The Peripatetic Philosopher observes:

Consequences of 65 Years of Self-Indulgence:

A Spoiled Brat Society

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR.

© November 12, 2016

Without the poorly educated but dedicated Americans that came out of the hinterland from the farms and factories, from the small towns and villages and volunteered to fight the Germans and Japanese in World War Two, America, indeed, the Western World would not have survived. 

I had a cousin who dropped out of high school and joined the US Navy in 1939 at the age of 17, and found himself a machinist on a repair ship tied to the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor Bay when the Empire of Japan naval and air forces attacked the American naval base there on the morning of December 7, 1941.  



My cousin survived with a broken back and was never able to pursue his duties again.  But his younger brother, a senior in high school, dropped out of school and joined the US Navy and became the captain of an LST (Landing Ship, Tank) bringing fighting men to the beaches of North Africa, participating in the D-Day Invasion of Europe, as well as the invasion of Italy and Sicily, and surviving, proud of his service but ever modest of his accomplishments.  


He read everything I wrote from articles in trade journals to published books, regretting that he had never had much of an education.  I collected his letters written when he was fighting in Europe in WWII, and published them in a book for his family shortly before he died.

Another cousin was a US Navy Commander and skipper of a mine sweeper in the North Atlantic looking for German submarines during WWII.  His sister was a WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service).  


They were part of nearly a million service men and women who sacrificed everything so that we could be safe, secure and free.

THE 1950s WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED

World War Two ended in 1945, and with it the nostalgia of the Great Depression that produced this Greatest Generation, who had the belief in honest work, sacrifice and dedication to something bigger than themselves.  


This generation also accepted philosophically disappointment, the unpredictable, failure, discrimination, inability to keep up with the prevailing norm, and cultural and religious biases, wasting little mind to what they could not change preferring to deal with what they could and get on with their lives.  


They believed in being the molders of their own destiny engaging in the Promethean struggle to achieve their own social freedom wresting from nature the means to serve their own goals and not looking for someone else to do that for them.

They believed in what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called “negative freedom,” that is, not looking for the government to protect and ensure their safety, security and freedom but to assume that responsibility themselves.  


We have drifted to what Berlin calls “positive freedom,” or entitlement where the government is our God, our protector, our conscience and our benefactor, and we are the obliging and obeying servants to that God and that government.


Sixty five years after Pearl Harbor nearly as many Americans survive on the dole or entitlements provided by the government as those working for a living in the US economy in 2016.

This all happened after 1945 when social engineers, sociologists and psychologists got into the act interpreting Sigmund Freud’s dictums on anxiety, trauma, and psychosexual hysteria treating these psychosomatic symptoms as communicable diseases as if as contagious as chicken pox. 

Educators got into the act and decided that no child should have a sense of failure; that every child should see him or herself as a winner.  Therefore, in classroom work or recreational activities everyone got achievement awards so no one felt left out.  


Education became a farce and a dumbing down process that commenced with social promotion from one grade to the next however unqualified the student was to do the work at the next level.  From the 1950s on, millions of students graduated from high school who could not diagram a sentence, read at the sixth grade level, do their multiplication tables, or read a map.  


From elementary school to middle school to high school to university psychological pabulum was fed to all students indiscriminately to protect their delicate psyches.

Then in 1958, the USSR or Soviet Union launched Sputnik, and suddenly the United States found itself behind – or thought it was – in science and mathematics with a radical reformation in the teaching of science and mathematics in the American classroom. 

This knee jerk response to outside activities would become an American syndrome in virtually every walk of life, as reaction rather than anticipation would become the game Americans played from the most sublime of activities such as the arts -- music, literature and culture -- to the most ridiculous in national politics in the Office of the President of the United States. 

The United States Congress as well as industry and commerce would follow the refrain, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” resulting in missing the changes, unable to face them, leaving the future up for grabs until the world exploded into crisis after crisis with rhetoric no longer sufficing for reality, as survival was now in play. 

We bemoan the loss of good industrial jobs in the rust built in such states as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere as if this all occurred in a vacuum.  It did not.  It was created by ineptitude and passivity.

In the 1950s, the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters Union, with many other unions following, decided to go for “positive freedom” putting their destiny in the hands of union bosses and obliging employers giving up their negative freedom, which was control of their jobs and the conduct of their work.  For this, workers became renters rather than owners of what they did. 

These workers did this without protest because their union leadership got them more and more money, and more and more entitlements until a typical UAW family in Detroit, Michigan might have a mother and father, brother and sister all working for General Motors, Ford or Chrysler with high school educations or less, while being better off than someone who had spent eight to ten years at university becoming a Doctor of Medicine.  



How do I know this?  In the 1950s, I visited my uncle every summer who was Head of the Department of Commerce and Economics at the University of Detroit, and I played summer baseball with kids of such families who had the best homes in the suburbs as well as the best equipment to play sports.

THE 1960s CAME AND EVERYTHING CHANGED AGAIN,

OR DID IT?

The Western World was devastated by the destruction of WWII, as well as much of the Far East.  The Soviet Union put up the Berlin Wall separating Western from Eastern Germany and the Cold War between Russia and the United States and Western Europe was underway. 

Senator Joseph McCarthy in the late 1950s had become something of a celebrity with the House Un American Activities Committee (HUAC) playing on the massive paranoia of Americans who believed “Reds” (Russian Communists) were everywhere.  



Meanwhile, Soviet Russia constructed an “Iron Curtain” between itself and the West with a promise that the Soviet Union would last one hundred years, which was modest to that of the Nazi’s claim of existing for one thousand years.  Germany’s Nazism last twelve years (1933-1945); the Soviet Union lasted seventy two years (1917-1989). 

World War Two was meant to be a "War of Liberation," but the West interpreted this to mean the world was prime for one ideology and one culture, and that was Western democracy and Western science.  Events have proven that was in error.

The 1960s gravitated to an essentially secular society with Christianity’s Catholicism and Protestantism taking a backseat to science and mathematics.  The mantra reverberated across the country that "everyone must be a college graduate.”  It was only a whisper in the 1960s, but would be repeated for the next fifty years to become the hermeneutics of an indisputable dogma of a civil religion.  



We tend to forget that mathematics is something that man has invented and not the forces of nature to which mathematics are dedicated to explaining.  It has been a challenge of man from the beginning to recognize the difference between self-understanding and deployment and accurate observation of the external world, as well as the world of others than himself. 

If anyone was paying attention, and clearly those in positions of authority and power weren’t, the 1960s saw the rise of Japan as an emerging economic force and serious competitor to the United States.


This groundswell of opposition continued to thrive in the 1970s and 1980s reaching a sustainable momentum throughout Europe and Pacific Rim countries. While this was happening, the United States would see its exports of finished products be reduced from a high of nearly 60 percent a quarter century after WWII to what they are today around 30 percent.



In 1980, NBC television launched an hour long program with the challenge: "Japan Can, Why Can't We?"  The Japanese surge was reduced to one word, "quality," and since Americans love simplicity, everything became a mad dash for quality in a tragic comedic effort to emulate Japan.  Little notice was taken of the fact that Japan was a group think or collective society and the United States was individualistic.  

Valiant as the effort, the trade deficit continued to escalate.  Good paying jobs continued to disappear with a severe erosion in the ranks of union workers in the United States along with the demise of American manufacturing.  



The United States has always prided itself in its innovative capacity to invent something new, and to produce new products swiftly and economically.  What the US didn't anticipate was that Europe, Japan and Pacific Rim countries could take this new technology and produce products equally as good if not better and more cheaply than the United States. 

In my work from the 1960s to the 1980s across Europe, I witnessed the inappropriateness of gas guzzling coffin sized American vehicles unable to negotiate narrow European streets.  The US automotive industry stubbornly continued to produce these machines, while Japan, South Korean and Taiwan took control of the American market at home and abroad nearly driving the "Big Three" automakers into receivership.  This has been repeated in many other US industries. 

As I have written in many of my tomes, the United States has gone from dependable, independent and self-actualizing workers up to and through WWII to workers suspended in terminal adolescence and arrested development, dependent on management and/or counter dependent on the organization that employs them for their total well being.  


They have become renters on the job rather than owners of what they do.

A blatant illustration of this dependence was apparent when US Steel and the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) decided in the 1960s to motivate workers and lift them out of their lethargy by giving veteran workers a 13-week furlough every five years to do as they liked while continuing to receive full wages and entitlements.  



Instead of taking advantage of this opportunity and going back to school to improve their skills, or to take an extended vacation, they did only what they knew.  They got a second job.  When the furlough period was over, many attempted to keep both jobs going as they had adjusted their standard of living to the new income.  Far from returning to work happy and appreciative as workers, they came back angry finding it impossible to be effective in performing the two jobs at once.

This illustrates how quickly counter dependence can develop from independence with responsible maturity giving way to immature adolescence in work as in life.  



In only a single generation after WWII (1945-1970), the American workforce went from independence to this dependent mode.  Moreover, American workers never expected the windfall to end, so they DID NOT SAVE FOR A RAINY DAY!

WAS THE PRESIDENT REAGAN YEARS A REALITY OR A MIRAGE?

Politicians today talk about the “boom years” of President Ronald Reagan, years when the Berlin Wall was about to come down, and the Soviet Union was about to dissolve; years when US Defense spending went through the roof; and years when the cauldron of the Middle East was festering to the point of explosion, leading to the First and Second Iraq War; and years when the US Congress and the American business community were unceremoniously and unwittingly seeding the discord that would lead to the rise of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Twin Tower terrorist attack with the subsequent emergence of ISSI and the present stalemate in Syria. 


This passivity was born and nurtured by those in leadership positions since WWII.

President Barak Obama's presidency reflects his generation and its passivity, cautionary to the nth degree in his approach to the problem solving with an irrevocable belief in the nobility of man to prevail in the end.  



If President Obama ever read “The Prince” by Machiavelli, it is doubtful that any of it resonated as man is equally ignoble as noble when it comes to power.  As Lord Acton has said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” 

Politicians reminded American voters in the 2016 Presidential Election that the United States National Debt had soared from $10 trillion to $20 trillion during Obama's eight year administration, yet presidents as far back as John F. Kennedy in 1961 through Democratic and Republican Administrations have seen entitlements soar without abatement as politicians on the right as well as the left have been more interested in reelection than governance as the appeal has been to the lowest common denominator of the American people. 

Pirating from the words of the Lebanese American poet Kahlil Gibran in an address to the people of Lebanon, President Kennedy borrowed his words that have been repeated ad nauseam without registering their import: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

THE SPOILED BRATS COME OUT OF THE WOODWORK

Otto Preminger, the famous Hollywood film director, once said, “Hollywood actors have the maturity of children and the intelligence of morons.  The best they can do is memorize lines written by someone else.”  


Yet, in the wake of the 2016 Presidential Election, this celebrity culture is a force which has evolved since the 1950s.  We see this in war movies made by such Teflon movie stars as John Wayne who made a career starring in movies as a war hero while avoiding military service in WWII. 

Teflon man became the prototype of American individualism as envisioned by such writers as Garry Wills in his “John Wayne’s America.”  


This America has segued to the politics of celebrity, a culture that is now 65 years old and still soaring.  Many of these Teflon characters have threatened to go to Canada now that President-elect Donald James Trump has won the presidency.  I await their departure, but I am not holding my breath to see that it happens.

The election of Trump indicates the epitome of the “Spoiled Brat Society” that America has become.  There are forty million more Americans in the United States now than when Barak Obama was first elected, yet 20 million less Americans went to the polls on November 8, 2016 than went to the polls four years earlier when President Obama won reelection to a second term.  Moreover, one million less African Americans went to the polls in 2016 than went to the polls in 2012. 

Many Americans of the eligible age to vote have never voted.  I have a son in that category.  While students riot at UCLA; Portland, Oregon; Chicago, Illinois; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York City, and elsewhere, I doubt if 20 percent of the rioters actually have voted.  Spoiled brats want their cake and eat it, too, but they don’t want the responsibility of earning the means to enjoy that cake. 

We have had waves of Black Power, Black dissidents, and now Black Lives Matters, all of which have legitimacy as there are many justifications for anger and outrage against the establishment for the practices of metropolitan governments and the behavior of police and the Criminal Justice System.  But destroying small business establishments and destroying public property is the behavior of out-of-control spoiled brats and not the behavior of mature responsible citizens.

When you have been on this planet for only 18 to 22 or 24 years, what do you know about life?  What do you know about police?  Novelist and former Los Angeles police sergeant Joseph Wambaugh once said, “A community gets the police it deserves.”  

I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on that fact from consultancy of police and community organizations along the Atlantic east coast.  I found it emphatically true: corrupt community leadership spawns unethical police departments; communities of integrity create effective and engaged police departments.   

There is no more important profession than that of the police, who put their lives on the line every day.  When they are successful they receive not a word, but when they foul up they earn headlines in the media and are painted with a broad brush as racists and bigots and not caring.  Walk one day in their shoes and then tell me it is not one of the most difficult jobs in society. 

President-elect Trump was elected fairly and legitimately winning the Electoral College vote while Hillary Clinton won the popular vote beating Trump by 400,000 votes in an election that included 120.5 million Americans.  Trump earned a majority of the Electorate College vote of 290 (he needed 270) to Clinton’s 228.  


That is the system.  If you don’t like the system, vote and elect people to the system who can change it to more closely reflect your views.

The call is for responsible Americans, not spoiled brats.  Responsible individuals expect to pay for their college education, and not have it provided by the government; they expect to compete in the workplace for jobs and careers and not have them guaranteed by the government; and they have the good sense to save 5 to 10 percent of what they earn for the future, and not expect the government to take care of them from cradle to grave.

The behavior we see across the country at the moment in the wake of Donald James Trump's winning the election is the behavior of indentured slaves to their appetites; people who don’t know how to take disappointment, failure or the embarrassment of their contretemps in stride.  

Several universities have postponed semester examinations because the anxieties of students are such that it is not possible for them to cope with the surprise of Donald James Trump’s winning of the presidency.  These young people are supposed to be the wave of the future.  If they don’t develop a backbone, they will represent its demise.

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