Tag: individualism

The Collapse of the American Dream

Via Armstrong Economics

The American Dream, where once upon a time, was when a parent saved to raise their children to have a perpetual better life than they had. Parents would save for their college education and they pushed their children to achieve. My father began saving the day I was born for my college education and law school.

Americans, no matter the circumstances of their birth, all shared freedom, opportunity, the right to build private businesses and enterprises, and a republic – “Representative Democracy.” We raised our children believing that they had a legitimate opportunity to live a better life than we did predicated upon their own skills and intelligence. We tried to instill a good work ethic, and that would provide good fortune for the future ahead.

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An Inquiry into Values: Men and the Art of Life-Cycle Governance

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

 

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal.  The persons who make up a nation today, next year die, and their experience dies with them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”, paragraph 48.

 

Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world.

Robert M. Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Chapter 10

 

A MAN’S JOURNEY

On April 24th, 2017, an author and philosopher by the name of Robert M. Pirsig passed from this world.  Pirsig, born in 1928, was best known for his 1974 book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” which is a semi-autographical account of his personal philosophical exploration into the concept of “quality”.

At the age of 9, Pirsig’s IQ measured at 170 and, at the age of 15, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota to study biochemistry.  After becoming disillusioned with the validity of the Scientific Method’s ability to genuinely reduce seemingly unlimited numbers of hypotheses, Pirsig’s attention diverted from his studies and, within two years, he was expelled for poor academic performance.  At the age of 18, Pirsig joined the Army and developed an interest in Eastern culture and philosophy while stationed in South Korea.  He eventually returned to college and obtained degrees in chemistry, philosophy, and journalism.  He also studied Oriental philosophy at Benares Hindu University in India.

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FOUNDATION – FALL OF THE AMERICAN GALACTIC EMPIRE

“The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.” – Isaac Asimov, Foundation

 

“Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.” – Isaac Asimov, Foundation

I read Isaac Asimov’s renowned award winning science fiction trilogy four decades ago as a teenager. I read them because I liked science fiction novels, not because I was trying to understand the correlation to the fall of the Roman Empire. The books that came to be called the Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation) were not written as novels; they’re the collected Foundation stories Asimov wrote between 1941 and 1950. He wrote these stories during the final stages of our last Fourth Turning Crisis and the beginning stages of the next High. This was the same time frame in which Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Orwell wrote 1984. This was not a coincidence.

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