America's Suicide, 2nd Edition

By Michael H. Davison

MAJOR THEMES EXPANDED IN THIS BOOK:

★ The human race cannot survive without moral principles.

★ Humans have for millennia rested their moral principles on the doctrines of their innumerable religions.

★ The religious foundation of morals in the United States has crumbled with nothing rational in its place. In conseque

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dapa Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Feb 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9780979243745

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

IN ITS ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT form this book bore the title, The American Neurosis. An acquaintance familiar with the publishing business informed me that no one would understand the word neurosis. Later a much respected clinical psychologist advised me that the word was fading from professional use. Properly humbled I changed to the more attention-grabbing title on the front cover. Nevertheless that word accurately captures the collection of political assumptions, and their consequences, that now sicken the Western World. I make no attempt to describe that which infects the rest of the world.

The word neurosis, first used in 1780 by William Cullen of Edinburgh, meant to him a nervous disorder.¹ Freud and subsequent clinical practitioners have had varying concepts of what they meant by the word but applied it to psychological rather than physiological distresses. The word neurosis roughly describes the process by which an individual by means of rationalizations, projections, deliberate distortions, and all the other artifices familiar to psychologists, contrives to evade awareness of the consequences of his thoughts, words, actions or emotions. In short, the neurotic lies to himself. Since that simple summation quite possibly encompasses the entire human race, a more rigorous definition of neurosis limits use of the term to describe those who lie to themselves in a compulsive stereotyped pattern designed to maintain some favored set of related viewpoints in sharp contrast to reality.

One of the more salient features of neurosis is a wholesale flight from responsibility. The neurotic faults inner compulsions, spouse, government, society or whatever for his unhappiness. Even though marital or social imperfections do contribute to the misery of an individual, the neurotic sees others or his own innate unchangeable inadequacies as comprising the sole cause or causes of all his difficulties. Most particularly he claims that he cannot help what he has become or what his actions have brought him. Unknowable inner influences cause his depression. Destructive rage is rationalized as retaliation for injustices done him by the system. The rich and the productive are lucky or advantaged in some way while he, believing that he has been cheated by life, demands restitution from those who have more.

Another example appears in the form of those who see themselves as helpless victims of overwhelming and incomprehensible forces wielded by politicians in collusion with heartless corporations who stomp on and heartlessly rob the little guy. Left out of this scene is that the little guy has most often contrived to stay a little guy and convince himself that he has no choice in the matter. He has carefully maintained his ignorance and helplessness to present to the world an image of abject dependency. The plea is obvious: Somebody must take care of me. There are those few who, drenched in crocodile tears and with motives considerably below noble or compassionate, rush in to offer aid, food and shelter, always at someone else’s expense.

In the same manner that some people cultivate an image of helpless dependency by evading the knowledge that they have other choices, others hide hatred, hostility, and power lust behind a beneficent concern for the welfare of man, especially those people seen as helpless and disadvantaged.

It should not be too difficult to see that these individual characteristics easily extend to a nation of individuals. If variations on this theme become prevalent, they will no longer be seen as abnormal by the citizens of that nation, but just and normal. Only some observers outside of that culture, and a few within it, will see those characteristics as wrongheaded or neurotic.

A nation is composed of individuals holding ideas, beliefs, customs and attitudes which blend into dominant social and economic trends that are often collectivized as if representative of a single individual. Daily news accounts reinforce the concept: In the UN today the United States voted to . . . , Britain declared . . . , China vetoed . . . , France rejected . . . , Japan proposed . . . , and so on. Verbally grouping millions of lives along with their beliefs, hopes, dreads and plots into a single summary presents dangers to accompany rhetorical convenience. Nevertheless if enough individuals with a shared set of values dominate the policies of a nation, then the principles they hold in common will become institutionalized. Then the entire nation will appear to have assumed the characteristics of those individuals. Other persons who retain different or possibly more accurate views of reality in conflict with the prevailing views remain unheard. Their views are not blended with the dominant ideas that comprise the philosophical summation guiding the policy of a nation’s leaders, and allow that nation to be seen and discussed as an entity with a single mind.

The basic course of the United States continues to roll left. Fear of that drift incites sporadic reactionary spasms that chronically fail their stated aim to reverse or at least stop the tide. Conservatives score impressive periodic midterm election triumphs, like those during the Clinton and Obama administrations, only to then flounder about as if they did not understand the nature of the fight. They then prepare the ground for the next liberal victory as did the second President Bush. This fascinating see-saw drama suggests action not toward some clearly defined and eagerly sought objective but away from a trend strongly suspected of being unhealthy but without an unconflicted understanding of what it is or how to reverse its course. To begin to clarify that trend we need to understand that the liberalism from which these conservative electoral sweeps recoil represents only part of a larger body of thought. This body of thought, collectivism and its roots in individual beliefs, a crucial part of which is shared by conservatives, is a primary focus of this book.

Collectivism, a generic word used in this book, includes communism, fascism and all the other innumerable shades of socialism even though communism and fascism also describe specific philosophic movements within the catch-all term collectivism. Use of the expressions collectivism and its derivatives are deliberately intended to be broad. The intent is to ensure that some particular group advocating total or partial central authoritarian economic planning and control, and common ownership of all or some wealth-producing property, does not absolve itself from criticisms of socialism on the pretext that its members are humanitarian socialists, social democrats, Christian democrats, American liberals, or some other socialist coloration that does not, like the communists, openly preach and attempt to achieve world domination by violent revolution.

Collectivism in practice has always been statist and cannot be otherwise even as an actualized idealization. For this reason the term statist or statism is used in the context of collectivism without the implication that the second can be separated from the first. Statism, watered down as in the United States or undiluted as in George Orwell’s 1984, is collectivism’s means. Contrary to the rapturous predictions of leftist theorists and activists who claim to labor so assiduously for a world of brotherhood, equality and love, statism is also collectivism’s end.

Humanity finds itself at a turning point in history, comparable in gravity to the time when a small city on the Tiber threatened the Western World. Or when the ancient pagan religions in so short a time were swept from the earth by the tidal waves of Christianity and Islam. Or the decades when Europe was awakening from a long sleep to flower in the spring sun of the Renaissance.

What we are witnessing in the intellectual confusion of our time is no less than a world-scale war of ideas raging over ground being abandoned behind a retreat of traditional values. All of us confront a choice now looming hugely before us. We can choose to be free people and accept the burdens of responsibility that that choice carries. Or we can continue the reassuring pretense that divine or omniscient secular authority will reveal our course, bestow our means, shield us from the consequences of that course and those means, compensate us for the misfortunes of life, and after all this allow us to remain free.

The anxiety of the choice before us has a familiar parallel in the awkward confusion experienced during adolescence. The felt need to reach for independence struggles to find expression in the immature judgment of a semiadult. The result is an ineffectual and often tragically self-harmful rebellion against adult strictures.

Among human groups, tribes or the larger groups called societies or nations, someone or a relatively few must always accept, voluntarily or otherwise, the burdens defaulted by those who have chosen to remain children. Nature does not allow creatures to remain children and remain alive. Only humans attempt to rescind that law.

As the incremental disintegration of our freedom continues apace despite many who try to understand and oppose it, it has become abundantly evident that there must be many others who deliberately and calculatedly advance the process. Succeeding chapters discuss the means and the motives of those who for various reasons make it their duty to eat away, like termites, at the founding principles that made this nation the greatest in history.

To demonstrate that the United States closely resembles an individual neurotic in that its prevalent philosophical trend carefully nurtures a counter-natural set of values in order to rationalize harmful policies is the theme of this book.

Second edition revisions added much new material, restructured the book, renamed some chapters and updated relevant data following the elections of November, 2018.

NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION

¹    H.J. Eysenck, W. Arnold and R. Meili, Editors, Encyclopedia of Psychology, Volume two, Herder and Herder, 1972, p. 321

CHAPTER 1

OUR OTHER RELIGION

THE 1980 TRIUMPH OF Ronald Reagan, the stunning defeat of an incumbent liberal president (Jimmy Carter, in case anyone has forgotten), and American liberalism defensively groping for a new identity, all trumpeted a victory toward which conservatives had long fervently hoped and discouragingly worked. The conservative sun rose out of the far West and in apparent defiance of the Earth’s rotation, streaked to the East to scorch the heathen liberal and bring the true gospel to the suffering multitudes of taxpayers. In less than twenty years after the prodigal Johnson heyday and only four years after liberal euphoria swept the unknown Carter into power, liberalism was in eclipse, however brief, behind the conservative comet. The Republican party witnessed an astounding achievement.

Or did it?

President Clinton won back the White House from the republicans in 1993 and President Obama in 2009, the only two democrats to hold that office since President Reagan’s inauguration in 1981. Democrats enjoyed a majority in the Senate in the 96th, 100th, 101st, 102nd, 103rd, 111th, 112th and 113th Congresses, and republicans the remaining eight since 1981. House democrats held a majority in the 96th through 103rd Congresses, all of them substantial, then back to the republicans for the next six Congresses, then the democrats again for the next two until the republicans gave President Obama a black eye by winning a 242 to 193 House majority in the 2010 election. House democrat majorities have been more heavily lopsided than republican majorities.

In the November 2012 election democrats increased their Senate majority by two seats and nearly wiped out the republican House majority. The House then numbered 201 democrats to the republican’s 234.

The November 2014 elections delivered a striking repudiation to the Democratic Party and to Mr. Obama in particular. Republicans then dominated both houses of the 114th Congress with their largest majority since the 71st Congress of 1929–1931.

The November 2016 elections were also remarkable. Republicans captured the White House against near universal media predictions to the contrary, increased their House majority, 247 to 188, and managed to hold on to their Senate majority despite the loss of two seats to the democrats. The 2017–18 Senate seats 52 republicans and 46 democrats.

November 2018 brought another reversal at least in the House. Mid term elections often result in significant losses to the party in power. Republicans retained their majority in the Senate, 51 to 46, but lost their majority in the House. The actual count was uncertain on the date of this writing.

Before we proceed to the unique rise of Donald Trump and what will likely happen after the newly elected members of Congress take their seats in 2019, two memorable events that together get their own chapter, how might we explain the foregoing teeter-totter? Fickle voters cannot make up their minds? Voters do not get what they want? Voters do not grasp the consequences of what they want? Voters imagine that they know what they want, but are exasperated trying to elect compliant candidates? Voters want the impossible? Voters get what they demand but later protest the economic and bureaucratic price? Voters elect candidates based on larcenous promises of a share in the loot, then later feel cheated when the candidates fail to deliver? Voters agree with the parental government course along which their country drifts but periodically recoil from its inseparable costs and statist correlations? The resulting specter lacks a pleasing shape and appears more menacing than what voters originally had in mind?

German voters had similar notions in 1932 which did not make them any less responsible for the outcome or give them a chance to change their minds.

Appending the adjective parental to our government received an impressive endorsement from Bill Clinton: To renew America, we must be bold . . . We must provide for our Nation the way a family provides for its children.¹

When the incumbent party fails to deliver the demands of the electorate, or voters become upset about what their government is doing to them, or not doing, they throw the bums out of office.

When the triumphant party proves no better at meeting voters’ demands than the recently defeated group, voters feel double-crossed and again demand change.

Our interminable frustration and disgust with politicians and perennially futile efforts to vote the right party into power come from an irrational expectation that politicians can solve problems rooted in our self destructive psychology. Do not alone blame the creatures who hold political power. Clearly we are doing this to ourselves.

The specter of liberal Robin Hood robbing productive America to benefit the downtrodden suffers periodic setbacks. Teeter-totter political victories signal that the patient wants a cure for a disease he fails to understand while at the same time winces from the bitter tasting prescriptions. Most unfortunately the doctors from either political party have not a clue how to diagnose the illness let alone write a prescription for it. Despite claims to the contrary they have both proven to be major, but significantly not only, carriers of the contagion.

Republican conservatives like to get all stirred up over what they call tax and spend liberals, but have not given us a balanced federal budget since 1969 (a slight surplus) during the Nixon administration. The only balanced budgets (actually surpluses) in recent memory occurred in the four years from 1998 through 2001 during President Clinton’s administration.² The largest deficit in history, $1.4 trillion in fiscal year 2009, President Obama inherited from President Bush’s budget. In view of these numbers, other than religion it is not all that clear what conservatives are trying to conserve, certainly not fiscal prudence.

Conservative voters have become justifiably alarmed at the decline of this country and periodically sweep like-minded candidates into office, only to find out later that they cannot stop the leftist rolling snowball.

Why can’t they?

I suggest two reasons.

One, they poorly defend and are identified with an increasingly unpopular economic system, capitalism, discussed in Chapter 7.

Second, the religious conservative movement that heavily influences the Republican Party suffers from a fatal flaw. If we are ever to defeat the parental state idea, it cannot be done with religion. Religious conservative arguments concede the fundamental moral premise of those they pretend to oppose. Conservatives have no defense against the emotional appeal of leftist assertions. Conservatives have traditionally rested their arguments on religion, a rapidly crumbling foundation.

If republicans want to rescue their party from increasing irrelevance, they must, with no trace of diffidence or me-too acquiescence, resolutely affirm their ostensible principles of circumscribed government, free markets, entrepreneurial capitalism, individual sovereignty and responsibility, and government probity and fiscal prudence. And they must do it without religion as a basis of argument.

Currently the two strongest foundations on which we rest our moral principles, theistic religion and the welfare state, have been badly savaged by reality. Religion has been under attack for centuries, especially the last four and especially by science, to the point when it can no longer mount a convincing argument to anyone except like believers. Moral arguments derived from religion have become ever more ignorable while welfare state morality, despite leading us toward ever increasing dependency, irresponsibility, government authority and bankruptcy, retains its emotional and intellectual appeal.

Disaffected people can draw comfort from the belief that an omniscient, omnipotent, just and loving God awaits them on the other side of death, or they can place their faith in a much more accessible nanny state. The motivating principle is the same.

At this point in our political controversy, it hardly matters whether our nation was founded on religious principles or not, or what the Founding Fathers had to say on the subject. The statist tide threatening to engulf this beautiful land is not going to be rolled back with religion no matter how fervently believed. Arguments derived from religion or some Founding Father’s writing have long since lost any intellectual force, particularly against those whom we would like our arguments to carry some punch.

An already bloated government continues to balloon. For all the conservative’s declared reverence for fiscal parsimony, we witness under their tutelage bankruptcies and unemployment increasing apace with expanding public spending and debt. The disease it seems will not go away no matter who we elect. What then is the nature of this disease that alternately requires alleged liberal remedies and then supposed conservative corrections to counteract the debilitating effects of the alleged remedies? What is it that each of these groups of do-gooders is trying to cure with a spectacular lack of success? Best to describe them as quacks.

If it is not unduly risky to draw upon liberal clichés, the answer can be derived from what the liberals posture and the conservatives do not, at least in their rhetoric. Liberals claim to be solely motivated by concern for the needy and disadvantaged and present a tableau of the deepest compassion. In their view the disease is perceived as social injustices arising from the correct observation that every person does not share equally in the pleasures of life and the wealth of the culture. Liberals recognize neither personal indolence nor rationalizations for personal failure as possible causes for this perceived social injustice. Their doctrine sees the problem not in terms of differing individual capacities and shortcomings but as a political problem to be corrected with government programs. If a person has been disadvantaged by accident of ignoble birth, he should be compensated by those who have enjoyed the good fortune to have been born in more favorable circumstances. To achieve this end liberals promote government as a proactive instrument of egalitarian redistribution, taking from those more able and giving to those less able minus steep administration fees. Based on the observation that liberals have grown dominant enough to dictate socioeconomic policy for the better part of a century and are repeatedly returned to office, it is evident that a majority of voters agrees with the liberal view of reality or at least its basic premise.

What have conservatives offered except watered down me-tooism? For all their expressed veneration for the suffering taxpayer, their scorn for liberal social programs, their lamentations on behalf of Holy Liberty crushed under the weight of government, every single program and institution initiated by the liberals over vigorous protests from the conservative camp has been retained by the conservatives during their times of administration. Not a single significant liberal inspired institution of the last century has been dismantled by the conservatives. They have perhaps reduced some of those programs a little in scope and influence, but the skeleton remained. The arguments of inauguration were left unchallenged, waiting for the following liberal administration to again flesh out the program and turn on the lights. To be fair, conservatives could not even attempt to reverse most liberal inaugurated programs without deafening screams of unfairness from beneficiaries and the bureaucrats who administer the programs, not to mention the media crowd who observe this fascinating contest and offer us their unbiased commentaries. But that is exactly what bureaucrats in Southern Europe now face. Their alternative to not doing it is economic stagnation, decline and authoritarian government.

Liberals have managed in the past to ram through some highly destructive legislation over loud protests from their opposition. Should conservatives expect the howls of pain to be any quieter when they attempt to inject their potions into the sick patient? Can they use as an excuse for failure of their prescription that their fellow liberal quacks oppose the conservatives’ remedies and scorn their medical competence? And they have no reason to expect any sympathy from news media largely hostile to their viewpoint.

The influential religious faction within the conservative cause is intellectually bankrupt. Conservative publications pour out endless streams of aphorisms and old arguments based on bible or Constitution, diatribes against the evil liberal and his satanic socialist brethren and urgings for immediate action along with dire warnings that the hour is late. Yet in all their weeping for America’s crumbling glory and stained and battered flag, conservatives consistently fail to show any fundamental understanding of the nature of the evil they face. They are therefore doomed to waste their energies defending against a feigned attack while the real war is driving for the heart of freedom. They fail to understand that the old dictum The price of liberty is eternal vigilance is far more an exaction on the philosopher than on the politician or the soldier. But the philosopher has long since abandoned the conservative to his religion. Religious conservatives peer out from behind their ancient battlements at the approaching statist armies, blithely unaware that the advance of thought, particularly from science, has long since hollowed out the stones of the castle, dissolved the mortar and left nothing but an illusion.

Conservative appeals to tradition no longer persuade. Freedom, which the Constitution was clearly designed to preserve, must be understood and reaffirmed continuously. The Founding Fathers gave us a socioeconomic system with a written document by virtue of which they and their descendants could live as free human beings. No men as intelligent as the Founders would expect to be able to peer two hundred plus years into the future and prepare a document that would alone remain secure against the unknowable forces that would assail it.

Suppose a group of zealots were today to found a new nation, say even on another planet, and as carefully and thoughtfully as possible prepare a written declaration of their hopes for mankind, their reasons and arguments for founding their new society, and a legal system of institutions, checks and balances by means of which the freedom and dignity of that nation’s citizens could be preserved for posterity. They would reasonably expect that their descendants would be taught the fundamentals of the new nation, understand and embrace the concept of liberty and defend the founding document that defined their system. They would not expect that their document, prepared with such attentive care, could remain unchallenged and untouched through the centuries, their progeny appealing to it like priests mumbling sacred passages from ancient untouchable texts handed down from the gods.

Collectivism as a world wide movement is a cruelly distorted expression of a fundamental human need much the same as cancer is an uncontrolled growth spuriously signaled by some as yet inadequately understood process operating at the very essence of life. Collectivism as a social malignancy will disappear only when human needs and motivations are better understood and satisfied by more meaningful and fulfilling pursuits, just as cancer will disappear only when the complex microscopic processes lying at the core of cellular reproduction are understood and brought under control. Collectivism will not vaporize from the magic wand of the conservatives’ antigovernment diatribes or by their clinging to tradition like small children clutching at and peering out from under their mother’s dress hem, any more than cancer will yield to anticancer slogans and over-the-counter palliatives. The conservative cannot fight effectively against collectivism because, to the extent of his religiosity, he is himself a collectivist. To the extent that he seeks to use the power of the State to further his aims and suppress the heathen liberal he is, like his alleged enemy, a statist. Freedom, which any rational ethics guarantees, must be continuously reaffirmed by reason which both religion and collectivism reject.

Religious conservatism cannot effectively counter socialism because the two are fundamentally the same phenomenon and their mutual intolerance reduces to yet another battle between rival faiths. Intolerance of dissent, one of the defining characteristics of religion, applies with equal or greater force in political doctrines. Communism and fascism, the two most lethal variants of socialism, serve as examples, but on less murderous strata so do welfare statists and grown up college children who exercise their freedom of speech by hurling insults and obscenities at speakers they don’t like while their professors snicker off stage over the success of their indoctrination.

When these naïve young people hurl insults and accuse others of hate with a conspicuous lack of evidence, they reveal hatred hiding in their own minds. Should they one day attain political power, do you suppose they will tolerate opposition to their leftist orthodoxy?

Who are the chief villains here? A bunch of thoughtless kids whose behavior is not all that far removed from a two-year old’s temper tantrum? Or the textbook authors and classroom professors who indoctrinate them?

Another kind of flaw occurs when universities allow a whole field of scholars to drift politically to the left or to the right. Either direction is equally injurious to the truth, but at present most university departments lean strongly to the left. Any researcher who even discusses issues politically offensive to the left runs the risk of antagonizing the professional colleagues who must approve his requests for government funds and review his articles for publication.³

The defense of freedom is an unending dynamic intellectual undertaking. The Constitution, if it is to remain a viable force to preserve our freedom, must be understood and reaffirmed in a Twenty-first Century context. The article preventing the forced quartering of troops in one’s private home was as necessary to keep Redcoats out of one’s log cabin as it now is to prevent the 101st Airborne Division from camping on one’s farmland.

The Constitutional measure to condemn unreasonable searches and seizures of private persons, houses, papers and effects by government agents without warrants is uncomfortably suggestive of the IRS and the NSA, both contemporary agencies.

Congress delegating its legislative authority to myriad regulatory agencies clearly violates Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution. Why that particular virulence was not declared unconstitutional long ago is yet another symptom of our political sickness.

Religious conservatives preach that belief in God is fundamental to solving our problems. Liberals preach that reliance on government will solve our problems. Which poses the greater threat to freedom? The answer will be found in Chapter 9.

The conservative cause, undermined by religion, is trapped in an impossible dilemma. Appeals to religiously founded traditions are no longer effective