The Worst Are Leading Western Society on the Wrong Path

If you are wondering what happened to the American people and the West in general, on the road to committing societal suicide in short order, F. A. Hayek has a plausible answer in his book, The Road to Serfdom.

Hayek, an economist and philosopher, a pioneer in monetary theory and proponent of libertarianism, lists three reasons why the worst elements of society have formed such a strong group of sycophants with homogeneous views on the direction that the western, free market societies must take to become the communist utopia-that-never-was.

1.     "The higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values.”

However, the education system has made sure that the miseducated are more homogeneous in their indoctrinated views and beliefs via the generalized teaching method of what to think, not how to think.

2.      The ‘docile and gullible’ have no strong convictions of their own and are easily swayed to accept a “ready-made system of values” if “drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.”

This is where the lying mainstream media comes into play, with their daily scripted and identical reports distributed to them by the socialist Democrat party.

3.      It is “almost a law of human nature” that people tend to agree more on the negative rather than the positive. Therefore, it is easier for people to agree on “the hatred of the enemy” or “on the envy of those better off.”  

The clever narrative becomes ‘we’ vs. ‘they’ and the fight crystalizes under the banner that ‘they’ are the enemy which must be destroyed.  The Soviet totalitarian leaders have vilified the ‘kulaks’ (Russian peasants as defined by Stalin’s regime) and the Germans vilified the ‘Jew.’ (F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 160-161)

The common enemy today labeled by bureaucrats and career politicians as dangerous are the ordinary Americans who love their country, their families, their Christian faith, and who reject the woke-ism of current young generations indoctrinated into believing that everything good about America, its economy, its history, its culture, its values, are evil.

These indoctrinated generations, whether in America or other western nations, believe that anything goes, socialism is great, being responsible humans and citizens is passe, free stuff is the way of life, jobs are for dummies, sex and gender are fluid, and biology is a construct to keep them oppressed.

To say that the worst and not the brightest among us are leading our country and western civilization in the wrong direction is an understatement, they are destroying it, and the damage is already at the point of no return.

Congress screamed insurrection when a few hundred Americans entered their hallowed grounds through the opened doors, taking selfies in the Chamber, but are turning a blind eye and deaf ears when five million illegal aliens have invaded our southern border and are now walking among us, all over the country, unvetted, unchecked, unvaccinated, possibly criminals, murderers, slavers, sex traffickers, and gang members. Can we get our country back after this massive invasion? Probably not.

Can we reverse fifty years of miseducation in public schools and in the high-priced colleges around the globe? Probably not without a lot of misery, sacrifice, and decades of determined efforts from millions of people.

How can all these young people today, with children of their own, help change the miseducation they received and that of their children when they have no memory nor role models to follow in order to cause a positive change to return our country to its former glory?

Worse yet, because of technology, human connections, social skills, and the ability to empathize have declined. Sherry Turkle of MIT wrote that “44 percent of teenagers never unplug from their devices” even when watching movies, eating, playing, or during meals with friends, in school, or with family.

Teenagers are so consumed by social media and influencing that they become unable to focus, to listen, to make eye contact, or read body language, an important non-verbal component of communication. It is easy to see that such humans are easy to sway in the wrong direction, a direction that often undermines their own interests.

As some psychologists remarked, once technology and social media were unleashed, humans have proven unable to be satisfied with being bored, relaxing, doing nothing, and enjoying it. They became irritable, stressed, scattered brained, unable to focus, tense, and anxious without constant stimulation from electronic devices.

Herbert Simon was right when wrote in the 1970s that too much information created a dearth of attention. I certainly saw plenty of that in the classroom from teenagers to adult students in college. People became, as Simon said, “overwhelmed and on overdrive, in a state of constant stress.” This state of constant stress caused “exhaustion, frustration, resignation, and even despair” in many people.

An important question must be asked, how capable are these narcissistic people, who are staring constantly into their smart devices and taking selfies, to lead society onto the right path of survival and excellence when they have little general knowledge and understanding of economics and history? Do they even care, in their drug-induced stupor, how many lives socialism and communism have destroyed in the 20^th century or that they are repeating history and expecting a different result?

 

 

Living in a Tornado Alley

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Living in a tornado alley is an experience not for the faint of heart. Every week during hurricane/tornado season, which was pretty much nine months out of the year, the sirens went off weekly. The best thing the small southern town did was to invest in loud enough sirens so that nobody would be caught unaware of impending potential disaster and were able to hide in a safe place like a shelter or a bathtub.

Trailers were shaken and rattled from their tied foundations like cheap carnival rides that needed urgent repairs. Some became easily airborne before they were smashed into smithereens.

At first, we automatically hid inside the tornado shelter in the garage which, in retrospect, was not such a good idea. It had thick walls that would withstand a lot of wind power but there was a water heater in the dark, dank room with not much fresh air coming from the garage through the slats of the very thick and heavy wood door. It gave us a false sense of protection, I suppose, since we could easily be subjected to scalding water if the house would be damaged.

So, we started “hiding” into the basement where at least we had a couch to sit down on and bookshelves with magazines and my collection of books. But it was dark, and electricity was always the first thing to go. I never bought a generator; it was something we could not afford to have - too expensive for the budget of a single parent and teacher.

The power would go out on a dime and we suffered various levels of misery – extreme heat or extreme cold, depending how hot or how cold was outside. The temperatures inside would reach unbearable levels in August and terrible wet and icy levels in early spring or late fall.

We started out with 16 majestic tall pines that the previous owner and builder had planted in the 1950s and, in the span of fifteen years we had lost all but one to various hurricanes, tornadoes, and straight line winds.  These fallen sixty-foot trees blocked the entire cul-de-sac, our and neighbors’ yards and required serious clearing intervention.

During Katrina, the entire street was blocked by significant debris and cranes had to extricate a passage for people to be able to get out. The roots stood high in the air and left huge craters behind after being completely pulled up like weeds by the unimaginable force of the wind.

We were grateful to out of state cleaning crews, food and water trucks from local churches and neighboring Mennonites, who would show up with axes and chainsaws and start clearing and cleaning, cutting lumber, piling it up out of the way, and bringing a hot meal and bottled water long before the first FEMA trucks pulled in.

We could only imagine the additional devastation in flood areas like Louisiana where the water surge would inundate homes up to the ceiling and having to deal with the destruction of everything they ever owned being covered and destroyed by mud and mold.

And the people who survived by some miracle the devastating winds were shocked to discover that their homes disappeared completely from the face of the earth and they found themselves only in possession of the clothes on their backs. Digging through the muck sometimes brought out a serendipitous family photograph that somehow was spared and was left behind. The concrete foundations of their former homes were the only physical evidence that the homes had ever existed in the first place.

After days of not being able to shower, going to the temporarily opened gyms for a shower became a blessed luxury. Finding a room in a local hotel that finally had power and being able to sleep in comfort again made us appreciate that much more what we had before the power went out for days and weeks at a time.

The harder to fill huge craters in the yard and the feeling of desolation made life that much more depressing. It took its toll on our next-door neighbor who, after two weeks of darkness, no heat, and living in his house like a mole, took his own life in his bedroom.

It was so sad that none of us knew what he was going through, he did not choose to share his misery and despair with the rest of us, perhaps we might have been able to save his precious life. We were all trying to survive within the confines of our limitations. People seldom realize how quickly everything crumbles like a house of cards without power, heat, A/C, water, and food.

We lost count how many times the entire content of our freezers and refrigerators spoiled after days without power, how many shorted television sets, microwaves, and other electronic devices we had to replace, items struck by lightning or burned out by power surges. We replaced three air conditioning units crushed by fallen debris and large trees and four roofs in an eighteen-year period.

Once we were shopping at the tiny local mall, three miles from our house, when all the windows blew out by straight line winds. Another time I was driving on the highway and was blown over on the other side of the road like a tiny toy. Luckily, there were no other cars in sight to cause a crash.

If a tornado hit or skimmed our town while it was cold outside, the house would become freezing cold fast. No number of blankets or clothes would keep us warm. We even tried to foolishly warm up with the outdoor grill which we brought inside. With no fireplace, the fumes were too much to bear, and we gave up, opening doors to air the house which made it that much colder.

The campus where I worked was hit twice quite hard. Several buildings were damaged, and a couple had to be demolished. With each tornado, more magnificent magnolia trees were uprooted, trees that had been there for generations. A dormitory was hit while students were huddling in their bunks and were missed by dangerous and lethal flying debris like pieces of lamp posts, impaling their beds or living quarters by mere inches from their bodies.

During sudden freezes, following a heavy rain, power lines would snap like bread sticks, and, aside from the treacherous and slippery roads, we had to contend with live wires on the ground, and miserable cold temperatures inside. God’s saving grace was that we still had our lives and the homes were still standing.

The ominous dark clouds, high winds, and driving rain or hail were always replaced by beautiful blue skies and sometimes rainbows, shining light over swaths of devastation that had obliterated people’s lives and sometimes their very existence.  And the memory and psychological desolation of those devastating times is still painful to this day.