The Choices We Must Make
None of what we face is inevitable. The harshest realization is that many can't be saved because they don't want to be saved.
For the past few days, I have been hearing Rand’s John Galt in my head repeating the line:
“I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
So many different interpretations have been assigned to that line, but to me it is the declaration of an individual taking charge of their own life and not putting one’s fate in the hands of another person during a time when many, if not most, are ceding their futures to the control of someone or something else.
This week has been a true disappointment to many of us because so many have chosen, as the economist Claude-Frédéric Bastiat said, to live the great fiction by which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else.
I guess the most frustrating thing for me is watching America just seemingly self-destruct when none of it is inevitable or even necessary. There is no overwhelming outside force, no invading army, no natural disaster causing this, it is coming from inside.
One wonders if people of history recognized the same as their great civilizations waned and died.
The prime frustration of all frustrations is that all of this is entirely stoppable.
In my life, I have had experiences with people close to me who fought drug addictions they began as early as middle school. Both had parents and siblings who loved them, who showered attention upon them, lived in strong middle-class homes and were well taken care of.
In both cases, these two came to understand the drug use was both dominating and destroying their lives and the lives of the people around them. Both receded into a sub-culture that supported their habits, telling them that their addiction was normal and that it was all there was.
Family and friends tried to help them, spending life savings to get them counseling and treatment, to bring them home, to get them out of that sub-culture long enough to get clean and sober, only to have both slip back into drug use to self-medicate or just escape from the pressures of daily life. Both even came to a point where they disappeared, cutting contact with their families for long periods of time as their parents and siblings reached out begging them to come home.
But the two paths did not wind up at the same place.
One continued the isolation and was consumed by their addictions, sinking lower and dodging death until finally, death caught up with one of them. He died of an overdose, alone and unremarked. His parents collected his body from the morgue.
The other was a different story. His change did not come easily. At 19, he was within a judge’s decision of going to prison for up to a decade, but thanks to God, was offered a last chance to be diverted into a tough drug treatment program, one he knew was his last chance. He finally made his own choice that the life he was leading was not the life he wanted or deserved. He decided he was tired of the self-destructive behaviors. He made a choice to change his entire life. He removed himself from his culture, moving to a different state, enrolled in community college and began a long road to recovery. Today he has a college degree, almost a decade in a great and challenging job, just bought a house and has a fiancée.
I say this because, all things being equal between these two people, the outcome came down to a single choice that no one else but those two individuals had the power to make. One choice led to life and happiness, the other to despair and the end of life.
It occurs to me the choice our Founders made in 1776 was such a tipping point.
I consider myself fairly well read - and even if I am in the shallow end of that pond - I can tell you that there have been barrels of ink spilled onto paper describing exactly how this process begins, how it proceeds and how it ends. Each tome considers multitudes of ways to avoid the doom of history, that citizens, like the families of the two boys I mentioned above, are forced to witness.
In the cases of the boys, no matter how loud the families cried out to them, they would not hear. For whatever reasons, sometimes people simply don’t want to be rescued.
Last night I opened the book covers to the screams of Friedrich Hayek and the “I can’t believe people are so clueless” expressions of two essays by Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, “The Law” and “Government”.
People should read “The Law” and “Government” if they are interested in seeing how we repeat the same mistakes over and over again. As Hayek noted in “Road to Serfdom” the worst always get on top when we allow collectivism to enter our socioeconomic systems.
Three things you will learn from history about what we face today are these:
It has all been done before, and
None of this is inevitable, and
It can be stopped.
All it takes is making a choice that we must accept that some will never make. One cannot save another who does not wish to be saved.
May God continue to bless our everlasting struggle to overcome ignorance and to preserve liberty for all.
As with addiction, the train that ultimately kills you contains many cars. But almost every time the one run over by the train laments, if only I hadn't had that last - insert drug or drink of choice here - never realizing or admitting, it wasn't the caboose that did them in, but the locomotive. 2022 may prove to be the caboose. The locomotive one might argue was the hanging chads, but quite possibly could have been a third rate break in at a DC hotel. Some trains use several locomotives so if you accept Watergate as the first, 2000 as the second, '08 and '12 as three and four, '16 was another, but "slaved" to the chain because it was down for maintenance. '20 and '22 may yet prove to be empty flat cars. We may not see the caboose, but it's coming. Another addiction truism is, if the last time didn't hurt bad enough, then it wasn't the last time. Apparently 2020 didn't hurt bad enough.
It's become a somewhat popular suggestion to want to burn it all down and start over. I've never been a fan of such drastic measures, though I must admit at times I've been tempted. I do know after decades of rehabbing old structures, at times, extensive demolition is necessary to ensure the structure survives. If the building has "good bones", it's likely worth the effort and expense involved. It may even be necessary to shore up parts of the edifice so that foundations, bearing walls, columns, and beams may be removed and replaced, giving the once sorry and dilapidated building a chance at remaining useful. As it stands now, I'm not certain our sanctuary could withstand a stiff breeze, much less the hurricane that feels almost inevitable. As with many things, if we who are responsible for saving the structure from collapse, dither too long about how to proceed and what course said repairs must take, the choice will be taken from us when the next storm arrives.
How can the world's greatest civilization self-destruct? I've pondered it quite a bit. I come up with a few things.
First, historically these cycles seem to happen around 250 years after a new major civilization arises. There are a number of supporting examples floating around the 'net. But why?
Second, providing context for the first, and you've probably seen this: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.” You see the same thing in the new rich families, where the generations succeeding the person who built a great fortune often don't have the same drive, just coast, and fritter away position and inheritance.
Third, 75 years of blowback. The death of Roosevelt, who hadn't properly groomed and prepared a successor, and who ignored Truman after Harry replaced the more qualified previous VP, created a vacuum in leadership. Truman wasn't ready to fill those shoes. His poorly thought out appointments of the Dulles brothers to powerful posts after WWII, plus Operation Paperclip, led to the cultivation of the Deep State. This paved the way for the US role as the world's "policeman"/in reality, the largest interloper in the affairs of other countries. In the end, you can't ignore "national karma." Killing and deposing dozens of leaders of other countries, one government after another, interfering with free elections around the world in the name of democracy, and using the lion's share of world resources for our own benefit while leaving crumbs for the "donor nations" eventually comes back to bite.
Going back even further, one history lesson we should not forget is that it was not only England that took part in the Opium Wars with China, which created a nation of Chinese drug addicts, but also the US and France were involved. China has a long history, and a long memory, and they play the long game: they are already in our pockets, and reading our mail, and now our citizens are dying from Chinese-made fentanyl. Coincidence?
I agree it doesn't need to be this way, but it would require our own cultural revolution, if you will, a renewal to steer our way out of our current morass of censorship and home grown authoritarian government. Being honest with ourselves, thinking critically and clearly, making hard choices instead of easy excuses, and reinventing ourselves in such a way that we clean house, repair relationships with other nations, and acting in unity around our mutual self interest instead of finding endless ways to fight amongst ourselves.
Instead, we swim in a pool made filthy with our own lies, and believe those lies that we tell ourselves and others, polluting our own consciousness and blinding us to the truth. We don't think twice about taking advantage of other nations. And we have a haughty, and undeserved, high opinion of ourselves as being the undisputed #1 as we were after WWII, but no longer are, which blocks our ability to follow what is essentially a 12-step program for World Powers.
We could do it. But will we look in the mirror and dedicate ourselves to the task?