97

Knights run societies, organizations, or churches well while a conflict is under way, but not as well afterwards. Gardeners run societies, organizations, or churches well during times not defined by conflict.

Put another way, both Knights and Gardeners understand that every city needs a police force—Knights who can protect the city’s growth and well-being—but that the police shouldn’t govern the city. When Knights run a Garden such as a city, they often focus so completely on thwarting or combating crime that they stunt the freedom of the citizens, crash the local economy, thwart its free market, and create police states.

To use another image, stoplights serve road systems; road systems don’t serve stoplights.

Similarly, Knights within the law enforcement arms of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Transportation Security Administration in recent years have given visitors, immigrants, or refugees to the United States the impression that our nation—the mightiest in the world—is militant, afraid, and suspicious of them. The actions of these security-minded agencies appear to violate the Gardener sentiment carved into the base of the Statue of Liberty, which asks the world to “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Afghanistan under the Taliban—another police state—is another example. The Taliban spent so much time and energy trying to determine which was the most theologically correct way to execute homosexuals—by throwing them off of a high wall or pulling the wall down on top of them—that they didn’t build an economy, or any medical schools.

more