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TomG's avatar

Underlying all this psychology are the realities of our true exceptionalism as we have:

-the highest per capita incarcerated population;

-the highest per capita users of cocaine, opioid, and amphetamine drugs;

-the highest per capita users of prescription drugs;

-the most expensive health care system devoid of outcomes to match its cost benefit ratio;

-the highest per capita of personal debt; and

-a majority mindset that still holds that our extraordinary military serves to defend our “freedom.”

Patrick states, “I will make a generality I am prepared to defend, Americans, by and large, would much rather believe than think.”

I agree with this and would add (as an observer of Christianity from the inside for many decades—now more from the outside, it must said) this indeed is both our ideology and our religion. “Only believe and eternal life is yours.” My problem with this has always been reconciling such simplistic “faith” to the Sermon on the Mount which is one call after another for action—peaceable action.

I was blessed to have an odd, Old Testament professor in my freshman year at what is now more than then a “conservative Christian” institution. (Then a college—now a university.) He did not teach ideology but rather prophetic action and the mess that is the Old Testament when read with any degree of integrity. One line I shall always remember, “Go to church, but don’t check your mind at the door.” I heeded those words, which have caused me plenty of mental anguish over the years as I see the complicity of Christianity with the evils this country has inflicted on the world and its own citizens in my lifetime. Not to mention, more than a few sermons that would get me riled up!

The well-informed readers here are all aware of the immoral abyss of our elected leaders and the press’ with their statements of our “moral clarity” in the Ukraine proxy war. All agree that dying Ukrainians is a great investment of American debt-financed spending. This while I’m still trying to figure out why Joe and Jane American feel any threat from Russians. Then there is our obsession with every pre-qualifier regarding Putin—we must say he is a thug. I’m hard pressed to see his global dealings in any measure as thuggish as our own! I can understand his popularity in his own country, and I'd take Lavrov over anyone in our state department now or from the past 30 years.

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John Merryman's avatar

Patrick,

You lay out the origin of exceptionalism as quite simply the providence of the enormous resources and land to a people leaving the confines of the Old World. Then that this occurred at the dawn of the industrial revolution only served to further power this frontier dynamic.

Yet underlaying that is the other aspect of the Americas. The Melting Pot. We are a collection of peoples from all over the world, largely bound by opportunity.

So the real question then becomes, what happens when the opportunity starts to run dry?

What bounds us then?

While there are many aspects, one of the most notable was World War 2, coming on the heels of the Great Depression, served to turn up the heat under the melting pot. It was a collective effort that drew together all the various creeds, colors and classes into one enormous joint effort.

Yet the result was to make the military the one public works project the entire country agreed on.

Consider more tonnage of bombs were dropped on Korea than on Germany and Japan combined. The machine was not to be turned off. All subsequent wars after that really have been driven by the fact the military is the only tool in the tool box.

Even 9/11 needs to be considered in that light. Did Building 7 just collapse out of sympathy? Supposedly there was 10 thousand gallons of diesel in the basement for running generators, but where were the building and fire inspectors when that was designed?

Given how the opponents switched from communists to Arab terrorists, to Russians, it should be evident the driving factor isn't the ideology, so much as it's just cover for the one communal aspect this country has.

Then there is the fact of the importance of public debt to the functioning of capitalism. Money is a contract, not a commodity and to store the asset side of the ledger, there has to be a debt to back it. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth. "The real money is in bonds."

When we talk psychology, there are often hidden factors driving it.

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