This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why does it seem that there is no neutral ground for political parties in America? You seem either extreme right or extreme left. Indeed, agreeing that the opposite party have a point seems to brand you as a traitor? Why is there this perception?”
The perceptions you describe result from a myopic lens in which the nation is ruled by one extreme.
There is no extreme left in the U.S.
No parties or groups are demanding to seize ownership of the means of production.
You argue that there is an extreme left because it helps to lessen the seriousness of the challenges facing your nation today. It’s a perception that helps to justify its Nazification as a reaction to a perceived enemy rather than a decline and degradation of its long-held moral values.
To believe an extreme left exists is to deny the harsh reality of natural cruelty your nation has been cultivating for decades.
Gordon Gecko was a warning against this cruelty, but as a nation, you embraced it, and you embody it by permitting the ongoing mass murderers of children in schools, by denying healthcare as a human right, by permitting whole towns to poison their people through contaminated water, and by justifying a profit motivation.
Your nation has been welcoming this transition into a culture of sociopathic dehumanization for decades, and you have cheered it on. You cheered when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers’ union. You cheered when he shut down mental health facilities and threw the vulnerable out onto the streets. You supported his hatred of gay people and allowed countless murders of them by denying them life-saving medical treatment.
You justify the fabricated existence of a far-left because you struggle to avoid facing the ugly truth of the nation you have become by choice.
There is no neutral ground because all that remains is a toxic evil threatening global stability. Those who struggle to muster the courage of their ancestors are stunned to find themselves engaged in a surreal battle against monsters who should know better than to deem themselves modern-day kings among the educated and democratized masses.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Are big companies likely to experience more fraudulent and mismanagement issues than small companies?”
This question touches on the core of the privatization argument, where people claim government inefficiency justifies a privatized alternative to a government service.
The larger the organization, the more people must be coordinated, and the more complex and inefficient it will naturally be. Whether it is a government operation or a privatized one.
Opportunities for corruption increase at scale per the degree of complexity of operation, which can hide corruption and the degree of reward available for effort expended.
The more opportunity there is for flying under the radar, the more attractive an environment becomes to the corrupt. The greater the reward, the more the corrupt will risk detection.
The larger the organization, the more vulnerable it becomes to corruption because the rewards are more significant, the chance of detection is reduced, and the effort expended is minimized.
For example, in a generic scenario, because it happens pretty often, it is a common tactic of fraudulent billing to a large company for non-rendered services by a non-existent company.
The larger the organization, the more significant the number of invoices it must handle. All are being funneled through a finance department with a large contingent of staff who cannot know the specific details of each bill passing through their office. They superficially review each invoice to determine veracity and establish a threshold at which the review process intensifies.
For example, if their threshold is $1000.00, the fraud can create a fictional company, send monthly bills under that threshold, and collect a monthly sum that can go undetected for extended periods. They will often be discovered when someone investigates the bill in detail, which may or may not result in charges, depending on how well one has covered their tracks.
In an accounts payment office handling dozens of bills per day, it can be easy to overlook something like copier maintenance invoices.
Setting all of that up requires inside knowledge of a specific operation, so I am not sharing this as an endorsement, only as a generic description of the type of fraud that can occur and does so in large organizations that would not happen in a small one.
The larger the organization, the greater the financial reward, which exposes larger organizations to ladder-climbing strategists more than smaller organizations, attracting people more interested in the quality of work, flexibility of challenges, broader scope of responsibilities, and deeper interpersonal relationships.
Larger organizations can become quite politically toxic, but that doesn’t mean smaller organizations don’t fall prey to the same levels of incompetence.
All of these are basic human behaviours we see throughout society, and ironically, they’re not much different than those we witnessed during our high school years. Sometimes, they are just as juvenile in their manifestations. More often than not, however, in large organizations, those underlying attitudes and behaviours one experiences within high school cliques are more subtle and sophisticated because they are more often among people with higher levels of education.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What are things that Americans should know about Canada, so that they better understand why Canada is so resolutely against being annexed to the USA?”
This Canadian’s view is that any American who needs an explanation to understand how obnoxiously offensive their confusion is over this matter is precisely the delusional arrogance that has made America the dysfunctional dystopia that it is today.
It’s like the bullying asshole who steals candy from a baby, being incapable of understanding how that’s precisely what qualifies them as a bullying asshole.
We see precisely this behaviour being played out when Musk claims social security is a Ponzi scheme, but can’t understand why the people who depend on it to stay alive are so angry with him for taking it away.
Elon Musk embodies precisely what is wrong with America today.
He deliberately provokes the entire world with a Nazi salute and, when criticized for it, doubles down with childish stupidity to mock people over it and then starts complaining about being hated for being a Nazi while scratching his head over what he thinks is wrong with other people.
There is no self-awareness on his behalf, nor empathy or compassion demonstrated toward others, but he expects sympathy to be expressed toward him.
Elon IS America with this behaviour and attitude.
America made 9/11 happen, then stood tall and declared the 9/11 responders to be heroes whose sacrifices should never be forgotten but then tossed them out like yesterday’s garbage to suffer.
Americans routinely declare how much they value those who shed blood on behalf of defending the nation and its values but then show them what those values actually are by treating their veterans like yesterday’s dogshit.
Then you wonder why people hate you.
That’s the core of what is wrong with America.
You people are sick, and you need help.
You must admit, like every AA member does, that you can’t go it alone. You need to open up to a world that is more than willing to help you get better.
You have to stop stealing their stuff and bullying your way through their lives while treating people like dogshit.
You can’t spread democracy by the point of a gun. You can only show people an example of how it makes your lives better. Right now, however, you’re showing the world how easily corrupted your democracy can become when you don’t restrain the individuals within your nation who have too much power.
You have forgotten how the greatness of a nation is found within how it treats its most vulnerable.
Admit that you need help.
That’s the first step every addict must take to get on the road to their recovery.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Has China become more democratic as its economy grew in the 1st quarter of the 21st century?”
China has become more accommodating of the needs of the people while maintaining a paternalistic attitude toward the masses — which has been effective, to a degree, in maintaining order while educating and empowering the people as they work toward common goals benefiting their society.
As a system of governance, Xi has been moving toward increased consolidation of presidential power while questions about how much control he has over the levers of power have arisen. In essence, however, China remains a single-party system that they sometimes call a “People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” and in other cases a “Socialist Consultative Democracy.”
The magical ingredient of their community-based social evolution has been lost within the hyper-independence cultivated in the West. China has avoided the manifestation of extreme sociopathic disregard for one’s fellow citizens from a philosophical perspective. However, they have profited from the paternalistic exploitation of workers to enrich the community and the rich in more of a partnership than as disposable commodities in the West.
In contrast to the planned societies in China, today’s “Western-based” corporatocracy has resulted in a legalized re-institution of a medieval social structure built upon publicly denied but implied class divisions as the plutocrat class feigns partnerships with the working class through empty slogans like “essential workers.” Ironically, China’s single-party rule of the people has been transforming from an iron-handed autocracy into a kindly old grandfather who watches and guides the product of their efforts to discipline their offspring and bear fruit.
China was rightly criticized for its suicide nets, and I’m not sure how prevalent those are these days, nor how gruelling their factory work remains, but the sacrifices of those who gave their lives in service to a horrid existence appear to be making way toward the emergence of superior societies built around advanced technological progress. Planned cities like Zhenzhen and Chengdu have become global technology hubs, making breakthroughs that rival American developmental efforts.
At this rate, American dominance in technological breakthroughs will become a memory within the next few decades.
As more technologically sophisticated societies emerge, the less reliant the public will be on autocratic structures to maintain order because they will become capable of the self-regulation that accompanies higher technological and psychological development levels.
Knowledge work has been woefully misunderstood by Western thinking. Capitalists like Musk, who consider highly educated people disposable assets rather than allies, rely on controlling talent they treat in abusively disposable ways instead of leveraging them as partners who could help him overcome his limitations. As we see with Chinese corporate structures, the way of the future is a more nurturing management style in their operations, favouring mentorship and career development support, than Western corporate autocracies favouring cultures with toxic cutthroat competition.
For the last few decades, workers in Western high-tech environments have been far more competent than leadership incapable of comprehending, much less appreciating how much more skilled their employees are than they are in their knowledge domains. Companies in the West hire down to the level of incompetence of the management rather than hire up to empower their organizations with capabilities that can empower their growth. They are still stuck in the dark ages of employment, which is why most people still don’t understand how disastrous DOGE’s cuts will be for the functional needs of the nation.
Far too many believe the laid-off labourers can be replaced like obedient cogs to continue functioning as before. They fail to realize they’re impacting human lives and professionals who once cared about their roles and their impact on their operations. They fail to recognize the cost of replacing professionals is not as simple as identifying another body to fill a space. Workers are now being incentivized to disengage and stop caring because they’ve been consistently confronted with proof that their contributions bear no value to any psychopath with power.
If the public was ever upset when dealing with dispassionate bureaucrats who did the least they could get away with in their jobs, welcome to “I don’t give a shit version 2.”
The deterioration of the human spirit currently prevalent within the Western sensibility merely gives China the impetus to continue empowering its people because global leadership is just around the corner for them.
With the advent of “Dark Factories” — fully automated factories, the Chinese people are ahead of Western Industries and their government is likely better equipped psychologically to transition their support systems for the people than what we’re seeing now in the reckless Chainsaw antics of cutting necessary systems indulged in by American plutocrats.
How this translates into a better-equipped governance system to represent the people makes American-style pseudo-democracies appear less capable of being the governments of the people and for the people than the Chinese government of a paternalistic entity ruling the people. It’s no wonder people had become more amenable to a fascist style of government before Trump’s bull-in-a-chinashop rampage began.
Fortunately, the world has better models for democracy in the Nordic styles of social democracies, which borrow concepts from both governance styles to create an effective balance between necessary support infrastructures and free market capitalist principles with realistic restraints on power.
In short, China hasn’t “become more democratic,” but it has become more efficient at meeting the needs of the people. Their system will continue to evolve as their industrial sector evolves and drives social change as it has since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you think by the time Trump’s second term is over, he will have successfully reduced identity politics to include only “Trump supporter” and “anti-American”?”
That’s exactly what his strategy has been to date. It is precisely that divisive strategy employed by conservatives everywhere he has leveraged into his position of power. This has been the consistent strategy of conservatives who claim the entire world is ugly, evil, and broken beyond repair while claiming they’re the only ones capable of fixing the messes they have made.
It’s a tiresome strategy that has worked wonders for them as they’ve instituted privatization programs throughout every democratic nation. They intentionally sabotage functioning institutes by defunding them to create problems that otherwise would not exist and then claim those institutes would be better served by the private sector.
People have been lapping this lie up since Ronald Reagan betrayed democracy by claiming the government was the problem. By demonizing the government, he created an entity the public would turn against as an enemy and scapegoat for all their problems. He successfully detached the notion of a government of the people, for the people, and by the people and converted it into an imaginary boogeyman that the people would willingly fight against rather than rise to their responsibility to change it in ways that more effectively represent their needs.
Disparagements like “nanny state” have often been used to characterize government as a paternalistic entity while attaching the opposing sentiments of historically destructive autocracies living within the cultural imaginations of people who have always fought for their right to self-determination. At the same time, the ownership class has endlessly justified their need for the government nipple to support the people by themselves as a proxy of wealth custodians with a paternalistic responsibility to care for the people by creating jobs for them.
In the minds of the people, blurring the distinction between a democracy and autocracy made it easy to turn the people against the only entity capable of protecting the integrity of a government of the people against the people. By turning the people against their only protection, he successfully made every citizen in every democracy around the world vulnerable to the only enemies of humanity that humanity has ever had — parasites who steal our value and hoard it in service to their egos.
DonOld Trump’s rhetoric, along with every CONservative political leader, makes a point of feigning solidarity with the working class while besmirching them in private. A recording of this dynamic was Romney’s downfall as he publicly pretended to have a working-class sensibility in the most awkward ways, making him give off uncanny valley vibes that made it difficult for people to buy his ruse.
George Bush Jr., however, was elected based on people’s perceptions that they could enjoy a casual conversation with him over a beer. Neither of these people understood or cared about the lives of everyday citizens. We have all been little more than disposable pawns in their games of power all along. The ownership class breeds this dehumanizing class distinction within every generation while disparaging anyone who does not share their misanthropic regard for humanity.
Trump hasn’t done anything different or unique from that playbook. He has merely capitalized on the inculcated belief that billionaires are job creators. Trump has leveraged the lie that his wealth is a product of pure effort and individual initiative. Trump has benefitted from the lie that anyone could have his wealth if they worked hard enough and were smart enough about how they spent their money.
He has taken the strategy of bamboozling the public over decades to its logical conclusion. He has benefitted from the illusion that an avocado toast diet has been responsible for irresponsible people suffering in poverty. It has been a strategy of mollifying the working class to such a degree that many have shown an eager willingness to wage war against their fellow citizens to defend the ownership class.
The ownership class has been so successful in cultivating the image of a blurred distinction between classes and making themselves appear as one of the little people that they’ve begun dropping any pretense of their disguise being a lie. They made themselves abundantly clear with the threat issued by the president of the Heritage Foundation when he declared Project 2025 would be a restructuring of the nation that would be bloodless only if the left capitulated.
The arrogance of the tech bros perpetuates a horror show of arrogance over the little people through a disgusting betrayal they have coined as a “dark enlightenment,” which hearkens back to biblical references and the devil’s temptations.
The most consistent characteristic of hubris, however, is its finite and fleeting moment of ascendancy because, like Icarus, the most arrogant humans who deign to fly too close to the sun fail to understand how their wax wings inevitably melt under the light of truth.
They will always fall to their doom.
This is the broad lesson of the history of social evolution.
Dynasties and monarchies are anachronisms because people invariably tire of the lies, the abuses, and of being played as fools while watching their dreams shattered one by one and the ownership class flying to the stars in their mechanical penises.
It is an embarrassment that Bezos remained so utterly oblivious to the profundity of that flight that he had to drag along a human symbol capable of interpreting an experience he could not appreciate. He struggled to acknowledge that that was only possible for him by the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of people who contributed to his hoard.
The ownership class has been successfully whispering in the ears of their hordes of Stockholm Syndrome victims that their power is an inevitability, that it belongs to them by a divine right of kings as old as humanity. They ignore how their power rests on the shoulders of those who support them, and they do not have infinite patience for egotistical abuses.
Our stories are written by those who have historically stood against their power and have consistently transformed human society into something more approximating the justice history inexorably bends toward.
Trump will only have succeeded in pushing the stale ruse past its due date and causing it to smell so much like rancid fish that even the MAGAt army supporting him today will turn on him like rabid animals when they can no longer believe his lies.
By the end of his term, many of his MAGAt followers will have hit rock bottom. They will be ripe for vengeance against him and all the arrogant members of the ownership class who have been steadily waging a war against the little people for centuries. If all goes well, this will finally be the last of this primarily silent war because the little people will have learned that power should never be unlimited within anyone’s hands. Power must always be restrained. That’s the only way we can survive and meet our future.
By the end of Trump’s term, he will either be dead because his body will have finally given out, locked in prison (and primarily for his protection) or be in hiding from an enraged electorate that has finally figured out the truth about his betrayal against them and the nation he fraudulently claimed to be a patriot of.
The hordes of the people who outnumber the ownership class by orders of magnitude will either destroy the edifices of power while seeking retribution for their betrayal, or they will be satiated by an awakening among the ownership class that they either share their power or lose it altogether.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What happens if all the wealth in the world got distributed evenly to every human being for 1 day? Would we return back to capitalism?”
People would do far better thinking about the system that creates income disparity rather than imagining pipe dreams that would accomplish nothing.
Firstly, redistributing all the wealth in the world equally would not magically create a world of millionaires. For example, if Elon Musk were to redistribute approximately 400 billion to America’s 350 million, they would end up with only $1140.00.
The entire world’s wealth is approximately $454 trillion; if you divide that by 8 billion people, each person ends up with $56,750.00. You can’t buy a house for that in most developed countries. It’s nowhere near enough to make fundamental changes in a person’s life.
The problem may seem that we have money hoarded by too few people — such that eight people own half of the world, but that’s a symptom, not the cause of the problem. The problem is caused by how money is distributed throughout our capitalist systems.
The problem is caused by centibillionaires and corporate executives earning thousands of times more per hour than the average employee.
When that ratio was only 23 times more than employees per hour (as it was in the 1970s), more people had disposable income. When most of a population has a lot of disposable income, they buy many more goods and take advantage of many more services, which creates many more jobs and opportunities for self-employed people to sustain themselves. In short, the velocity of money in an economy is much higher — which means cash changes hands much faster than it does today when it’s mostly tied up in significant investments and essentially hoarded by too few people.
This is called a force multiplier in the economy and why the middle class is called the economy’s engine. Everybody wins.
You should ask instead: Why don’t we cap an upper limit on personal net worth to ensure the economy works for everyone? This strategy not only supercharges an economy like a finely tuned vehicle, it also eliminates government corruption. With a global cap of one billion in personal net worth, we could forever eliminate the threat we face by a globalist oligarchy.
We could end a centuries-long class warfare overnight with the stroke of a pen.
We could end poverty almost overnight.
If we were united in solidarity on this point alone.
It may seem impossible, but it would happen if eight billion people decided they wanted this to happen.
Try to think about that.
It would also end wars around the globe.
The war in Ukraine would end overnight.
Vladimir Pukin’, his oligarchic buddies, and all the rich techbros thinking they could reinstall a modern monarchy would be disempowered overnight.
No more familial dynasties. No more Walton family treating their employees like dirt while forcing them to get government handouts because they’re not being paid enough.
No more arrogant stupidity by people thinking they’re better than the rest of humanity that they regard like pack animals instead of human beings.
We would reduce and eliminate many social problems because money would flow freely. People would not be dying from poverty. A child would not be dying every five seconds from hunger. Homelessness would disappear. Altruism and food banks would become moot.
Fight for a global cap of one billion because that’s more than enough to live in bloated luxury.
If we need one goal for eight billion people to rally around, we should make this our goal (along with UBI).
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Will the next President be able to reverse the current destruction of the government?”
No.
The next president can mitigate the impact of the damage, reverse all the executive orders, and pull the nation out of freefall, but the destruction will be permanent.
The damage to the nation’s international reputation is permanent.
The damage to the people who Trump’s reckless behaviour has victimized is permanent. The families he destroyed in his first term have still not recovered.
The divide he has wedged open will take the rest of this century to repair.
The nation will not and cannot return to the state before Trump took office. It was already being held together by duct tape and a skilled, lifetime politician who performed feats of magic to repair the damage done by Trump’s first term.
Too few people failed to acknowledge the significance of Biden’s leadership, and that was a consequence of a nation that was far too broken on too many levels to appreciate for most.
The nation has been falling to pieces for decades, and since Ronald Reagan betrayed the middle class. This destruction became inevitable when Reagan reversed the nation’s trajectory to favour the wealthy class.
This damage isn’t based on politics but on class.
The wealthy class have brought this tragedy to the world.
The numbers don’t lie.
The moment the people bought into the lie that the wealthy class are gods among the population and from whom we are blessed with their favour in economic growth and prosperity is when we gave up on ourselves and started turning against each other.
No president can repair this damage alone… not even if he were the second coming that far too many people pin their hopes and dreams on.
We must do the repair work, and we have to begin by repairing ourselves first.
We must focus first on the welfare of the people because, without the people’s health and welfare, there is no nation, economy, or prosperity. No wealthy class of billionaires can exist without the economy’s engine of 350 million consumers pumping value through a system designed to benefit everyone. They are more dependent upon a healthy middle class than the people who are dependent upon them to finance their pet projects.
We must weed out the greed of humanity if we are to have any hope of stability.
Reversing the destruction will require doing many things differently, but they’re not insurmountable problems. On the upside, more people are aware today of the threat of excess power in too few hands. More people understand today that medical bankruptcies occur only because a handful of greedy billionaires prioritize the bloated luxuries they have acquired by victimizing millions of people.
More people understand today that their economic struggles are due entirely to the economic disparity that led to a world war less than one century ago.
The economic destruction can be repaired, but it must begin by restoring economic justice.
The psychological destruction of today, however, can forever change the nation on a fundamental level — but sadly, the destruction is nowhere near complete enough to force enough people to wake up to the horror of what they have become.
There is still much pain ahead, affecting the entire world.
If Americans truly want to believe their anthem and be the land of the free and the home of the brave, the entire world is pleading with you all to step up to the plate and rid this world of the oligarchy scourge.
All of the ugliness we see on social media didn’t just magically appear because of social media. Social media is simply a means by which people can express their natural selves. People have always been the way they are on social media. The only difference is that their voices and behaviours were not broadcast to the world.
Before social media, people lived in social silos which enabled toxic people to rule their environments. Their victims had no outside support or validation for their suffering and were groomed to believe they had to accept the toxicity as normal. People have been groomed for generations to believe social reality is immutable, that change is impossible.
We can now see that the opposite is true, and social media helps bring about change.
Social media brings about social change much faster than was ever possible, and that makes social media a solution to society’s woes, not a problem.
Consider, for example, how concepts like “Woke” are used as weaponized disparagements to enable the corrupt among us to leverage hatred into legislation sending society back into the dark ages.
Fifty years ago, and before social media, similar terms like “tree hugger,” “do-gooder,” and even “liberal” were terms of disparagement in which whatever little media attention was given to them existed without pushback from a public rejecting the toxicity. “Politically incorrect” was such a term that took hold as a disparagement before social media, and it is now widely accepted as a negative characteristic in society.
The pushback it received wasn’t magnified like “woke” has been through social media. Consequently, the attempts made to weaponize “woke” like all disparagements which began with positive connotations haven’t succeeded at converting “woke” into a negative. “Woke” is now a term that backfires onto those who try to use it as a disparagement. Through pushback on social media, “woke” will reassert itself as a wholly positive connotation. In contrast, those who invoke stupidities like “woke mind virus,” and “go woke go broke” will increasingly become viewed as enablers of toxicity much like the red alert beanies in society have become.
This represents tremendous progress in the fight for human decency on how we perceive concepts and how they frame our interactions with the world.
It’s almost quaint, now, to think of “do-gooder” as a bad thing to be called; and to such a degree that if someone is to refer to someone else as a “do-gooder” today, they sound like sociopathic idiots. That conceptual lifecycle is what has happened now with the term “woke.” It’s taken a fraction of the time for the implications of the word to settle into our public consciousness within the context it originally conveyed.
Being called a “do-gooder” fifty years ago meant one would retreat in embarrassment, but now, the accusation garners confusion. The person who hurls that accusation appears like an idiot.
In contrast, “woke” became popular less than two decades ago. It appeared as a positive connotation that the toxic among us attempted to weaponize like they have with every positive connotation in society. Within a comparatively short time, people who weaponize “woke” are already being regarded as toxic idiots.
Without social media, the weaponization of “woke,” and the legitimacy of concepts like “woke mind virus” would have been accepted as valid disparagements in which those are “woke” would retreat from social discourse because they had no outside support.
Arguments and counter-arguments flitted about in geographically isolated silos and never managed to spread from community to community. The consequence was to cultivate localized and insular community values. Social media cultivates community values across the globe. Social media breaks down the silos, and the barriers of distance between human beings and empowers those who must face the bullies attempting to corrupt positive values in society.
The best weapon against bullying is social media because of this. It’s also a megaphone for bullies, but they’re outnumbered by those they victimize and they are generally stupid people.
For example, the best thing that Trump could have done was to have that media circus of bullying Zelensky. He claimed, during his ego masturbating rant, that he “let it go so long” for a purpose suiting his goals, but it backfired spectacularly.
He and Vance were viewed as the bullying thugs they are and I’m sure this will be a watershed moment for many who have blindly supported Trump. Many people, if not most of us, have been exposed to bullying and the thing about bullying, is that the victims of bullies never forget.
Social media is community development on steroids. The problem with social media, however, is that it is predominantly operated on a for-profit basis, which makes it impossible for social media to cultivate positive social values deliberately and strategically.
Community development on social media occurs organically and within a chaotic environment. The fact that we can progress on issues through this chaos is a testament to the human spirit. No matter how the toxic people among us make life difficult for the rest of us, we are pushing back and succeeding in gaining ground on establishing a baseline for decency. It may occur glacially in contrast to what would be possible if a publicly owned and operated, not-for-profit social media environment existed within and to compete against the for-profit model.
We are, however, succeeding in making “woke woke again”.
I’m sure many people would quickly gravitate to a much safer environment where they could trust that their personal information wasn’t being mined for profit.
This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “How do Canadians and Americans really feel about each other?”
This Canadian thinks of Americans in ways not too dissimilar from how I think of fellow Canadians. Most are decent human beings at heart. Many are misguided and gravely misunderstand the nature of today’s dysfunctionality in society. A few — or more than just a few, but a minority nonetheless, are toxically stupid to the point of being beyond redemption.
All but the third group are reasonable and amenable to working together to identify the best solutions which meet the broadest range of needs of the citizenry. Our cultures are similar but unique, while, as a whole, Canadians appear to have more insight and respect for the values declared by Americans as being core to their identity.
Much of the discord in America, for example, in the value of freedom, lies in the difference between Canadians being more community-oriented. Americans tend to breed an isolationist degree of individualism. The resulting perception of freedom between the two nations is that Canadians regard freedom as derived from our community, and Americans appear to interpret freedom as the ability for an individual to do whatever they please whenever they please.
If we were to track this difference through Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development, we can see a distinction in the degree of moral evolution this represents.
Caveat: Like all models, this is not a universal prescription defining all people in any culture, and so this may generally describe some fundamental cultural differences, the overlap between cultures exists in the developmental differences between individuals.
Canada has no shortage of people who fail to grow beyond the pre-conventional stage. We do have our flavour of Maple MAGAts — the toxic form of extremist conservativism plaguing the planet. It is certainly more prevalent in the U.S., but that’s entirely due to economics.
The U.S. has always had a much larger budget that has always been more attractive to society’s predators. IOW. The economic success of the U.S. has been its most fundamental weakness.
It is in the best interests of those seeking power to ensure the populace is developmentally stunted. Keeping people on the level of pre-conventional development makes them more malleable and amenable to influence from authorities. Teaching them to fear punishment keeps them in line and converts them into sycophants addicted to chasing their self-interests.
This works for most of the population, which functions as workhorses to keep the machinery of society operational. Still, the next level of conventional morality is also necessary to function as an administrative body to keep the rabble in line.
All nations leverage this developmental dynamic through intrinsic and extrinsic punishment and reward systems. Canada and the U.S. are no different in this regard because this is a dynamic cultivated by power structures.
The causes of the distinctions between nations begin at the third and uppermost level of development, in the post-conventional stage. This is where philosophies and ideologies live that define the visions guiding all citizens in their perceptions of themselves and as members of a community.
This is where the distinction between “melting pot” and “multicultural mosaic” lives and flows throughout society to form a cultural identity.
It appears ironic that a nation that values individuality is adamant about conformity, but that’s explained in the differences between these two perceptions of national identity. One cannot truly value individuality when their culture homogenizes its citizens through a melting pot. (Many) Americans consider Canada a “socialist” country, but we value individuality, and freedom, by extension, more than Americans because we embrace and celebrate diversity as core to our cultural heritage.
I am proud to have Quebec as a part of Canada precisely because their contrast has kept Canada from falling into the same self-serving traps of insular arrogance that Americans have. They’ve been regarded as pains for many westerners, but so have westerners been regarded in similarly disparaging ways by our French-speaking members of our family. However, the dynamic between divergent cultures characterizing Canada makes us strong and coherent as a nation, which values its people above those who would rule us.
Americans would do well to learn from our dynamic and begin to treat their Spanish-speaking population with the same respect. It would help you grow as a nation with something more nuanced as a culture beyond the bombast of commercial ostentatiousness and avoid being viewed as the meth lab we live above.
The next president can mitigate the impact of the damage, reverse all the executive orders, and pull the nation out of free fall, but the destruction will be permanent.
The damage to the nation’s international reputation is permanent.
The damage to the people who Trump’s reckless behaviour has victimized is permanent. The families he destroyed in his first term have still not recovered.
The divide he has wedged open will take the rest of this century to repair.
The nation will not and cannot return to the state before Trump took office. It was already being held together by duct tape and a skilled, lifetime politician who performed feats of magic to repair the damage done by Trump’s first term.
Too few people failed to acknowledge the significance of Biden’s leadership, and that was a consequence of a nation that was far too broken on too many levels to appreciate for most.
The nation has been falling to pieces for decades, and since Ronald Reagan betrayed the middle class. This destruction became inevitable when Reagan reversed the nation’s trajectory to favour the wealthy class.
This damage isn’t based on politics but on class.
The wealthy class have brought this tragedy to the world.
The numbers don’t lie.
The moment the people bought into the lie that the wealthy class are gods among the population and from whom we are blessed with their favour in economic growth and prosperity is when we gave up on ourselves and started turning against each other.
No president can repair this damage alone… not even if he were the second coming that far too many people pin their hopes and dreams on.
We must do the repair work, and we have to begin by repairing ourselves first.
We must focus first on the welfare of the people because, without the people’s health and welfare, there is no nation, economy, or prosperity. No wealthy class of billionaires can exist without the economy’s engine of 350 million consumers pumping value through a system designed to benefit everyone. They are more dependent upon a healthy middle class than the people who are dependent upon them to finance their pet projects.
We must weed out the greed of humanity if we are to have any hope of stability.
Reversing the destruction will require doing many things differently, but they’re not insurmountable problems. On the upside, more people are aware today of the threat of excess power in too few hands. More people understand today that medical bankruptcies occur only because a handful of greedy billionaires prioritize the bloated luxuries they have acquired by victimizing millions of people.
More people understand today that their economic struggles are due entirely to the economic disparity that led to a world war less than one century ago.
The economic destruction can be repaired, but it must begin by restoring economic justice.
The psychological destruction of today, however, can forever change the nation on a fundamental level — but sadly, the destruction is nowhere near complete enough to force enough people to wake up to the horror of what they have become.
There is still much pain ahead, affecting the entire world.
If Americans truly want to believe their anthem and be the land of the free and the home of the brave, the entire world is pleading with you all to step up to the plate and rid this world of the oligarchy scourge.
thotbag 