I was talking recently with my right hand man about the relative virtues of the Greek and American minds. Our consensus was that while the American mind matched and eclipsed the Greek for at least the first one and a half centuries of our nation, it has recently been bureaucratized and inundated and OMG'd from divine revolution to soul-less but competent management to moral, ethical, and intellectual decrepitude.
The American mind has been utterly disaggregated with technocracy, with myths, with virtuality, with an endless inundation of images and sounds imploring us to borrow, to buy, and to never settle for anything, including our first wives. In a sentence, we have lost our ability to recognize the Nature of Things.
The Greeks, due to the conspicuous lack of YouTube, TacoBell, iPods, or even billboards, had plenty of time to sit and think. The American mind no longer has this time, and this is evident in American actions. The Greeks were able to get to the Nature of Things.
Deliberation before action made for inordinately great political thinkers and actors in Greece and early America. But when America became swamped in an endless deluge of information, gossip, entertainment, and consumption all blended seamlessly into an inseparable goulash whose whole is even more worthless than its mostly useless parts, deliberation came to be seen as vaguely pathetic, as a sign of a jellied spine and a European (read: gay) orientation.
American actions now are not based on the Nature of Things; instead, they are based on a foundation of self-imposed delusion which holds that an American hand at the tiller is enough to defy the Nature of Things and to superimpose ideological solutions onto problems whose Natures are willfully ignored.
For example, 9/11 was an attack by a stateless entity, and the Bush administration responded by overthrowing two states in set-piece battles (in which the enemies of the American Army had decidedly few "pieces"). The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad would have made a sick newsreel in 1945, but as a response to 9/11, it fundamentally ignored the Nature of the threat.
We now have the issue of the big three American car companies and whether we should bail them by confiscating the wealth of other citizens. The Nature of the problem, of course, is that the world no longer exists where an American company can make cars nobody wants and pay folks 50 bucks per hour to do so. That world no longer exists. That is the Nature of Detroit's problem, yet most proposed solutions ignore this obvious truth.
My heart is literally heavy at the thought of all those folks losing their jobs, but did not the candle makers all get laid off when we invented electricity? That's the nature of progress; victims are a part of the equation, just as surely as beneficiaries are. If we spend the peoples' money on the car companies, how is that different from spending my money to bail out VCR companies after the DVD was created?
It seems that we need to get back to the Nature of Things, which will require the renunciation of the myth that we can have a perpetually and universally wealthy, healthy, and safe society. That is a myth, and it is a myth whose misguided attempts at implementation have caused more misery than anything else in the history of the world.
The American mind has been utterly disaggregated with technocracy, with myths, with virtuality, with an endless inundation of images and sounds imploring us to borrow, to buy, and to never settle for anything, including our first wives. In a sentence, we have lost our ability to recognize the Nature of Things.
The Greeks, due to the conspicuous lack of YouTube, TacoBell, iPods, or even billboards, had plenty of time to sit and think. The American mind no longer has this time, and this is evident in American actions. The Greeks were able to get to the Nature of Things.
Deliberation before action made for inordinately great political thinkers and actors in Greece and early America. But when America became swamped in an endless deluge of information, gossip, entertainment, and consumption all blended seamlessly into an inseparable goulash whose whole is even more worthless than its mostly useless parts, deliberation came to be seen as vaguely pathetic, as a sign of a jellied spine and a European (read: gay) orientation.
American actions now are not based on the Nature of Things; instead, they are based on a foundation of self-imposed delusion which holds that an American hand at the tiller is enough to defy the Nature of Things and to superimpose ideological solutions onto problems whose Natures are willfully ignored.
For example, 9/11 was an attack by a stateless entity, and the Bush administration responded by overthrowing two states in set-piece battles (in which the enemies of the American Army had decidedly few "pieces"). The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad would have made a sick newsreel in 1945, but as a response to 9/11, it fundamentally ignored the Nature of the threat.
We now have the issue of the big three American car companies and whether we should bail them by confiscating the wealth of other citizens. The Nature of the problem, of course, is that the world no longer exists where an American company can make cars nobody wants and pay folks 50 bucks per hour to do so. That world no longer exists. That is the Nature of Detroit's problem, yet most proposed solutions ignore this obvious truth.
My heart is literally heavy at the thought of all those folks losing their jobs, but did not the candle makers all get laid off when we invented electricity? That's the nature of progress; victims are a part of the equation, just as surely as beneficiaries are. If we spend the peoples' money on the car companies, how is that different from spending my money to bail out VCR companies after the DVD was created?
It seems that we need to get back to the Nature of Things, which will require the renunciation of the myth that we can have a perpetually and universally wealthy, healthy, and safe society. That is a myth, and it is a myth whose misguided attempts at implementation have caused more misery than anything else in the history of the world.
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