Freedom to Argue: We the People Versus They the Government

By Dick Sim

The United States and the European Union are facing a crisis. On the one hand, they each stand at a crossroads where centralized government policies have fostered a growing gap between the agenda of the political elite and many of their voters. Yet at the same time, they are also on a collision course with the Middle East and Africa. With immense and growing disparities in wealth, population, religion, and culture between the United States and Europe and their neighbors in the Middle East and Africa, how they deal with these disparities will have worldwide significancebut what worked well from 1950 to 2000 is broken.

The Freedom to Argue addresses the moral dilemma of how best to help others without destroying ones own culture in the process. It explores the coming wave of Middle Eastern and African immigration and questions the failure of the African continent and why Muslims who grow up in completely Islamic societies are unable to assimilate into Western societies that have democracy, freedom of religion, independent and transparent judiciary systems, womens rights, and free-market capitalism.

While Western civilization is not perfect, it is the best political and social system in existence. And although the West has delivered great wealth, its traditional values are in trouble. As the political and intellectual elite blindly devoted to multiculturalism ignore everyday problems of the working folks, the West now more than ever needs solutionsfewer laws, less regulation, and stronger cultural normsto overcome global threats.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781491797266

Dick Sim

Dick Sim, born and raised in Scotland, studied engineering at Glasgow (BSc) and Cambridge (PhD) Universities. He spent thirty years traveling the world overseeing global industrial operations which included serving as CEO and Chairman of two NYSE public companies. He has an intimate knowledge of global capitalism, cultures and the role that technology plays in transforming society. He splits his time between Europe and the USA and continues to be active in operating businesses.

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Copyright © 2016 Dick Sim.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-9725-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9724-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9726-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016907636

iUniverse rev. date: 06/24/2016

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Human Reality

The Beast within Us

The Antidote to the Beast: Parenting

Values

Tribalism

Instinctive Stereotyping

The Power of One

Chapter 2: Our Cup Overflows

The Wealth Status

The Golden Goose: Democracy and Free Market Capitalism

The US Success Formula

Free Market Capitalism Regional Scorecard

Consequence of Wealth: Population Declines

Technology, a Necessary Ingredient in Wealth Creation

Chapter 3: The 1 Percent

Venezuela’s Tragedy

Hauser’s Law

Extreme Wealth—Good or Bad?

Chapter 4: The Mysteries of Islam

The Lifeboat Dilemma

Population Projections

Global Religions

Is Islam A Cult?

Chapter 5: The Curse of Oil

Europe Leaves; Israel Is Founded

The Theocracies

More-Moderate Muslim Nations

The Future

Cultural Conflicts

Chapter 6: We the People versus They the Government

How We Got Here: Europe

How We Got Here: The United States

Experimental, Incremental Change versus Visionary Hoped-for Change

Very Smart People and Their Speculative Ideas

Why Do Smart People Consistently Get It Wrong?

The Drivers of Opposition Today

Material Wealth versus Values

The Organized Opposition

Chapter 7: Immigration and Cultural Cohesiveness

Legal Immigration

Illegal Immigration

Asylum

The Geographical and Cultural Realities

Immigrant Assimilation

The US Melting Pot Illusion

German Muslim Assimilation Experience

Jewish Assimilation Experience in the United States

Projected Muslim Assimilation

Chapter 8: Ideas and Thoughts for Possible Solutions

Remedy for Problem 1

Remedy for Problem 2

A Personal Perspective on the Power of One

Family to Family

End Notes

Preface

The world is a shrinking space because of population growth, the ease of modern travel and enhanced global communication. As the world shrinks, the conflicts in belief systems are becoming more evident. Most of these problems exist at the interface of Islam with other cultures. Added to that are the growing wealth gaps and population disparities between continents. It causes problems for Judeo-Christian cultures to coexist with Islamic peoples and to be direct neighbors to an overwhelming number of very poor people. This book addresses the moral dilemma of how best to help others without destroying one’s own culture in the process. These challenges extend well into the future.

There are other governance issues in Europe and the United States. Central governments are inefficient and unresponsive to local needs. Politicians are trying to legislate solutions for societal problems that are best addressed by cultural norms established by the folks. In short, we need fewer laws, less regulation, and stronger cultural norms. There is a balance point that must be adjusted between an individual’s and a family’s freedom and the laws and institutions protecting society.

The scope of the book is very broad and ambitious. I hope that the reader takes away an understanding of these immense global challenges and a desire to be part of the solution.

Introduction

There are two big challenges that the United States and Europe are facing now and will face over the next forty years. They are as follows:

1. There are tens of millions of economic refugees who will come from Africa and the Middle East to Europe or the USA either legally or illegally. This is an especially difficult challenge because many of them are from conservative Muslim countries.

2. For fifty years, voters in Europe and the United States have willingly supported the centralization of power in Brussels and Washington, DC. Now many of the voters are unhappy with such rule. In Europe new political parties have been formed and are now ascending to positions of power to resist the policies from the center that are seen as dictatorial and threatening to their local culture. There is no longer consensus on many European Union policies. In the United States the popularity of Trump is driven by the same phenomenon, disgust with the ruling class.

These two challenges are intimately connected. The Muslim immigration is driven by the increasing wealth and population gap between the United States and Europe as compared to Africa and the Middle East. Over the next forty years, Africa and the Middle East will not improve much economically but will grow in population. The United States and Europe are the opposite. They will continue to become much richer while their native populations decline.

The result of these population and wealth disparities is the refugee crisis you see in Europe today. Although this current crisis is made worse by the war in Syria, this invasion is a continuation of a trend that has existed for fifty years and that will remain in place for at least the next fifty years. The politicians and media in Europe and the United States do not want to recognize this invasion threat. They have an intellectual posture that says the solution is to accept the invasion, that open borders is the way forward. One of the reasons that politicians embrace open borders is that they and their central bankers have little idea how to deal with the economic and social consequences of the population declines that will occur without significant immigration.

Over the last fifteen years in Europe, new political parties have been formed in response to the cultural challenges of too much Muslim immigration too fast. These parties are now coming to power and, in certain countries, are pushing back on the European Union’s Schengen policy. The future of the European Union is uncertain. In the United States we see the beginning of similar political movements in the presidential candidate of Donald Trump.

The issues that are associated with Muslim immigration are confusing because Islam is not monolithic. Islam is an entrepreneurial religion. Within Islam, in addition to the Koran, there are many writings by religious scholars over the last thirteen hundred years. Each imam has a certain freedom as to how he interprets the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. In the beginning, Islam was a violent bestial ideology; adherents raised armies to vanquish the disbelievers and robbed caravans to raise money. Punishments including death by stoning, beheadings, amputations, and other bestial behavior, such as taking slaves for sexual exploitation, subjugating women, and rendering Jews and Christians either to death or a subservient existence. That is the ideology of ISIS. Radical Islam is a threat to Western civilization. However, the difficulties of assimilating Islam into Christian value based cultures go beyond the teachings of the Koran. There are in Western Muslim communities embedded cultural behaviors that are unacceptable. It is hard to know what is really going on in a Muslim family or a Muslim community. They do not seek close relationships with Christians and Jews and under the watchful eye of their imam, they remain separate and apart.

The frustration of voters in Europe and the United States, although focused on immigration, exists for reasons broader than that. It is a frustration with large central governments that enforce a wide array of one-size-fits-all policies that do not sit well at more local levels. There is a need to reform government and move more legislative and administrative power back to the states and sovereign nations, closer to the citizenry. The United States has the structure in place to do this easily. Such changes in Europe are more difficult and threaten the structure of the union.

In addition to practical changes, there is a need for an ideological change. The media, the academics, and the politicians (the ideas industry) have become disconnected from the masses (the folks). The ideas industry is very much invested in the vision of a multicultural global community that works in harmony to create global peace and solve problems like global climate change, the conflict between Israel and Palestine, world hunger, ISIS, North Korea’s behavior, the global sex trade, and so forth. More centralized government is intrinsic to this global view. This is a nice vision, but at this time it is unrealistic. Instead the naked self-interest of nation states is the dominant reality today. Europe and the United States need to deal with the world as it is, not as they would like it to be. Our goal should be peaceful coexistence, not global integration. We need to accept that humans are strongly tribal and that our values and individual cultures define us. Yes, we change, but we do so slowly. If the ruling political class tries to impose too much change too fast, change that threatens and disrupts our way of life, then they will get pushback. This dissent has been successfully silenced in the past by using political correctness to inhibit individuals from voicing their opinions. This is changing. We need to reverse the trend toward centralization by delegating as much governmental and administrative power to the most local level within a framework of consistent values: more local, less central.

This book deals with these challenges. The conflicts are partly economic and partly cultural. The global conflicts are about different values. The conflicts are very real and are difficult to resolve. Some of the issues are fundamental and must be recognized as such. Other conflicts are about being realistic about how fast change can occur. Human beings evolve, but they do so on a generational time fame. A generational time frame is about forty years. So when you try to make change happen faster than that, you are always going to meet with resistance. Understandably the intellectual elite are frustrated by the speed at which cultural change can occur. However, reality is what it is and ultimately has to be respected. Democracy does not work very well, but it has a way of ultimately having its say.

CHAPTER 1

The Human Reality

All human activity is based on the zoological and social realities of the human being. Everything I discuss in this book can be connected to these underlying factors. This chapter explores these realities.

Many intellectuals live in, and believe in, an international multicultural world of open borders with shared values. This is not an imagined environment. It is the one they live in. They travel to international conferences to meet similar colleagues. Such conferences occur in several places in the world every week of the year. They include, for example, United Nation conferences, global climate change conferences like the one recently held in Paris, the World Economic Forum held in Davos each year, academic conferences, European conferences, the Asian-Pacific Cooperation Conference, business conferences, and so on. At such conferences these intellectuals meet similarly highly educated people from all different cultures who share their concerns and are indeed colleagues. They feel strongly that the global community is as one and that we all share the same objectives. I used to be part of that global elite flying around the world and visiting various operations and customers. What the global elite forget is that the great, great majority of people live and die within fifty miles of where they were born. Let’s call these people the local folks, in comparison to the global elite. The local folks are the product of their environment, and even if they are limited in their worldview, they vote and are entitled to their opinion. The local folks are strongly tribal. As humans we have deep needs to identify with and belong to a tribe. I am suspicious of