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A Fable of Liberty Lost and Found is a brief satire offering insights on the hard choices our world faces today. Inspired by Thomas Paine's original fable in Common Sense, here is a cautionary tale of what happens to government in any society where the people lose a sense of our natural global oneness.
Paine began Common Sense with a short parable (five paragraphs) about a remote community trying to govern itself. The allegory explained the forms of government and how they arise. His fable set the table for urging 18th century Americans to reject monarchy and establish the world's first modern democracy.
Today in the 21st century, author Judah Freed uses wit and wisdom to warn about any nations' corrupt slide into tyranny. He ends the narrative with hope for reviving democracy. His imagination and satire are informed by recent absurd yet terrible trends and events in the USA and the world.
The short story is told in two parts with 10 sections. Part I tells a tale of conscious people who land on a remote island to escape dystopia. Over the generations, their society goes from utopian anarchy to open democracy, then they choose a republic, which gets corrupted, leading to tyranny and collapse. Part II offers an optimistic alternative ending, a vision of the people instead emerging into an enlightened society. We need all the hope we can get these days.
The two-part story originated as the preamble and epilogue that frame Judah' Freed's nonfiction book, Making Global Sense: Grounded hope for democracy and the earth inspired by Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Written in the style of literary fiction, the parable brackets Freed's reasoning about the power of a billion globally aware people to build our world anew. The story stands up on its own, so here’s the tale told in a single volume.
