Editor’s note: This is one installment in a One Small Step series exploring how our founding principles apply to policy change movements. See the series introduction and full collection here.
Dignity means being seen for everything you are – not just one underlying trait. When dignity is recognized in a society governed by the rule of law, people have the opportunity to make something out of nothing.
America formed on the revolutionary idea that all men are created equal and capable of greatness. Our principles of liberty and self-governance have long rewarded those who work hard, tap into their talents, and discover better ways of doing things. These ideals have empowered countless Americans to make this country the greatest the world has ever seen, and attracted to our shores the world’s most ambitious people seeking to contribute to and join in our prosperity.
Take, for example, my great grandfather, Nathan Opotowsky. At just 14, he fled poverty and oppression in eastern Europe and later became extremely successful in New York City.
Back home, he was simply seen as a Jew, an ethnic and religious outsider. Jews were restricted from many professions and often forced to wear a yellow star of David to demonstrate their inherited inferior status (a practice the Nazis gleefully reinstated).
Outbursts of extreme violence against them were quite common. If they were lucky, the local ruler would protect them. But just as often, the ruler did nothing or even incited the violence himself.
Amidst this backdrop, 14-year-old Nathan had enough. He came to America, where, despite prejudice, he became what he had no chance of becoming in Europe, a successful inventor. He invented many dentistry products, including an improved dental flask for which he obtained US Patent 2,440,910 in 1948. He was also a less successful sculptor.
Nathan relied on the opportunity that America offered him to build something out of nothing. This opportunity only existed because he was treated as an individual with dignity and the rule of law protected his property from thieves and vandals. Such opportunity did not exist for Nathan in eastern Europe. Even if he did manage to invent something in the old world, there was absolutely no guarantee it wouldn’t be destroyed in a pogrom.
Nathan was one of millions of people who fled the old world with its old paradigms to make something of themselves in the new one. Some of their names are well known, like Albert Einstein and Elon Musk. Others, like Eric Yuan, the founder of Zoom, and Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, are somewhat less well known. Still others, like my great grandpa, are only known to their families (and dental product afficionados). But all created value in the new world after fleeing an old world that either outright rejected them or, at the very least, didn’t offer the best climate for them to reach their full potential.
It would be exceptionally inaccurate to say that everybody in America has been treated as an individual with dignity. Anybody with a modicum of education would know that we have frequently failed to live up to our founding principles.
But unlike other countries, we actually had founding principles of freedom and equality. Thus, while we committed the same sins as many other nations – including the denigration of other humans based on nothing more than their parentage – our founding DNA contained the cure for these sins.
But the cure has never been inevitable. It has taken the hard work and bravery of patriots like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King to force this country to live up to its founding principles. And it is still a work in progress.
We are currently seeing a surge of old-world thinking. That is, viewing people through the lens of collective identity rather than as individuals imbued with dignity. Whether it’s the surge in antisemitism or the surge in anti-immigrant sentiment, this old-world thinking threatens to tear the country apart and reduce it to just one of too many unexceptional, illiberal regimes.
President Reagan famously called America the shining city on a hill. I believe that we are still that city. Our founding values created an atmosphere where we produced the most vibrant, rich, and peaceful country that the world has ever seen. It was precisely these values that allowed a penniless Jewish immigrant to create unimaginable value for himself and society.
But it’s up to each generation to uphold these values and reject old-world thinking. If we forget them, we could see our shining city on a hill reduced to a stagnant city in a bog.
