Amerika

You know you live in a trivial time when most people flit around on the surface of issues, looking for the outrage or emotional payoff of the day, and never are willing to enter into the area of real disagreement, the core.

For example, we have no shortage of conservatives writing articles to “own the libs” by pointing out Leftist hypocrisies or how the latest public statement from their politicians or entertainers is an outrage.

These are the same people who back in the 1980s could be reliably counted on to have a tantrum any time the occult, drugs, or sex were mentioned. Consequently those are the mainstays of entertainment today because the outrage made them profitable.

For humanity, the presence of these people presents an enduring problem. Whenever any serious issue arises, they can be counted on to start the usual annoying distraction of talking about nothing. All of conservative media is like this; any actually relevant articles sneak out between the blather by accident.

Our founding fathers knew this about humanity, and they knew that the problem for every society was that over time it produced more bloviating fools and fewer insightful intellects. Like this site, the founding fathers were concerned with a big issue: the tendency of human civilizations to self-destruct.

Funny how you never hear about that on conservative websites, magazines, blogs, and television shows. For them, the apocalypse is fiery nuclear doom, and if that does not happen, everything is OK if people just find more Jesus/Israel, money, and military might.

Civilization collapse actually looks like what happened to Rome and Athens. Once leading societies, these two cultures just faded away and were replaced by modern Italians and Greeks who are more third world than first world, more Arab and Turk than White European.

The founding fathers were aware of a Europe in the early stages of collapse. It was overthrowing its kings bit by bit, replacing its national cultures with international alliances, accepting foreign orthodoxies, and increasingly commercial and urbanized. They saw that this path led to trouble, as it would in the wars of the next century.

Their quest, as they visualized it, was to make a civilization that did not self-destruct in the way the ones around them were. They wanted to make a saner form of government, and they borrowed both from the new liberals and the ancient conservatives to do it.

For example, the original voting scheme had governors voting for presidents like dukes used to put support behind kings to select the best option. The democracy was intended not to be unlimited like Athenian democracy, but rather held in the hands of a natural elite of wealthy and competent people.

On the other hand, they designed a society around freedom so that it could not form an inflexible dogma and enforce it on its citizens. They even encouraged these citizens to keep weapons around to periodically overthrow their government when it became too dependent on bureaucratic method and lost sight of the goal of having civilizational health.

Very few are talking about this anymore, for a simple reason: they do not believe our civilization can be saved, so they are just taking their share and planning to get out as it becomes Mexico, Italy, Vietnam, Greece, Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, or Ireland.

The founding fathers recognized that civilization is a two-step problem: first, one must avoid invaders and anarchy by having a power structure, and second, one must avoid the power structure becoming abusive by limiting its self-interested activities.

Unfortunately for them, the real power in democracy is the voters, and the process of voting seems to drive people insane because it is a lottery in which no one is really responsible for the end result. Consequently no one focuses on the long term, and instead people look at what they can do to transfer benefits to themselves or their special interest group.

In the same year they passed the Bill of Rights, the framers also wrote into law an immigration act which limited immigration into America to those coming from Western Europe. They were not intolerant or hateful, but recognized that polyethnic societies are inherently prone to division and therefore strengthen government self-interest.

As it turns out, they were right to be skeptical of diversity. Neither conservatives nor liberals now will talk about these topics, especially conservatives who are terrified of being accused of being Hitler-like. As a result, our civilization makes no efforts to stop the decline much less reverse it.

Tags: collapse, decline and fall, founding fathers