If we had only learned from the mistakes of others

The Great Disconnect

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By Dr. Robert R. Owens —— Bio and Archives August 25, 2016
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Chaos is the mother of tyranny.  Chaos reigns when people operate in confusion and disorder.  It is a state in which behavior and events are not controlled by reason.  Today we are faced with a government and an elite controlled media that lie to the people and then lie about lying.  They operate as if the country is theirs to run and ruin for their own personal enrichment.  Chaos is a time like today when life makes little sense and we are force-fed such gobbledygook as the economy is booming, President Obama has outperformed Reagan when it comes to job creation and investment, inflation is under control, unemployment is at 4.9%.  Over here in reality we are fighting endless wars for peace, working people are being squeezed between stagnant wages and rising prices, and almost as many able-bodied people have dropped out of the workforce as there are people working.  This is chaos.  This is the seedbed of tyranny.

Our tyrants-in-training have captured the government and the economy, created a dependent class of motor-voters, convinced people that a continually growing debt is sustainable and turned the government into the one who picks winners and losers instead of a free economy.  The slow slide down a slippery slope has accelerated into a precipitous procession over a predictable precipice.  To those who have seen this coming it is like watching a slow motion train wreck.  The coming destruction is not mitigated in the least by decades of warning by the watchmen on the walls.

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How is this evolving progression from individual freedom, personal liberty, and economic opportunity into a centrally-planned collectivist corporatist regime possible?  It is built upon the alliance of perpetually re-elected political hacks, crony capitalists, and corrupt unions aided and abetted by a sycophant media?
Why have the descendants of the Founders, the Framers, and the Revolution fallen for the same swan song that has led so many others before us down the primrose path to authoritarianism, totalitarianism, despotism, and collapse?  I believe it is because the average American has no frame of reference.  If we don’t know what has gone before how can we understand what is?  Or plan for what might be?

If we don’t know where we came from it is impossible to predict where we are going.  Therefore it is helpful to learn how the world became the way it is so that we can work to make it the way we think it should be, for without the past the present will never come into focus and the future will be nothing more than a mist that someone else will bring into focus.  History consists of perspectives from the present projected onto facts from the past.  While the facts are often disputed the perspectives tend to become quasi-religious dogma expressed as political opinions wherein the present uses the past to shape the future.  Examples would be increasing the minimum wage is good for the working poor, infrastructure stimulus is good for the economy, or preemptive war is good for peace.
An important thing to realize across the board in Historical studies is a truism often maligned and sometimes even used as an insult but true nonetheless, everyone is the center of their own world and everyone experiences life from where they stand, and all attempts to speak of “the” experiences of THE people are fabrications that may be agreed upon by scholars but has little relationship to what any one person may experience.
As we mature it is easier to gain an appreciation of History since we have an ever increasing personal experience with the past with which to analyze our present and to project our future.
America’s lack of historical perspective and lack of understanding the basics of civics and economics has led to what I call the Great Disconnect.  Here is the condition which we all encounter on a daily basis that exemplifies this educationally instilled mental pathology: How many people do you meet who vote for politicians diametrically opposed to everything they believe in?  From everything they say you would imagine they must vote for party X then you find out they are rabid supporters of party Y which is against everything they are for, and they can’t stand the politicians of party X which supports everything they believe in. This is what I call the Great Disconnect.

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A historical perspective is the antidote for this pathology.
In essence what I am talking about is using history to build a platform of the past to be a launching pad for the future.  We are currently mortgaging the future to pay for the excesses of today.  We are spending money that has not been earned by people who have not been born to subsidize the current creature comfort of those who don’t care who pays as long as they get what they want.  It is unfortunate for the generations of the future for they will be forced to live in a world that we have created.  Our parents conquered the world and left the nation inherited by the Boomers as the sole colossus who bestrides the tides of time.  We have wasted the accumulated wealth of two hundred years, created a far flung empire we cannot afford to garrison, and turned a noble experiment in human freedom from a city on a hill into dysfunctional republic functioning as an entrenched oligarchy masquerading as a democracy.
If we had only learned from the mistakes of others, if we had only seen in the sudden collapse of the USSR that we too could follow hubris and collectivism from victory to defeat.  Unfortunately it appears the only lesson we have learned from History is that we don’t learn the lessons of History and this is the Great Disconnect.