WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE 

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 17, 2019

"So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days."

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Inaugural Address when he assumed office on March 4, 1933 at the height of The Great Depression.



In recent decades, and especially after the September 11 attacks, Americans have quietly traded an increasing number of civil liberties for increased government “counter-terrorism” programs and wars purportedly waged to “keep us safe.” Now, those same policies used to target “terrorists” are set to be used against ordinary Americans, whose electronic lives and communications are now set to be scoured for evidence of “mental illness.” If these untransparent algorithms flag an individual, that could be enough lead to court-ordered “mental health treatment” or even imprisonment regardless of whether or not a crime was committed or even planned.

Whitney Webb, Sleeping into a Nightmare, October 25, 2019, MintPress News


WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE

In my lifetime, we elected and reelected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt four times because he “led us out of The Great Depression,” which of course he didn’t; World War Two did.

American journalist David Halberstam (1934 – 2007) wrote about the “American delusion” in “The Next Century” (1993). This was published after the Berlin Wall came down. Taking little solace from this, while the Soviet Union was grappling with its disintegration, he writes in his book that “The United States, however, is a prisoner of grandeur.”

This was followed with the burst of patriotic fervor with the Gulf War, after Vietnam, then the Iraq War, and all the subsequent wars including Afghanistan, and now Syria, and always with self-worshiping optimism that this will all turn out well in the end.

It is obvious that America is in decline and its own downfall isn’t far away as it continue to fail to come to grips with its own enemy, itself.

It is now three quarters of a century since the triumph of World War Two, when America was a giant playing big brother to the rest of the world after other nations were dealing with their own devastation after two world wars.

Now, the United States has lost its immense technological advantage over other nations after the best American minds were invested first in devising weapons (the atomic and hydrogen bomb) that have now become obsolete producing waste that can never be destroyed; then turning its attention to the paranoia of using the breakthrough technology of electronics to create the George Orwell nightmare that Whitney Webb describes.


THE TANTALIZING APPEAL OF “MANAGED” CRISES

There is something in the American character that quite regrettably loves crises. This is so much in the personal/political identity of the American that we elevate people of distinction to executive leadership status in virtually every field of endeavor: from government to education, industry, medicine, mental health, and so on, who are expert "crisis managers."

We are a reactive solution driven society choosing to avoid the heavy lifting of carefully defining our problems, preferring instead to resolve pesky issues with quick fixes (e.g., throwing money at our problems) with cosmetic expedient remedies.

These solutions invariably exacerbate the situation. This operational blindness has, paradoxically, resulted in our crisis managed society with our most brilliant and capable citizens expected to rise to the occasion to unravel what cannot be undone.

Not unlike the corporate executives of cigarette manufacturing companies, in April 15, 1994, sitting side by side at a conference table before the US Congress, echoing the same sentiments: smoking is not dangerous to the smoker’s health.

Yet, each of these companies had conclusive data in their own research departments that smoking was, indeed, dangerous. Once again, profits won over people. We forget or choose to ignore the charade that has taken over responsible enterprise in these United States.

Our national leaders in nearly every discipline do not accept the new equation that the years of easy affluence and complacent regard for the future are over. Meanwhile, Americans are still in love with the feeling of being on top of the world even though they no longer are.

“The result,” Halberstam tells us, “is a society oddly oblivious to its new realities, a people and a nation living above their heads, and politicians who dare not tell the truth to the population.” 

This is a perfect climate for journalists to use scare tactics to gain an audience, as clearly Whitney Webb has managed with his piece on the World Wide Web mania, and electronic backstories, situations that have been going on long before the Attorney General of the United States made it his policy.

We are literally spies with our electronic contraptions used against friends and enemies alike, with our own backstory methodologies. In a word, we can be pathetic.

Now, as author Whitney Webb suggests, we are “sleeping into a nightmare” as U.S. Attorney General William Barr desires to establish an electronic “back door” to discourage and control the aims of terrorists and criminals, all to nullify our fears of the reality we have created: first, with the nuclear bomb and now with the wizardry of ubiquitous electronics.

Meanwhile, America has squandered its wealth becoming the greatest debtor on the planet. But it chooses to blame its competitors rather than tax itself and spend more wisely. It has entered this new century with a large portion of the American population impoverished and uneducated.

As is the American inclination, money has been thrown at poverty and education hoping some of it will stick and do the job, which is another indication of the great delusion, as the United States spends more money per student than any other nation, and yet the problem persists. There have never been more homeless and impoverished people in this nation before, which is now in the millions, while the per capita income of individual Americans in general is on the rise.

Meanwhile, our leaders engage in internecine warfare in the workplace, in education, in industry, in medicine, in the military, and in government, seemingly languishing in an aristocratic manse of superiority and exclusivity that is now delusional.

The world is now only functional for grownups, and the United States has never made that cut. It is a reactionary nation that responds to its fears in the form of pervasive anxiety (to wit, "The United States of Anxiety”), and has been willing, as far back as the “New Deal” of FDR to sacrifice identity, individualism and purpose for the benefits promised by progressive socialists.

Now, everyone is being told that they have the right to a college education at the government’s expense; the right to a well-paying job whatever their qualifications; the right to happiness without effort necessarily in its pursuit; and the right to be optimistic with no pause to embrace reality along the way.

This is a far different world than when I was a schoolboy, when I only had to compete with my classmates and neighbors for a good education, a good job and a relatively good life. Now, kids are competing with Germans who go to school six days a week, Fins who pay teachers the same as its doctors and lawyers, while the best and the brightest from Osaka, Seoul, Djakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, Wroclaw, Budapest and elsewhere come to America’s excellent universities to leave American graduate students in the dust.

What are America’s movers and shakers doing? They point to the Gross Domestic Product and  National Job’s Report and declare everything is going fine.

Now, the United States is no longer in the driver seat, although the nation lingers in the belief of America’s exceptionalism. Where the nation once basked in the eminence of its nuclear prowess, and world dominance, it now retreats into the hubris of its crafty electronics and wasteful abundance, failing to realize such conceits epitomize its own mental illness which includes depression, mass hysteria and delusion, states of mind of its own creation.