A better world: founder Robert Welch believed the combination of less government and more responsibility would bring about a better world--materially, politically, and spiritually.(Hope For The Future)

As he inaugurated The John Birch Society during its two day founding meeting in 1958, Robert Welch sagely warned: "We can never win ... unless both leadership and following have a positive dream which is more important as a hope than the negative nightmare is as a fear: unless the promise of what we can build supplies more motivation than the terror of what we must destroy; and unless this faith in the future is based on a deeper faith in eternal truths."

In the struggle to preserve freedom, graphic descriptions of past and ongoing atrocities committed by the Total State have their place, as a warning of what awaits if we lose. But the freedom fight is not merely an effort to prevent the worst that can happen; it must also be an active struggle to achieve the best that we can imagine. This is why, for those who truly understand and cherish freedom, hope is an even stronger motivation than fear.

John Adams displayed an understanding of this principle in a letter to his wife Abigail. Writing after the War for Independence, but before the constitutional foundations of our republic had been firmly established, Adams observed: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons must study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

Founders vs. Conspiracy

The purpose of politics, Adams understood, was to keep government in its properly subordinate role, thereby leaving people free to build a better and more civilized world. And, like the other leading Founding Fathers, Adams recognized that the liberties he cherished were threatened by a conspiracy of evil men lusting to control government to enrich themselves at the expense of human liberty.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Harvard historian Bernard J. Bailyn wrote of the Founders: "They saw about them, with increasing clarity, not merely mistaken, or even evil, policies violating the principles upon which freedom rested, but what appeared to be evidence of nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty both in England and America."

In 1774, as the widespread sentiment favoring American independence began to coalesce, Adams declared that "the conspiracy was first regularly formed and begun to be executed in 1763 or 4...." To defeat that conspiracy, it was necessary for Americans to join in an organized, principled effort to expose it and defeat it. But it was not enough to tabulate the offenses wrought by the British Crown, or to offer gruesome (and plausible) warnings of the fate that would befall Americans were they to lose their bid for independence.