What Got America Here - Not A Genius: important dumb details

This is a continuation of what got us here as a Western society.

The concept of America as a free-spirited nation started with a crowd of cantankerous Protestants who felt it was better to start homesteading in a new land instead of finding ways to coexist with the Catholic Church that shunned them (along with other more unsavory elements). This meant they were a coalition of the most risk-taking (and therefore entrepreneurial) Europeans.

They were an unwieldy crowd of people, and they regularly defied their home nation’s commands. One isolated example was when the King sent a governor to one of the colonies, but he was thrown out and someone else was placed there instead.

There was talk by the 1750s of unifying under a central government with the Albany Plan, but it didn’t go anywhere until the colonists were dragged into fighting in the French and Indian War. It didn’t go well for Britain, and the colonists were required to pay taxes they didn’t get to choose.

This was too much for them, so they decided to form a founding nation, starting in 1776. In a dramatic turn of events, they won against Britain, and then successfully spent the next few decades building a government (under the Articles of Confederation), then rebuilding it once it failed (under the US Constitution). Their entire mindset was the farthest equally minded society that had ever been existed, and their founding documents intentionally omitted slavery out of a belief that it was a cancer that would go away on its own.

The emerging culture from this new nation was unprecedented. Their optimistic culture mixed with extreme individual wealth broke population records with 13 children per married woman. And, starting in 1827, the British made the word “individualism” to define Americans, which were marked by several characteristics:

They were quick to compare themselves with others, and comparisons almost always guarantee resentment or ambition.
They made more associations with other nations and built plenty of organizations and systems, but lost the habit of helping others in any communal sense.
Their religious background made them unusually evangelical, meaning a certain type of openness and involvement in the community.

It could be most clearly stated by John Quincy Adams in those times: “The American Republic invites nobody to come. We will keep out nobody. Arrivals will suffer no disadvantages as aliens. They can expect no advantages either.”

Slavery

Unfortunately, slavery did not go away. There’s just too much power in directly owning people that those who own it will not give it up so easily.

For decades, the discussion was a naturally occurring question. The abolitionist movement persisted, though, and it wasn’t uncommon in the decades leading up to the war in 1861 to hear open discussions about the morality of slave-holding.

At the same time, cotton was the high-tech item of nearly the entire 19th century, mostly through improvements in cotton processing via the “cotton engine”. Some people in the southern US states felt that cotton was so powerful that it was impervious to anyone’s criticism. That criticism included the slave workforce necessary to run it.

Eventually, the newly minted Republican Party took a risk with Lincoln in 1858. He didn’t succeed in the election, but his debates with Stephen Douglas started drawing ideological lines in the sand. When he became the US President in 1861 by an electoral win, the southern states concluded there was too much to lose economically, so they tried to form a new nation.

In response, Abraham Lincoln declared war on the South. The American Civil War was not pleasant, and about 700,000 soldiers died in a four-year war, not including the civilian casualties.

Despite this, the American experiment continued, with the entire country being unified under a far more pervasive solidarity. Somehow, the results of the war brought a shared identity to the nation.

Progressing

The American Progressive Movement began in the 1890s, and it cast off a very specific universal belief that had mostly permeated throughout history: that human nature as a collective society is capable of changing. They envied Europe’s culture (especially their post-modern thinkers), and wanted to reproduce the trend.

However, human nature collectively doesn’t really change. Individuals can (and often do) change, but every baby born is nearly within the same parameters that existed thousands of years ago, especially their moral state.

Naturally, a changing people means that old ways won’t apply to new people groups. That system was good 100 years ago, but things have changed, so it’s no longer good.

In the mix of these thoughts, one of the major drivers of this movement came from the “Social Gospel”, which replaced the spiritually focused Christian gospel with a more practical social works mindset.

Either way, the primary implementation of this new mode of thought came through rejecting many aspects of Natural Law and its implication of Natural Rights. Instead, they adopted a wide variety of philosophies such as Utilitarianism, Darwinism, Sociological Jurisprudence, and Legal Realism. They made a sharp distinction between human rights (which nobody argued against) and property rights (which are part of the Constitution but were treated as something the government granted to people).

Centralized control was the answer to implement this, and that meant the role of government had to grow. However, instead of elected or appointed officials, they saw they needed people who were isolated from politics who could make the necessary decisions to wisely control where people were headed. One of the most significant developments came through the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, which took 20 years to be accepted by the courts.

Politically, the shared identity of its past and its new progressive ideals provoked America to look beyond its borders. One of its first explorations involved the Spanish-American War in 1898, where it tried to imprint a freedom-loving society onto Cuba. In the ensuing chaos of war, the US acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

The centralization was finally complete in 1906, where Congress gave more power to the executive branch. The idea was that it would overthrow the legislative and judicial branches and create a “new nationalism”, where the federal government had more control than any of the individual states and power was consolidated in the executive branch.

A Crisis

The Progressive Movement was enhanced by the Great World War, which utterly destroyed Europe through a contrivance of many nations crashing against each other. The United States entered late into the war in 1917, but they adopted a type of “war socialism”:

They set prices on anything related to the war effort.
They illegalized converting wheat into whiskey.
The Sedition Act limited freedom of speech.

This created plenty of centralized power, but the controls were dismantled after the War. However, the ideas had been set. The language in Roosevelt’s administration was very explicit in the rules: the concept of a welfare state had been framed, and the concept of “rights” was closer to the idea of “entitlements” than “freedoms”. This created an implicit “second Bill of Rights”:

Everyone is entitled to a new level of prosperity, regardless of station, race, or creed.
Everyone is entitled to a useful and well-paying job.
Everyone should earn enough to have adequate food, clothing, and recreation.
Everyone should earn enough to sell the surplus of what they make.
Everyone should have a decent home.
Everyone should have adequate medical care, as well as the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
Everyone should receive adequate protection from the risks of old age, sickness, accidents, and unemployment.
Everyone deserves a good education.

These ideas assumed that someone is entitled to things, but didn’t really consider the rights of the people who responsible to maintain those things:

Prosperity comes through finding meaning much more than what anyone else can do for us.
A useful and well-paid job requires specialized training, which requires someone opting into that sort of thing.
To get adequate food, clothing, and recreation requires paying someone for it, and it’s difficult to define “adequate”.
Selling the surplus of what we make requires the wisdom to live frugally enough with our resources to even have a surplus.
Everyone needs a home, but it’s difficult to define “decent”.
Adequate medical care is difficult to define, given that we will all eventually die.
It’s absurd to think the government can protect us from old age, sickness, accidents, or unemployment, especially when we make decisions that bring adverse consequences.
A good education requires good teachers, who are often worth more than most people are willing to pay for them.

Among the changes, women were given the right to vote in 1920, which reflected a continued individualism. One vote per land-owning male meant one vote per household, but the individualism trend had moved more atomically to each person represented as a separate existence.

This discussion of freedoms also expanded to foreign policy:

The United States should enforce everyone’s freedom of religion.
The United States should enforce everyone’s freedom of expression.
The United States is responsible to enforce everyone’s freedom from fear.
The United States is responsible to give people freedom from scarcity.

This set a precedent that has marched along into today. The role of government is poorly defined, but continues to expand as it works to fulfill the impossible mission of giving humanity everything it believes they need.

Greedy

People don’t tend to like governments encroaching on their liberties, and the public wasn’t particularly happy with the Progressive movement’s changes. However, people will react to a crisis by trusting powers greater than themselves. This is the basis of religion, and governments can certainly fill that role in a secularized society.

As stated elsewhere, Europe’s aristocratic class needed a new vehicle for its wealth, especially after the Great World War utterly destroyed Europe. They found it in the free market capitalism exploding in the United States, embodied through the legal expansion of the living trust into a de facto living being on paper. The 1920s were a good time, and most of the modern conveniences (e.g., indoor plumbing, electricity) had fast become a standard part of a typical American home. Life was good for the average American as the wealth poured in.

In 1929, the government decided to create a significant hike in taxes, and this triggered a massive speculative drop. The cause of it is still a present political debate, but both the endless hype about stock ownership and the government’s implementation of new taxes were in no ways helpful.

The Great Depression kicked off the 1930s, which were a decade of impoverished struggle through impotent government programs designed to give jobs and every other sort of public need. The situation had gotten bad enough that there were even echoes of a potential revolution. Among the programs, the Social Security Administration was born, which was an optional program (at first) that created entitlements for the elderly.

Through a convergence of post-modern thought and resentment against their legitimately unfair treatment after the Great World War, Germany over-reacted back with a new government party called the Nazis. They advocated for a more efficient, self-sufficient nation, as well as complete separation (and eventual annihilation) of multiple people groups.

Even now, there is a desperate, unyielding darkness within postmodern dialogue that’s still taboo to address. If humanity only has the values it creates (without any grander values that transcend us), there’s no reason to preserve any other humans except the ones we like, and the Nazi party was the first full implementation of those thoughts.

Good Empires vs. Bad Empires

After several years of tension in the late 1930s, Germany finally made a move to conquer more territory by attacking Poland in 1939, allying in solidarity with Italy and Japan. The rest of Europe fought back, along with whatever support they could gather from just about every other nation on the planet. America was still licking its wounds from the Great Depression until Japan got over-ambitious and bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, which made America rapidly change its mind.

Four intense years later in 1945, the Germans were defeated soundly by Europe and America on the west and Russia’s USSR alliance on the east. Shortly after, the Japanese also surrendered to the United States in a devastating display of brand new atomic bomb technology.

The aftermath of World War II was quite severe, and its consequences still ripple to today. The Nuremberg trials unveiled the tragedy of the German Holocaust, and there was a vast worldwide fear of atomic weaponry. The United Nations formed as a shared alliance to prevent against risks of further large-scale evil.

Among their first establishing acts was to carve out a portion of ancestral Israel for the Hebrew victims of the Holocaust. This would not bring world peace and Israel, to this day, is still plagued by territorial disputes between the religions of Islam and Judaism over that land, with Christians sometimes politically shoving their oar into it.

USA/Europe vs. USSR

The USSR didn’t give back Germany’s land after World War II, and instead claimed ownership of Germany in the name of the USSR. This terrified Europe and America, but most of them had become somewhat battle-weary and were afraid of the risks of atomic warfare, so they declined fighting about it.

However, America’s military had left a lasting cultural impression on every single American. Nearly every male aged 18-40 had served in a war, and the story passed around that they defeated a genocidal regime (therefore making it a just war). Further, most females had worked back at home to support that war effort, so every single adult American had become part of World War II.

By the late 1940s, Americans had normalized into civilian life again, but most of them had found some identity with the rigid, structured military culture of their shared experience. The ex-militarized culture of over 60% of the country brought about a nation of harsh, subordinating, hard-working, top-down hierarchical conformity. The American spirit had been reforged into a type of collective autonomous mindset, union membership was at a record high, and the nuclear family unit suffered as the men worked hard to avoid thinking about their war trauma. Even the idealistic depictions of a perfect home expressed in television shows like Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best demonstrate an emotionally unavailable father who worked like a slave to provide wealth for his family.

The focus was reinforced by the Cold War, and the optimistic portrayals of the period’s propaganda would imply it was a battle between independent freedom and national solidarity. In practice, it was a battle between a sea of workaholic fathers and the victims of a new type of dictatorial regime branded as socialism.

In this incredible military power struggle, the Military-Industrial Complex was born. It consisted of truckloads of government money expanding the military presence. Every branch of the United States military grew dramatically. They enlisted the private sector to expand operations, both through manufacturing equipment and in researching new technologies. Even now, civilian technologies continue to benefit from declassified technologies in many domains.

At the same time, the presence of American consumerism grew dramatically through the development of the “public relations” approach to marketing. Starting in 1919, Edward Bernays had converted his uncle Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic work into a means to subliminally advertise to Americans. The product placement became less of a competition in the conscious decisions of a person’s mind, and instead was a battle for the feelings and sentiments that fostered impulsive behavior and addictions.

The Soviet world didn’t change much through the 1980s beyond the standard decay of bad management and breaking records in government-sponsored genocide, but the 1960s blossomed a youth in the United States that was severely untrained for life. Their rebellion against “the man” that represented their absentee father figure followed them for decades, and most of the nation suffered under a sea of inexperienced adult children demanding peace. The irony of their desire for autonomy was that the public relations apparatus appealed to their sense of individualism and independence, but kept on marching along. Eventually, the hippies became the yuppies of the 1980s: hard-working consumerist members of society.

The ubiquity of medical technology in the United States had also brought about a new power structure, slowly growing as the Social Security funding and scope increased to accommodate all Americans. As people aged, the need for elderly healthcare increased, and the truckloads of government money slowly formed the Big Medical/Pharma Complex. To this day, American health is inextricably intertwined with it.

The American overseas conflicts intensified during that time through proxy battles between the US and USSR. The increasing development of media technology in the US, specifically, made its wars progressively more unpopular: Korea, Vietnam, and on beyond the Cold War into Iraq. Everything was a battle for dominance and national pride, from education to space faring, and many mysteries will likely be lost to history. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, Jr. was one of these, as well as the actual question of how far outside of Earth’s orbit humanity had actually traveled. To improve test scores, the United States made it a priority to consistently lower the criteria to boost the numbers, effectively giving all formally educated high schoolers a fifth-grade education.

By contrast, the development of the computer made the 1980s a vastly productive decade across the world, and the economic prosperity of a free society dominating over a centrally planned one triggered the end of the Cold War when the USSR collapsed and Russia gave up East Germany.

New Powers

The 1990s were a confusing period, with the world now being free of any antagonist whatsoever. Calls for world peace resonated, but there was no profit to be made in world peace, so proxy battles and civil wars continued in Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, and others. Some of them continue to this day.

Following the Cold War, the public relations push migrated into the political realm with Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign. Instead of dry lists of policy decisions, the election was won through the emotional sleight of hand regarding a candidate’s implicit sexuality and paternal characteristics.

In the late 1990s, the continued development and expansion of the internet broke long-standing human conventions. The library became a household object, calculating and referencing became available to poor people, and easy access to financing made the social classes even more blurred. The consumerist push drove people to concern themselves as much or more over how they looked than any inward qualities or personal preparedness.

As the internet developed, the world saw a period of relative peace for decades, which led to increasing leftward thinking as people misinterpreted the peace as a standard behavior and conflict as the deviation from the norm. Society had finally “arrived” in a new, ever-increasing social development that would eventually lead to a utopia.

The powers-that-be, however, may talk of utopia, but they are also human, and would like to run that utopia. Their approach and political education eventually developed from the 1990s onward into the 2010s as a type of “eventual communism”, which indicated that capitalism worked well, but was an intermediate stage for the communist utopia that would bring about a new age.

The arrangements made by the USA during the UN’s founding had given poorer countries an opportunity to compete, with the idea that the US could become as powerful as Germany and take over the world as well. China, more than any other nation, had taken advantage of the uneven trade arrangement, and China grew dramatically from it.

Information Is Power

A new industrial complex emerged with the development of the Information Age, though its roots started much earlier, likely as early as the 1920s. Consumer reports about credit worthiness is worth plenty of money, and the association to a person naturally converged on the legal fiction that represented through the Social Security system. By the 1960s, every American could have a report run to determine their viability for borrowing, simply with their name, social security number, and birthdate.

This system was expanded dramatically with the development of the internet. By the 1990s, consumer information bureaus had developed information-gathering techniques and standardized procedures to build a vast reporting system to monitor key components of Americans’ lifestyles. This has expanded in recent decades, all through the continued development of smartphones and other commonplace technologies like GPS devices, to capture a wealth of information for the purpose of making decisions that maximize consumerist motivations.

On the other end of the information-gathering domain, the public relations apparatus has splintered into endless subdomains of niche demographics. Marketing data has become granular enough to accommodate vast specificities across many domains inclusive of age, family size, hobbies, religion, job role, job satisfaction, favorite color, known associates, and favorite snack.

Further, the echoes of the Cold War still resonate, and there is incentive to advance abject fear of an unseen terror. The purpose, however, is to keep people focused on media, which increases the price they can sell for advertisers to place their promotional material.

This entire apparatus of attention-fighting and background data has become the Media-Information Complex. A report of a person’s information associated with a specific niche is worth $10-150, and the anonymized data without the name attached is worth $20 on an open market. All of it is permitted by the United States Government, but it’s debatable if it’s even constitutional.

New Antagonists

In 2016, an outsider was elected as US President, and massive chunks of the world’s accustomed ways rapidly shifted. Donald Trump imposed tariffs on China in 2017, and it devastated the Chinese way of life, and much of the establishment wanted him gone.

Around the same time, 2018 saw the emergence of machine learning technology, which allows computers to make rules through thousands of trained repetitions of the same inputs.

In 2020, a disease called COVID-19 emerged as a pandemic across the world, starting from Wuhan, China. It was probably a biochemical weapon, but likely emerged before it was sufficiently complete. The government response across every major Western nation was a direct message pulled from Chinese propaganda: everyone must stay in their homes, civilization must stop, and everyone must conform to the Great Reset.

The political power of 2020 to sufficiently stop everyone from acting had arisen because most Western society had not experienced a direct war in their lifetime. If they had, they would have integrated their shadow enough to have resisted, and would have had a significant-enough skepticism of the intentions of their government.

Even so, by 2022 everything had resumed as it was in 2019, mostly unscathed but with many lessons learned. The credibility of all authority that had advanced the Great Reset’s talking points was gone. The aristocracy’s narrative had been ignored.

As this is written, in 2024, the machine learning revolution has trend repetitions of the 1990s internet: excessive spending that will lead to a coming collapse in the trend within a few years. The damage, though, has been machine learning spawning endless near-useless content across the internet, flooding computers with worthless data that drives the Over-Information Age into an even further deluge of unfiltered tripe.

And, in the midst of all this, economic decisions beginning in the 1990s have led to an unmanageable United States government debt. It has been the most favorable reserve currency of the world, but it may not be sustainable for a nation’s currency to be backed by more debt in its currency. They may adopt a different backing, such as blockchain, but only time will tell.

Where We Are Now

The United States is composed of 3 gigantic economic powerhouses:

The Military-Industrial Complex, which has given us lots of tech and keeps America very safe, at the expense of tons of money.
Big Medical/Pharma Complex, which keeps people alive for longer, but wants people to always be partially sick.
The Media-Information Complex, which gives everyone what they want, but also tries to turn us all into addicts and passively monitors everything we do.

This entire nation’s system is held together as a stable mechanism, presuming the following:

American citizens keep on happily consuming without enough civil unrest to overthrow the current order.
The United States government can keep funding Americans’ consumption.
No major upsets arise, such as a constitutional amendment for privacy or the US government defaulting on its debt.

There is an ongoing battle of ideas that has existed since the 19th century, all asking whether human nature changes collectively.

If it doesn’t, capitalism as we understand it will work great forever. If it does, we are responsible to implement new solutions. This is the never-ending conservative/liberal debate.
There is a soft connection between this ideology and our religious beliefs. If our ancestors were apes, we may yet evolve to meet new circumstances. If God made us, we were already made with sufficient qualities.

Underpinning all of these ideas is the fulfillment of postmodern thinking. We have now reached the end of where postmodernism can take us: completely relativistic in nihilistic hopelessness. Among these ashes, there is a strange cult worship of AI arising as a trend, which brings us full-circle back to mankind’s value-consolidating pagan roots.

The beauty, however, of Americans is that they really like their freedoms. If the United States government collapsed under its corruption, quite a few law nerds would get together and rebuild nearly the same Constitution with minor alterations.