The Secret Knowledge by David Mamet Page B

the law has been transgressed, a consideration in which the state of the offender (past his mental competency) must play no part.
    The Bible is the wisdom tradition of the West. It is from the precepts of the Bible that the legal systems of the West have been developed—these systems, worked out over millennia, for dealing with inequality, with injustice, with greed, are reducible to that which the Christians call the Golden Rule, and which was, previously, propounded by Rabbi Hillel: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.”
    These rules and laws form a framework which allows the individual foreknowledge of that which is permitted and that which is forbidden. This foreknowledge, a real right-of-property, is that upon which the individual makes decisions. It constitutes a practicable system for dealing with a tragical existence and a deeply flawed human nature: it asserts not the perfection, but the imperfectibility of Man. These assertions (and their attendant investigations and observations, known as philosophy and religion) may be called, in their entirety, the Tragic View.
    The Left has abandoned the Tragic View, 31 and considers life and man as unconstrained in our ability to understand and to supersede all strife and inequality. The Tragic View, however, holds that life is complicated and man flawed, and so, our actions must be guided by laws difficult both of formulation and of observance; that these laws, being the product of Man, will, themselves, be flawed, that they will not cover all instances, that their observation and correct application will often cause anxiety, and, indeed trauma, but that the health of a society (both moral and material) must rest on the attempt to do so.
    The tragic view recognizes that it is possible to obviate the necessity of choice only by surrender of responsibility (worship of a dictator, or charismatic figure, guru, politician, or theory)—that between Good and Evil there is no choice, and thus moral choice means a choice between two evils.
    Having renounced the necessity of dealing with complexity, the Left imagines and endorses a “post-governmental” era, in which the individual need not consider the economic and social results of his actions and his vote. He may choose not to choose, and merely endorse “Change,” and reject any request for information about the actual mechanics of this “Change,” by referring to “Hope.”
    In this post-societal world of the new cult, we are told we need not produce, but may merely hope, we need not defend, but may hope, we must not consume, but are allowed, somehow, to hope for sustenance—this sustenance, magically, deriving from some unspecified actions of a government which, all observe, is at best incompetent and, more usually, self-serving and corrupt, whoever is in power.
    From the Left’s point of view one need not work, and may not only Hope to be provided for, by this government, but may insist upon it. This new post-governmental America, then, may, without guilt, apologize for the arrogance of its prosperity and the beauty of its traditions and culture, and plead with the weak of the world to be allowed to join them.

8
    THE RED SEA
    There is another possible interpretation of the parting of the sea by Moses.
    Rather than intervening to create a path in a unitary substance, it could be said that he demonstrated that freedom lay in the ability to see distinctions; that is, that life could be seen as divisible into good and evil; moral and immoral; sacred and profane; permitted and forbidden—that the seemingly unitary “sea” of human behavior and ambition could actually be divided.
    A slave is not permitted to make these distinctions. All of his behavior is circumscribed by the will of his master. The necessity of making distinctions is the essence of freedom, where one not only can but must choose.
    This revelation of the long-denied, long-lost