The Danger Of A Successful Society: Absurdity

I spend a lot of time talking about how western civilization – in particular as driven by the United States – is easily the greatest that mankind has yet created.  If one looks at it objectively, it’s not even close.  The list of things that are part of the everyday life of people around the world is basically a list of things that were invented or developed in the west.  From cars to planes to advanced agriculture to elevators to plastic and mobile phones and computers and DNA and much, much more. 

But every now and then something happens that makes me question that.  A couple of years ago I watched Matt Walsh’s “What is a Woman” where he spends most of the movie talking to leftists and doctors trying to get a definitive answer to the question of the title.  Most of the time he’s unsuccessful.  The most interesting part of the movie however didn’t take place at a feminist conference or in a studio, but rather in Africa when he was speaking with Maasai tribesmen.  When asked a simple question about whether a man can become a woman, he was quickly given a definitive “No”.  Straightforward, no debate, no hedging. Essentially 180 degrees from the insanity that Matt encountered in the United States.

This was brought back to me last week when reading about Justice Thomas’ destruction of the “expert class” in Skrmetti.  The Justice took direct aim at the notion that Americans must ignore their common sense, relinquish their lives and give up their Constitutional rights to those the elites have pronounced as “experts”.  As we all learned during COVID, with the Hunter Biden letter, and have been seeing with climate scares for decades, “experts” are rarely that, and often are simply shills for this or that monied interest. 

Justice Thomas stated clearly that the government can no longer use such “experts” to manipulate and control the lives of citizens.  Although the specific case had to do with the butchering or harming confused or coerced minors, it applies everywhere else as well.

Which is a very good thing. Because there’s a danger in success – as in a successful civilization.  It breeds complacency, entitlement and most importantly, the loss of a functional memory of how things work and how they became successful in the first place… which leads to an over reliance on “experts”. 

I frequently mention Cyrus McCormick as the man most responsible for the rapid advance of western civilization.  Of course people can argue that others, like Isaac Newton, Jethro Tull, James Watt, J.D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford or any number of others could wear that badge.  I choose to award it to McCormick because he almost single handedly helped 85% of Americans and substantial numbers of others around the world, escape the farm.  Not that there’s anything wrong with farming, obviously, but because of the efficiencies McCormick brought about, 95% of Americans work at something other than farming while in his day that number was in the mid-teens.

So basically he freed up 80% of the nation to go out and be everything from baseball players to scientists to doctors to entrepreneurs to inventors to, sadly, social media “influencers”.  It’s basically division of labor on steroids, where people focus on what they want to do, are good at, or can make a living at, while paying others do the things they can’t or don’t want to do.

That works well when the choices of options are shoemaker, baker, blacksmith, farmer, soldier, etc., i.e. things society actually needs.  It even works when options include things that society wants, like literature or sport or art.  Baseball may not be as critical to the continuation of society as say, electricity generation or infrastructure maintenance, but there’s a demand and people are willing to work for money to pay for it out of their own pockets.

Where it breaks down is when options include things that no one actually wants or needs, yet they get produced nonetheless, or get produced in quantities that make no sense. Things like gender studies graduates, therapists and lawyers. Shakespeare talked about lawyers (as a bulwark against the masses) so we don’t need to.

The fact that gender studies even exist in the first place tells you how far America has moved from the fundamentals of a successful society.  In a normal, functioning universe such things wouldn’t even exist.  While one can at least make an argument that being gay is at least theoretically natural – if still deviant – a universe where men are women, women are men and the difference between the two is “fluid” is a fiction created by people who have too much time on their hands and no connection to how the real world functions.  We’ve strayed so far from the time when 85% of the people worked on farms and did things that actually helped society that we now have people who create an illusion and then set about trying to force society to accept it as normal. 

Another example of this a disconnect between actual demand and supply is therapists. Before the late 19^th century therapists didn’t exist. (Well, they sort of did, but they were your friends.) Today tens of millions of Americans go to “therapists”, mostly women, and white women at that.   Essentially 40% of white women receive mental health treatment in the form of anti-depressants and or therapy.  If you look deeper you’ll see that the numbers skew towards college educated, as in liberal, white women.  Has our ostensibly successful society somehow become so bad that fully 40% of the women of the majority population are now sufficiently damaged that they need mental health treatment? Or are they suffering from a mass psychosis of grievance and guilt created by people being too prosperous and having too much time and money on their hands?  They say that idleness is the devil’s workshop and there is perhaps no better example of the truth than that. While there are certainly people who are in need of mental help, the fact that 40% of any ostensibly normal demographic needs either anti-depressants or therapy is absurd. 

But that’s what happens when society veers so far from the fundamentals of society and common sense that many see a future in pursuing nonsensical fields like gender studies, political science (my major…) and countless others where there is no real demand in society beyond that generated by government fiat. More importantly, without the individual feeling of accomplishment that goes with doing something that actually benefits society, not the least of which is raising good children, people create the absurd in order to fill the void, and then demand society congratulate them for their “courage”.   

Thankfully, we may slowly be coming to the point where the larger society recognizes that absurdity is no longer acceptable, or worse, compelled.  Justice Thomas and Matt Walsh are actually addressing the same thing. Common sense should have to be discarded just because “experts” say it must.

The world is a challenging place with dangers of all sorts around every corner, the sooner America gets back to being a place ruled by common sense rather than absurdity, the better we will be prepared to deal with them…

White Pride... Is that a thing?

Although the first person killed in the American Revolution was a black man with native American blood – Crispus Attucks – the reality is, every man who signed the Declaration of Independence and was involved with the crafting of the Constitution was white.  Simply put, there would be no United States without white men.

After almost 250 years however the life of the average American is not directly impacted by what those white men did in Philadelphia.  Indirectly however, we experience the world build upon their foundations every day… and most of that world was the result of the inventions and innovations of other white men.

If you woke up this morning and did anything other than work on a farm, you can thank Cyrus McCormick.  When he invented the mechanical reaper in 1831 farming hadn’t changed in a thousand years, where one man with a scythe and two helpers could harvest two acres of grain a day.  McCormick’s early reaper allowed a man to double that and his later reapers multiplied that many times.  His introduction of payment plans made his machines the workhorses of a dramatic increase in efficiencies in farming.  At the time of his invention 80% of America’s population was either directly or indirectly involved in farming.  Today that number is closer to 2%.  So in essence Cyrus McCormick freed up almost 80% of the population to go out and do pretty much anything… from becoming entrepreneurs, to florists to baseball players to scientists, to plumbers to Instagram models and, yes, sadly, professional race grifters and activists.

Another white guy who had an extraordinary impact on America today was Henry Ford.  Many people think Ford invented the automobile.  He didn’t.  But his auto manufacturing production line brought the car from a luxury item only the rich could afford to a product tens of millions and eventually billions of people around the world could afford.  With that unprecedented access to cars the universe opened up for Americans.  Transportation limits on where they could work, live or go to school evaporated.  Suddenly they could drive anywhere they wanted, not limited to where public transport went or how far their horse could travel in a day or how far they could walk. Today 250 million Americans drive three trillion miles a year, six times the distance the earth travels around the sun!

There’s also Willis Carrier, the man who invented modern air conditioning.  Every summer as temperatures soar across the country, scorching everything in their path, most Americans can retreat to their homes and relax in air conditioned comfort or enjoy a movie theater or restaurant that would otherwise feel like a sweatshop. The degree to which the air office spaces changed the face of America is hard to exaggerate.  While manufacturing steel or working on a farm might not be impacted greatly by the invention of air conditioning, many of the things Americans do for work would be much more difficult if not impossible without it.  Things like medical research and high tech manufacturing or more mundane things like computer programming or working in a superstore or busy restaurant.

Then there is Elisha Otis, inventor of the safety elevator.  Take a look at the skyline of any American city and you’ll see buildings that stack 30 or 50 or even 100 floors high.  Of the tallest, skyscrapers of 40 or more floors, New York City alone has 250, and there are almost a thousand across the country.  None of those, or even the tens of thousands of buildings of just 10 or 20 stories high wouldn’t be possible without Otis’s safety elevator.  His presentation at the 1853 New York World's Fair helped usher in the advent of skyscrapers by giving much of the public the confidence to ride in elevators.

And there are countless more including George Eastman, the personal camera innovator, Charles Goodyear who put tires on our cars, the Wright Brothers and their airplane, Samuel Colt and his guns, Isaac Singer the sewing machine magnate, Levi Strauss and his jeans, Leo Baekeland who brought us plastic, and thousands of others.  To those historic figures you can add (for better or worse) contemporary white men Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andreessen and in reality, millions of others. 

The fact of the matter is that these white men built much of the world we live in today. There’s no group of people in human history who have had a greater impact on mankind than white males in general, and American white males in particular.  The world they created may not be perfect, but measured against virtually every culture that came before them the level of freedom and prosperity isn’t even close.

As such, we should celebrate White Male Pride!  Yay!

But here’s the thing, although these white men may have accomplished much, white men have also done extraordinarily bad things… from Jack the Ripper to Hitler to Stalin to Teds Kaczynski and Bundy. 

We can’t celebrate white male pride because white men are not monolithic.  Some white men are great and others despicable human beings.  The thing that made America great wasn’t the fact that her Founding Fathers were white, but rather it was the ideas they had and the framework they put in place. 

The notion of white pride is simply absurd. But the truth is, so too is black pride and gay pride.  George Washington was no more of a representative of all white males than was Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter.  Equally, MLK was no more a representative of all black males than was Samuel Little, the nation’s deadliest serial killer. 

And while celebrating white males is absurd, we should nonetheless be grateful for the things that some of them bequeathed to us that have allowed Americans to live lives that kings couldn’t have imagined just a century ago. 

And that legacy isn’t due to skin color, it’s due to a culture that developed individual rights, freedom and representative government over more than two millennia, and happened nowhere else on earth. Those basic elements, when combined with free markets and limited government, found their apex in the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution.  Today the nation built on those foundations is the most robust and prosperous in history. 

But that prosperity can only survive if the fundamental tenants of its culture remain strong. Sadly they’re not, and that’s why America is fraying.  The Democrats’ balkanization of Americans by race and sex have taken Americans’ focus off of creating more prosperity and instead put the focus tribalization and redistributing wealth, with the full weight of the government, media and academia driving the transition.

No nation in history has prospered by redistributing wealth.  It’s against human nature and a recipe for tyranny.  The key to prosperity is creating more wealth and the Democrats have undermined that as they vilify whites, both past and present, for the crime of being white.  The truth is, we don’t need black or gay or white pride. What we do need however is pride in the successes America has achieved and the building blocks of freedom that made that success possible. 

Just as comparison and envy are the roots of evil, gratitude and conscientiousness are the fount of prosperity. Although it’s verboten to mention in woke 2023, the reality is that white men built much of the world we live in today. We can be grateful for their efforts without making them gods or denigrating anyone else.  The beauty of America, particularly in the 21^st century is that anyone can succeed.  We should look to history with curiosity seeking to find inspiration in what those men (most of whom happened to be white) accomplished, not with scorn and disdain for their sin of being men of their times. 

Follow me on Twitter at ImperfectUSA

2020: The Year Democrats Put America on a Path to Collapse

It’s possible that 100 years from now people on this planet will look back at 2020 as the year the world began its descent into hell. Hell is what life was for most of the people who lived on earth before the United States was founded. In what might come as a surprise to many progressives, the United States did not create slavery. Slavery has existed since the beginning of mankind and was a common element of societies on every continent, including Africa. For most of human history the common experience of most people was one of poverty, subjugation, war and early death, whether they were slaves, slave owners or anyone else. This held true whether someone lived in Pharaonic Egypt, the Roman Empire, China’s Han Dynasty or even Elizabethan England, or virtually anywhere else on the planet. The average life expectancy around the world for most of human history was somewhere between 25 and 35 years old and infant mortality could be as high as 30%. Families would usually have many children because so many children never survived to adulthood.

It was into this world that the United States was born in 1776. The world did not measurably change on July 4th of 1776. On the contrary, the world stayed very much the same for many years to come. But what the establishment of the United States did, along with the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, was bring to the world the first nation in history to have at its core the principle of God given individual rights, individual freedoms and a government explicitly limited in its power. What this American experiment did was give unprecedented life to the yearning of humans to worship as they liked, to say what they felt, the freedom to life the lives they wanted to live and protect them from tyranny. (Obviously none of that applied to slaves in the new country, but at the time slavery was a common practice around the world including both Africa and Europe.) The result of this unprecedented freedom was the creation of the fertilizer that would in time become the garden from which many of the greatest advances in the history of mankind would emerge.

The year America was born 85% of the world’s population - 50% in the developed Europe - worked either directly or indirectly in farming , one of the most dangerous jobs in the world and an industry that had not significantly changed in 1,000 years. Today that number is lower virtually everywhere in the world and in the US and much of the west that number is below 5%, freeing up 80% of the population to do everything from becoming doctors, scientists, astronauts, teachers, actors, journalists, entrepreneurs and even bloggers! It was a Virginian, Cyrus McCormick, who made that possible with his invention of the mechanical reaper in 1831.

Later, far from the farm, in what is possibly the most extraordinary sequence of scientific advances in all of history, in a mere 66 years Americans went from inventing the airplane to sending men to the moon and returning them safely to earth. A mere sixty six years!

And the list of advances directly or indirectly due to the incredible opportunities in the United States is simply extraordinary. From the assembly line for cars to plastic to elevators to air conditioning to personal computers, the Internet and the smartphone, the United States has been the fertilizer from which unprecedented inventions and advances have together brought more prosperity to more people around the world than at any point in human history.  Not only are more people living more prosperous lives, but they are living longer, with the average life expectancy in the world going from 29 in 1800 to 46 in 1950 to 71 today. And just to be clear, all of the advances of the last two centuries did not originate in the United States. They did not, but American success and spirit of entrepreneurship helped inspire others around the world to make further contributions as well.

Americans have been able to make those stunning advances and many many more because of the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and our capitalist system. Today we find those two pillars that helped power the world's march to prosperity under siege. From the Communist Black Lives Movement to the Antifa fascists to their media enablers, the nation finds itself at an unprecedented precipice. In one direction sits a future empowered by opportunity and prosperity, albeit an imperfect one, where things will not be perfect, things won’t always be fair and there will be winners and losers. But progress will continue as American capitalism and entrepreneurship push forward economic advances while free discourse allows for the exchange of ideas to push forward cultural advances.

In the other direction sits an abyss of mob rule and fascism where Americans will be forced to speak with one voice or be silenced and where, in the name of fairness and equality businesses will eventually come under the control of the mob and the government, which will have morphed into one. The Constitution will be discarded like yesterday’s newspaper, and the rights and freedoms that spurred the creation of the nation in the first place will become distant memories. Religious freedom will be gone. Freedom of speech and the press will apply only to those who toe the leftist party line. The 2nd Amendment will be history and confiscation will be the order of the day. Private property will cease to exist. And while the fascist regime will not succeed in producing prosperity, it will produce an equality of sorts, but one of poverty for everyone, except of course for those who wield the reins of power. Crime, corruption and extortion will become rampant and the United States will come to resemble a third world banana republic where the common man is subject to the whims of government apparatchiks, those with money & access, and anyone with a gun.

If this sounds a little like Dante’s Inferno, it should, but one doesn’t need to go back 500 years to understand what our future looks like. We just have to look at the recent history of places like Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, China, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, etc. Communism and its fascist twin always produce the same thing… dictatorships, failed economics and widespread death and poverty. That is the history that will be written about the United States if we allow the BLM / Antifa / mainstream media triumvirate (via their Democrat puppets) to take power in November. Barack Obama used the IRS to silence opponents prior to the 2012 election and the FBI to try and overturn Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. For Democrats like Obama and Biden, the Constitution is more a collection of suggestions than the articulation of a set of functioning rules by which they have to operate. Imagine what a Democrat empowered by the radicals burning down America’s cities and rewriting her history would be willing to do…

America as we know it won’t end on January 20th 2021 if Joe Biden wins, but it will be a far darker place and the future of failure will be imminent.  One need only look at the disastrous outcomes in places like New York, Chicago, Baltimore, LA, Detroit, Minneapolis and the dozens of other cities run into the ground by Democrats to understand what would lay ahead for the country, and frankly, much of a world without America's leadership. The only question is, will it take Democrats more or less time to destroy the United States than it took Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant to save it.

Random Measures of Human Progress... We've got it pretty good in 2016

One of the downsides of success is that people sometimes forget what it took to get there. It’s not usually the people who created the success in the first place who forget it, but rather their progeny or the people who experience the fruits of success without having to have actually achieved it…

Mankind has been on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years. To borrow Carl Sagan’s analogy, if the time mankind has been on earth was a calendar, the time the United States has been in existence might be just one day.

For most of the 365 days on that calendar most humans lived largely in conditions of scarcity, barbarity, poverty and war. For most of human history it was the sword that was the defining element of destiny… either by fighting on the battlefields or as a medium of control over other people.

If the Declaration of Independence is midnight on night of the 30th of December, then the year 1900 might constitute noon on December 31st. To put some perspective on today’s world, let’s look a few of things from the year 1900. At the turn of the century the average life expectancy in the world was 31 years and 35% of all babies never made it to their fifth birthday. Half of the American population worked on farms – one of the most dangerous occupations in the world – or in its ancillary industries and for most of the rest of the world that share was over 90%. Slavery still existed in 15 countries, Jim Crow laws existed throughout the south and the bubonic plague was killing 100,000 people a year worldwide. Flight, radio, and television, had not been invented (nevermind the computer and the Internet) and a three minute long distance call would cost five dollars.

Today most humans live in a different world if not necessarily on a different planet… this is particularly true for people living in the West. On that 365 day calendar the period from 2000 to today might only represent the last hour on the last day of the year. But during that hour life for almost every American would be exponentially better than it had been for our ancestress for the previous 99.99% of human history. Today the average life expectancy worldwide is 64 while in the US it’s 79 years and worldwide less than 5% of babies don’t reach their 5th birthday. War still exists, but it’s different. During the two wars the United States has been involved in since 2001 the number of fatalities is near 8,000 while over a period of just over a dozen years of war during the wars of the 20th century Americans lost over 600,000. Today 91% of Americans have mobile phones while 65% have smartphones that are more powerful than the computers that put a man on the moon. Today 95% of Americans work in areas other than farming… something for which we can thank a man named Cyrus McCormick. In 1831 McCormick invented the mechanical reaper that freed men from the soil and changed the world. McCormick made it so that so that rather than spending their lives toiling on dangerous farms most Americans could spend their lives as teachers, plumbers, programmers, golf professionals, accountants, actors, doctors, marketing executives, YoutTube stars, writers and pretty much anything they might want to do as they no longer were tethered to the farm.

Today we can fly virtually anywhere on the planet in less than 24 hours, we can video chat endlessly with anyone anywhere for free, we can fill up our gas tanks for the equivalent of two hours of work, we can order books or dinner or clothes or furniture online and have them delivered to our door in hours or days and watch new movies from our couches or make them on our computers. Ninety nine percent of American households have TVs, 87% have air conditioning and 86% of households have cars.

All of these random measures showcase why someone plucked from Rome from the year 100 B.C. would have much more in common with someone 2000 years later from Atlanta or New York in 1900 than either would have with the average American today a mere 100 years later. The United States today has enormous problems that must be faced and the world has even more. But we should not let those problems, as real as they are, divert us from recognizing exactly what we have and how far mankind in general and Americans in particular have come. As we celebrate the birth of Christ and look forward to a New Year we should take time to reflect on our good fortune to live in a world as wondrous as ours is in 2016… and perhaps that will give us the strength, confidence and desire to make it even better for our progeny.

Professor Obama and Real Job Creation

We’ve recently been told that to refer to President Obama as a professor is coded racism. (Click here to read my take on such arguments) Interestingly, during the campaign for the White House his campaign didn’t see it that way as he referred to himself as a "constitutional law professor". I don’t know how good of a professor he was, but if he had spent more time reading American history and less Rules for Radicals, he might have been a better President. Two weeks before he was inaugurated the President stated that “Only government" can save us.” The subsequent actions of his administration (and its predictable lack of results) suggest that professor Obama should have spent less time reading Karl Marx or Cloward & Piven and more time reading Adam Smith.

History clearly demonstrates that government is not the engine of American prosperity. The success of the American experiment was played out on the fields of limited government and free markets, guided by the rule of law and powered by the ingenuity, entrepreneurial spirit and quest for success that runs through the veins of the Americans people. Without a doubt, the single best example of the power of that American spirit and its ability to change the world can be found in the life of one man, Cyrus McCormick, the man who freed mankind.

Cyrus McCormick has been called the "Father of Modern Agriculture." His creativity was twofold. The first element of his genius was his invention of a workable reaper, a machine that harvested grain. In the 1820s the limits on agriculture were dictated by how much grain could be harvested before it went bad. A man, using tools and techniques that were largely unchanged for five thousand years, could harvest approximately 2 acres of grain a day. For centuries men had been toiling in vain to invent a tool that would increase that number. In 1831 Cyrus McCormick solved the riddle and created the first effective mechanical reaper. Despite its great limitations, his first reaper more than doubled a man’s capacity to harvest grain and began a technological march that continues to this day.

As if that were not enough, McCormick had more up his sleeve. The second element of his genius was the introduction of financing for his equipment. Farmers moving west often had little more than the clothes on their back and very little cash. Unlike most bankers, McCormick understood the economics of farming and sold his reapers for $30 down and the balance – typically $90 or $100 – in 6 months. (By 1880 when McCormick retired, economies of scale had driven the cost of a far better reaper down to $18.) McCormick also introduced advertising, (including satisfied customer testimonials) replacement parts and the written guarantee to American agriculture. Indeed, "15 acres a day or your money back" was his promise.

By the time McCormick died in 1884, his company had sold over 6 million reapers around the world. A measure of his impact can be found by noting that in 1831, the year he invented the reaper, 85% of the American population was involved in agriculture. Today that number stands at less than 3%. Not only does that 3% feed the United States, (with its 300 million vs. 15 million in McCormick's time), but it also exports millions of tons of food every year. Although the impact on farming was substantial, the real impact of McCormick’s genius was felt far beyond the fields. Millions who had formerly been tied to the farm were now free to pursue their dreams elsewhere. From energy to medicine to manufacturing to retail... and virtually every other area of our economy, the economic miracle that came to personify the United States owes much to the man who freed the population to dream of the possibilities that lay beyond the amber fields.

Cyrus McCormick did more for the advance of the human condition than virtually any politician in human history. His efforts freed the masses of people around the world to leave the farm behind and pursue their passions for becoming… basically anything they wanted. With freedom (in this case from the chains of farming) comes creativity, and McCormick unleashed a flood of it. Because they were no longer chained to a farm, Americans were able to go out and invent and build the world we live in today: photography, movies, electric light bulbs, baseball, television, advertising, computers, the Hula Hoop and the Frisbee, the Internet, FedEx, McDonalds, Wal-Mart and yes, even things like Enron and Lehman Brothers.

If President Obama had undertaken even a cursory reading of American history he would have recognized that Cyrus McCormick was not unique. Rockefeller brought order to the petroleum market and made energy affordable. Edison illuminated the country. Alexander Graham Bell revolutionized communication. Henry Ford brought the assembly line to automobile production and made cars almost anyone could afford. Charles Goodyear brought comfort to driving a car while Elisha Otis made elevators safe and Willis Carrier made movie theaters bearable even during the dog days of August. Not only did these advances make our lives significantly better, but every one resulted in millions of jobs being created.

From Robert Fulton to Bill Gates, America is a country of inventors and innovators who solve great problems and build great fortunes… and those visionaries usually benefit millions of others along the way. This economic malaise is no match for a motivated citizenry of entrepreneurs who are just waiting for their chance to strike out and earn their fortune. If President Obama really wanted to put America back to work he’d unleash the unabashed power of American innovation by slashing taxes, rolling back government spending and moving to reign in the power of unions and lawyers, the numbers two and three obstacles (behind the imperial federal government) to any chutes of recovery that might begin to sprout. If the Professor decides not to pursue such a path, we shouldn’t be much surprised. It’s hard to imagine a shining city on a hill is something to strive for if one is looking down on it from an elevated perch in an ivory tower.