Earlier this week, market strategist and geo-political commentator, John Singer, released an essay entitled Losing the Plot. He opens the piece with a story about a young woman posing in sultry fashion for a photo while sitting on the train tracks that run directly into Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where over a million people were murdered during World War II. “The woman is lying on the throat that fed the largest grave on earth, and she is catching some sun,” he writes.

Singer’s essay goes on to share anecdotes about General Pershing reminding Americans what they were fighting for in WWI and one about Singer’s own father, who survived Auschwitz and went on to serve in the American army that liberated him. The essay is a sobering journey through a society that has lost a sense of reverence for the great sacrifices of the past and seems to have little awareness of the dangers before it as its very fabric shifts rapidly.

In 2000’s The Patriot, director Roland Emmerich takes us through the American Revolution through the lens of one man and his family in 1776 South Carolina. The fictionalized account begins on the eve of the Declaration of Independence, giving us a glimpse of the complexities of fervor for freedom from British rule and some of the practical human realities of family, community, and fear surrounding the epic decision to fight for it. The protagonist, widower Benjamin Martin (played by Mel Gibson) is a reluctant revolutionist, having a sense for the horrible realities of war and fearing for his numerous children.

The movie opens with a town hall meeting to vote on joining the northern colonies in their revolt. Martin, a respected war hero and local leader, listens to the various arguments for going to war with Britain before standing up and saying, “Why should I trade one tyrant 3000 miles away, for 3000 tyrants one mile away?” The pithy line evokes a sense of just how uncertain were the prospects of an independent America past the passionate rhetoric surrounding the notion of freedom. He follows it up with the following flourish:

“But mark my words. This war will not be fought on the frontier or some distant battlefield, but amongst us — among our homes. Our children will learn of it with their own eyes. And the innocent will die with the rest of us.”

Of course, the war does happen, death appears on the doorstep of their homes, and Martin is drawn into the conflict, becoming a lightning rod for the revolution in South Carolina and the hero of this story. Great loss is visited upon him and his family, but it is the heroic fervor of his oldest son, including his willingness to die for the cause of freedom uniting these thirteen colonies, that eventually moves Martin beyond father and farmer to true patriot. He eventually comes to see himself as part of something greater than self and the fears and desires motivating him. A few lines from a letter written by his son, Gabriel Martin, sums it up:

“Despite all this, I feel fortunate to serve the cause of liberty, and I would gladly give my life for it if necessary. Pray for me, Thomas. But more importantly, pray for our cause.”

Cause. Liberty. Pray. This is a very interesting combination of words. What is the cause? Thomas Jefferson gave us the words and they were memorialized in The Declaration of Independence. This snippet sums it up: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” A cause simple enough to be captured in a few words which unified about 2 million people spread across a landmass about 8 times the size of England.

Our country has been debating the notions of equality and rights, not to mention the place of the Creator in our country, ever since. Who are all men and what is equality? What are those unalienable rights? What is life and when does it begin? What is liberty and where does your freedom end and mine begin? What is happiness and what does it mean to pursue it? The broad eloquence of Jefferson’s words masked the brutal journey ahead for a nation that would bleed profusely in its struggle to define them.

Much has been written and spoken on those words. We’ve debated them on Civil War battlefields, Presidential and Congressional elections, in our courts, in protests and marches, in newspapers and social media, not to mention within our own families, churches, and communities. Part of the Singer essay’s lament is the sense that we’ve forgotten many of the debates and the cost of our efforts to define and refine the meanings of these words. For most of us, the battles occur on distant frontiers, are fought by others, and are bereft of the costly context of tyranny and repression expressed in the forms of physical threat. In many ways, a sense of our collective history has been lost.

One might argue that 250 years of immigration has produced a 340+ million person melting pot of identity attached to myriad histories. Singer contends that politics in America’s big cities are shifting as the Democratic party looks more and more socialist. Perhaps he’s right. But American politics feeds on trends and movements, power follows money and we’ve created a vote-buying system built on great collective wealth and the sometimes less-than-subtle redistribution of it in the name of the common good. But there is an elegant and practical beauty to our system of checks and balances, a process which has imperfectly held our nation together from the beginning.

In 1987, Pope John Paul II addressed President Ronald Reagan and the United States in a speech honoring the Bicentennial of the Constitution. The Pope celebrated all that the United States had done for the world in the first two centuries of its existence : “I thank America and all Americans – those of past generations and those of the present – for their generosity to millions of their fellow human beings in need throughout the world.” He also called on America to remember its founding principles and see them in light of a responsibility to the world. “To celebrate the origin of the United States is to stress those moral and spiritual principles, those ethical concerns that influenced your Founding Fathers and have been incorporated into the experience of America.”

“From the beginning of America, freedom was directed to forming a well-ordered society and to promoting its peaceful life. Freedom was channelled to the fullness of human life, to the preservation of human dignity and to the safeguarding of all human rights. An experience in ordered freedom is truly a cherished part of the history of this land.”

Then, the Pope described America’s mission as he saw it, and offered his own definition of freedom:

“This is the freedom that America is called to live and guard and to transmit. She is called to exercise it in such a way that it will also benefit the cause of freedom in other nations and among other peoples. The only true freedom, the only freedom that can truly satisfy, is the freedom to do what we ought as human beings created by God according to his plan.”

St. Thomas Aquinas described free-will as a gift from God, born of reason, and ordered to choosing good. We’re given freedom to do what we ought. How do we know what we ought? Aristotle would answer that doing what we ought isn’t about rigid rules but about cultivating virtuous character though repeated action. These thinkers argued that we were given freedom so that we might live virtuously, and in so doing, be happy.

The ultimate point of Singer’s essay is that we have lost our center, our sense of mission or place in the world. The great melting pot of America has become a diffusion of myriad selves vying for their own interests with no common, unifying ground or vision.

Of course, the reality is that even revolution is born of self-motivated interests. The mission that unified our Founding Fathers and the colonies gave way to a thousand individual missions of varying degrees of self-interest. Facing the Civil War, self-interest unified on two fronts and the great experiment begun nearly 100 years earlier was put to its greatest test. The unified visions that came to be in WWI and WWII were also hard-fought as American self-interest aligned to a purpose greater than itself. Survival is a great necessity and there is nothing like war and the threat of destruction to unify those threatened.

One of the great challenges of success, at any level, is the tendency toward comfort and complacency. We naturally wish to avoid conflict and gravitate to an equilibrium that pulls us from tension. Our history has been marked by the ebb and flow of tension and equilibrium – power and politics have followed this pattern. In the absence of the obvious threat of destruction, self-interest pulls at the center of purpose and unity.

With the final battle of the American Revolution won, we see Benjamin Martin bidding farewell to French military officer Jean Villeneuve who was present throughout the war fighting alongside the colonials while promising great French assistance – which was ultimately necessary to end the war. As Martin rides away to begin again, we see Villeneuve (who had lost his entire family in a British attack years earlier) looking unsettled as-if wondering what’s next in his life. Most likely, his character will return to a France that will soon undergo its own, bloodier and uglier, version of the American Revolution. Centered in a cause that saw its ideals trampled by human passions.

Have we lost the plot? Is the great story of our founding buried in the myriad self-interests driving faction, power, and division? Singer’s final challenge is to suggest that there is still time and the right choices can be made. His is a call to a new era of leadership to step up and remind us of our “cause,” and unify us around the fundamental mission and purpose for the existence of this great experiment we call America.

I think these are great questions and agree with his call to action. A great place to start is at the beginning with a renewed focus on the guiding principles of the Founding. A deeper intellectual grounding in the notions of equality and unalienable rights would provide a powerful re-centering of our purpose and a north star by which to navigate the difficult questions in our own country and around the world.

Seeing freedom as both gift and responsibility, life as God-given human dignity in every soul, and re-discovering that true happiness comes from choosing the good, choosing to live virtuously, would be a profound place to start. Then, we might recognize our mission, and opportunity, to share our hard-won lessons for the betterment of a world desperate for hope. Grounded in such a purpose, maybe we’d begin to see that there are things far greater than self and that the founding principles we are celebrating on this 250th birthday of the United States are still something worth dying for.