Hypocrisy In The Declaration Of Independence

The United States of America was founded on hypocrisy fueled monetary motives and is irredeemable. The founding fathers wrote that “all men are created equal” and stood by this in very few, limited ways that most definitely did not include “all men.” George Washington was known as a murderer by the native people, and he certainly did not treat them as equals even in this respect. Their cultures and villages were all but eradicated and stomped out. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the controversial statement, was one of the wealthiest and most prominent slaveholders in the Virginia at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and he never freed his slaves or truly treated them as “equal” human beings. Benjamin Franklin had a different, albeit related, type of hypocrisy: his was based not on having any drive for American liberation from England, at least up until the very moment he was no longer favored in the elite circles of British politics.

While many think of this document, signed on July 4th, 1776, as the signal of the end of the Revolutionary War and the beginning of the United States of America, it was in fact signed by a small group of scared men who are today called the Founding fathers. These men signed the document years before the Americas were recognized globally as their own independent self-governing nation, where “all men [were] created equal.” This was an entirely new concept in the methodology of a government treating their people. Ideas almost identical to this had previously only been seen in the European Enlightenment, written by Thomas Paine in his pamphlet “Common Sense,” inspired by ideas from Thomas Locke. Sadly, these aspirations were not carried out to the fullest of their potentials and hypocrisy flourished throughout