Like in most matters, a purely intellectual understanding without a substratum of experience including pain and complexity and compassion is simply a strawman caricature playing with pickup sticks. Rituals and hero worship can be a blatant attempt to sugarcoat reality. I have limited knowledge regarding the details in which American independence was won and the Constitution established. But clearly an essential number of these early framers were creators--not strawmen, not caricatures. Reality was too much with them.
They of necessity had the stern stuff of which creativity is made--gutsy curiosity; a persistence that learns from mistakes; vivid perception; willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty; combining knowledge with imagination; cultivation of fitness and elegance in deriving principal and structure; and an appreciation for systematic interconnectedness.**
In short, the most important freedom of the nation's founders was first and foremost the freedom to aptly frame reality and to imagine a hopeful future.
[**refer to "The Seven Da Vincian Principles" in How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael J. Gelb.]
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