wealth can be gotten by criminal mischief as well as by many lawful means. There are at least two ways to acquire riches, history reflects. Six years ago, I wrote : "One's conscience or value system is either inborn, acquired, both, or neither. Consciousness is the vital life force that animates all of life. Conscience is a subset of consciousness pertinent to human behavior. It marks “man.” All life has consciousness. But, not all life has consciences." I was recently greatly moved by Frederick Douglass' declension of "conscience" in MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM'S appendix. In a speech from December 1850 he said this: "It is, then , the first business of the enslaver of men to blunt, deaden, and destroy the central principle of human responsibility. Conscience is to the individual soul, and to society, what the law of gravitation is to the universe. It holds society together; it is the basis of all trust and confidence ; it is the pillar of all moral rectitude. Without it, suspicion would take the place of trust; vice would be more than a match for virtue; men would prey upon each other, like wild beasts of the desert; and earth would become a 'hell'." Comparing conscience to gravity is particularly profound for both keep us bound to the ground until death comes around to release renown. William Wells Brown, another self-educated, self-liberated, a former slave from Missouri as elsewhere, writer, historian, freedom fighter, wrote : "The blacks have been so badly treated in the past that kind words and social recognition will do much to win them in the future, for success will not depend so much upon the matter as upon their manner; not so much on their faith as upon the more potent direct influence of their practice ." P. 821, "My Southern Home," WILLIAM WELLS BROWN: CLOTEL AND OTHER WRITINGS (2014) Both Douglass and Brown became wealthy men by the standards of their day in the 19th century. Few acts in history are comparable to the African slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas for wanton degradation, eradication; and then elevation of people deigned to be doomed to genocide by detractors! But through it all we are still here! And by the grace of God we are still here; conscious of our conscience by divine consciousness of destiny.