American Odyssey: From the Declaration ... to Donald??!

I’ll be seeing Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey later today, and I recently finished the pocket book The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson. This book, like the other pocket books I’ve reviewed recently, will be going into my waiting room, hopefully enticing those held in limbo there to look up from their smartphones and find inspiration.

“Without the wound, there’s no reason for the journey.”

Odysseus had wounds from war, loss, and separation from his beloved. What should have been a brief journey home became a 20-year voyage. Ours has lasted 250 so far, and perhaps now we find ourselves with Sirens, or Cyclops, or between Scylla and Charybdis, or tempted to forget about our voyage altogether on the island of the Lotus Eaters. (See this quick guide to the epic’s obstacles.)

But we need only return to that great sentence of the Declaration of Independence to re-ignite our passion, sharpen our reason, and shake us from passivity.

“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…”

(As Professor Danielle Allen taught us during Democracy Summer last year, a typo in the first distributed edition made this a sentence, when it is in fact only part of a sentence that goes on to establish government as a means of securing those rights.

Declaration of Independence: A Transcription (National Archives)
Chandra R. Democracy Summer! Week 2: Danielle Allen on the Declaration of Independence. Letters from a Psychiatrist, June 11, 2025

As I highlight in my Democracy Summer post, Allen points to the syllogism of the DOI:

Allen ended on the key point of the syllogism in the second sentence of the DOI, which unfortunately was accidentally split with a period in the widely distributed newspaper printing.

1. All men are created equal

2. We need governments to secure those rights

3. When government fails to secure those rights …. it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and institute new government.

Isaacson simply focuses us on the first part of that syllogism, which might be the “face that launched a thousand ships,” or inspired countless revolutions to reject the tyrannies and biases that keep all from the self-evident truth of equality and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

America has been alarmingly hypocritical to these values from the get-go. In 1852, Frederick Douglass famously asked “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?”

“What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?”: James Earl Jones Reads Frederick Douglass’s Historic Speech

Perhaps Douglass’s question may be a contender for the “greatest sentence ever written.”

Our Earth is held in orbit between these binary suns: the Declaration, and the calling out of its failures. Always, on this Earth, the need for advancement and amendment, the shedding of biases. We must always press for the unification of suns until full relief, full daylight, full enlightenment, is achieved. It is a life or death struggle, indeed, and we must hang together, or surely we will hang separately.

Isaacson traces the intellectual history of this sentence (clause):

1. Social contract theory from Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau posited that the “general will” of the people created conditions for association - not the supposedly “divine right” of kings. To my psychiatrist eyes, this reads as a demand for relatedness and the beginnings of the deconstruction of hierarchy, authoritarianism, and narcissism.

2. Hume also provided heft for “self evident truths.” “Propositions of this kind (analytic truths) are discoverable by mere operation of thought.” Again, to my psychiatrist brain, this means that all humans possess equality, inherently: they breathe, eat, sleep, etc. Out of this basic humanity, they must therefore have the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

   

   Since the self-evident truth of equality is “discoverable by mere operation of thought,” if you don’t get this, there’s somethin’ wrong with your noggin. And yes, there’s a lot of people who are … off … based on how they view and treat others. Most prominently, Tyrant Trump.

3. The definition of “men” was both limited for the founders, and also all-encompassing, in rhetorical history and in subsequent expansion of rights.

4. “Created equal” was hotly debated by the founders and their circles, including their spouses. Abigail Adams said “the Southern slaveholding delegates’ ‘pretensions to liberty are a mockery’ when they hold ‘hundreds in chains.’ … ‘It is a contradiction that must wound the conscience of every honest man.’”
   

   I wish these tensions would have been resolved in favor of the self-evident truth, but they were not, until war, four score years later, began to correct the noggins of White men and the society we share. What gets swept under the rug comes back to haunt the journey. This is a tale told again and again, and points to the drive for power and the chasm of empathic failure it leaves in its wake.

5. “Endowed by their Creator” refers to Deistic views of a benevolent creator. But the founders differed on the divinity of Christ, and the involvement of God in mortal affairs. In my view, you could take away “created” and “Creator” and the sentence would still rock the world.

   We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are inherently equal, that they are inherently endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…

6. My choice of “inherent” fits with “unalienable.” Unalienable rights are not given away when we choose to live under a social contract.

7. “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
   

   It’s all about health care, amirite? Locke originally felt life, liberty, and property were fundamental rights. Jefferson decided on happiness, not property, as an unalienable right. But we see how far people will go to protect and maximize property, at the expense of the happiness and equality of others.

Isaacson completes his short book with chapters titled “Common Ground,” “the American Dream,” and “Going Forward.”

I might call them Agent Democracy: Reactivated.

I’ve been enjoying Agent Kim: Reactivated on Netflix. When Kim’s daughter is abducted, his switch is flipped. His long-buried, dormant, and disavowed killer instincts as a former covert agent return in full-force, and he becomes a killing machine, to rescue his daughter. To get back to and avenge his wronged “Penelope.”

We need Agent Democracy: Reactivated. We need our inner Odysseus to shake off the effects of Calypso, make haste to our destination, and clear the House (and Senate) of illegitimate suitors.

How can anyone purport to be a suitor in this land, and agree to Trump’s Big Lie of election fraud in 2020? How can anyone legitimize January 6th?

Anyone who doubles down on these has something wrong with their noggin. They have doubled down on power, rather than equality, and democracy, and our unalienable rights.

Let’s get this movie right, folks.

Passion or Fashion (Lyndon B. Johnson), on Let Freedom Swing (from his speech advancing the Civil Rights Act of 1965)

Playlist: Let Freedom Swing, by Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis

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Ravi Chandra is a psychiatrist, writer, compassion educator, and civilizational health shaman in San Francisco, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is the recipient of the 2025 Kun-Po Soo Award for Achievement in Asian American Psychiatry from the APA and APA Foundation. Here’s his linktree. Please sign up for updates via Substack where you can also support his educational and creative mission by becoming a free, paid or founding subscriber. For fourteen years, he was lucky to have his MOSF posts published by the Center for Asian American Media, and is now at work broadening and building a diverse creative community and coalition through reflecting on culture and psychology for East Wind eZine.See all the East Wind posts here. He writes from the metaphorical intersection of The Fillmore and Japantown in San Francisco, where Black and Asian communities have mingled since the end of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. He literally works there, between two Indian restaurants, go figure. His debut documentary was named Best Film (Festival Director’s Award) at the 2021 Cannes Independent Film Festival. The Bandaged Place: From AIDS to COVID and Racial Justice is available on-demand. His nonfiction debut, Facebuddha: Transcendence in the Age of Social Networks, won the 2017 Nautilus Silver Award for Religion/Spirituality of Eastern Thought. You can find him on Psychology Today, Medium, Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, SoundCloud, or better yet, in the IRL.