Victim of Success
How America destroyed the world
America is a unique case among modern nation-states. It has a distinct beginning with a dichotomous history of deep religious faith and cold rationality, and was thus born with a split personality that can never be consolidated.
America is a relatively small fraction of two large continents called “America,” yet Americans usurped the name because they had nothing else to call themselves. The people who moved there had disposed of their native cultures and wanted a fresh start, and yet they had brought all the baggage of their old cultures with them. The nation began by rejecting the hard-wired societies they had left, only to reinstall old habits, albeit with fresh twists.
America came to dominate the globe with two concepts: democratization and standardization. The idea that “all men are created equal” meant that everyone should have access to luxuries once reserved for the elites, and the need to mass produce the luxuries so everyone could have them required universal standards. This made it inevitable that American products would dominate the world, and it planted the seed of its own demise.
America’s history of invention is one of ever-increasing productivity to empower the individual. The country was obsessed with doing more work with fewer people producing products of equal quality and value for the most number of consumers.
This obsession led to repeatable experiences anywhere and everywhere. The Holiday Inn and McDonald’s hamburger promised - and delivered - the same product with the same process and same ingredients anywhere in the world. Winchester rifles and Ford Model Ts guaranteed interchangeable parts and supplies anywhere, extending product life and value far beyond the norm.
This led to the International Standards Organization (ISO), making rules for toilets and water fountains - among thousands of other items and processes - identical across the globe. Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP) established rules that allowed regulators and investors to do apples-to-apples comparisons among companies in wildly different sectors creating completely different products. Even the English language became the standard for international trade and business, which itself was a form of cultural hegemony.
The American preoccupation with rationality and democracy led to the ubiquitous and obsessive measuring and defining of everything. Populations were measured and classified and pigeon-holed into smaller and smaller demographic categories. Off-the-rack clothing was mass produced according to bell curves of sizes. Raw materials and processing were qualified and quantified down to the molecular level.
In the arts and entertainment, America introduced the rock band with electric instruments that allowed a handful of performers to make more noise than an entire 100-piece orchestra, and radio and recordings ensured everyone had access to the latest popular songs. Thanks to Kodak, everyone had access to cameras and could take their own pictures, setting painters and sculptors free to produce more abstract works with fewer skills. The theatre became film, and film became TeeVee, and TeeVee became digital “content” anywhere and everywhere.
While it is undeniable that the American passion for democracy and standards has brought many benefits to humanity - global adoption being proof - it has also led to a massive decline in quality, while at the same time saturating markets with quantity. When everyone can have everything all the time, then nothing is special or unique, and we have lost something because of it.
We are increasingly forced to conform to a universal standard. Being “born equal” and remaining equal throughout life are two very different concepts. The former means we have a universal toolbox (Natural rights) at birth and equal access to advancement, but the latter means that everyone must have the exact same things all the time or no one can have them. One reduces obstacles to personal realization and improvement, the other forces limits on them.
Without the impetus of improving one’s condition, people give up trying. If one person works night and day to create a lifestyle, while another is given the exact same lifestyle in order to be “equal,” then eventually everyone gives up and accepts the universal package, since there is no benefit to improve anything.
And this is where where we are. Unique hand-crafted products have become the most desirable, yet few can acquire them because they cannot amass enough wealth to improve their lot in life.
Probate laws and taxes wipe out any accumulated wealth with each generation, forcing the next to start from scratch. Everything is disposable, because the family home must be sold off to pay debts, so no one buys or keeps multi-generational products of quality and craftsmanship.
With the push to produce more products to allow everyone to own the same things, the quality has declined to near trash level, and the few quality items left are under constant attack for being elitist or privileged or simply over-carbonized. Statistics are no longer a tool to find new markets and better serve current ones, but are now weapons to deceived and dissemble. Demographics no longer quantify a population to better serve its needs, but now divide and conquer.
Everything is in decline, because people demand more stuff for less effort. The mom-and-pop shop died to make room for the mall, which died to make room for the strip center, and now half the world is a strip center, and the other half is parking. No one has a neighborhood grocer. The milkman doesn’t swing through on Mondays and Thursdays. No one knows their baker by name, nor gets that extra roll per dozen for being a long-time customer.
All the food tastes like all the other food. Even the produce has uniform size, shape and color. The subtle differences in taste and texture between one butcher’s sausages and another’s have vanished. The cut and jib of your favorite haberdashers shirts have been standardized into oblivion. Everyone in the world wears jeans and t-shirts, and cultural differences that made things exotic and interesting have faded away.
The world is a victim of America’s success. We are suffering from too much of a good thing. Our cultural malaise may have no solution, but certainly not an easy one. Cheap convenience is hard to give up, but the cost is individuality and uniqueness.
We have reached an evolutionary nexus point and the choices we make here will have effects far beyond our lifetimes. Radical isolationism and nationalism is not the way forward, but neither is compulsory uniformity. Perhaps the next best step is simplification - a return to basics and essentials.
One thing is for certain, we must shed bloated, corrupt, totalitarian systems of command and control.
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Gotta chime in on this one. The thing that sits in D.C. belongs to Britain and Rome and always has. Likewise Democracy is Britain and Rome's system of governance. The American government was a Republican form of governance. Self-governance. Not representative government. Once again, that was Brittain and Rome's system. The true American government hasn't functioned since the so-called Civil War and the Federal Republic was never reconstructed. Rather a bait and switch occured right under the nation's nose. The source for this information can be found on Anna Von Reitz's website. Or you can go to John Henry Hill's law blog on WordPress. Both sites contain a wealth of truth bombs. U.S. history is not American history. Never let your enemy educate your children. D.C. was for the federal subcontractors. Philadelphia is America's true Capital. I was actually taught this and more back in the 80's in grade school.