A friend asked for a three sentence summary of the book, and this is what I came up with:
America’s greatest days are yet to come. Just as the world of family farms and small businesses, America 1.0, gave way to the industrialized world of big cities, big business, big labor unions and big government, America 2.0, we are now moving into a new world of immense productivity, rapid technological progress, greater scope for individual and family-scale autonomy, and a leaner and strictly limited government. The cultural roots of the American people go back at least fifteen centuries, and make us individualistic, enterprising, and liberty-loving, equipping us to prosper in the upcoming America 3.0.
There is a lot more to it, of course.
I ordered the book but I am skeptical. I am content to have been born in 1938 and lived through what I believe to have been a golden age, not just in medicine but in most of American life. I believe we will go through traumatic period when the “blue model” fails and that trauma may last for years. We do not have the social cohesion that kept us on track in the Depression.
Two of the key components in any positive future are forms of energy—the continuing discoveries of massive recoverable deposits of natural gas and oil, and the natural creative energies of free and independent minds seeking to find solutions to problems, both great and small.
The energy discoveries are especially good news as so much of it is in countries that are friendly and allied to us, as the recent discoveries of oil in Australia, and our neighbor Canada, as well as in our own states.
The creative energy is always bubbling along in our society, as long as we educate and tn allow the minds whose goal is productive achievement to grow and prosper.
The only entity which can thwart these two energies is the blocking interference of the collectivist state, which in the current regime is dedicated to stopping energy development whenever possible, and is, in any manifestation, always anti-thetical to the creative, independent mind.
The brighter future you speak of, and which Prof Mead also tries to imagine in his series of essays on the demise of the blue social model, lies there in the gutter where he collectivist ideology of stagnation and retrenchment has thrown it.
Pick it up.
“Pick it up.”
Working on it.
We ALL need to work on it.
Yes about that collectivist state, practicing a sort of El Dorado collectivism, where first the power and now the wealth is collected at the…State. We of course have to consider the State in it’s totality to include at least the Captains of their captured industries: finance, housing, media, many utilities, healthcare, and most importantly academia.
What happens to it? I think it has power, money, it *may* have the police, it certainly will have some ideas about America ANYTHING.
There is a reason America’s 3 richest counties and 7 richest ZIP codes are around the Beltway.
This 3.0 bright future is all very diverting, but there is the America we actually HAVE as opposed to what we dream of, and cancer eats it.
Our benevolent paternalism governs us as El Dorado – an enormous mountain of money and power being strip mined to nothing. All is taken, nothing is to be left, and the earth is to salted behind our current, actual Rulers.
Who despite Prof Mead’s wishes will NOT simply fade away, unless by fade away he means the United States of Detroit.
You will not get anything but what we have now – only Progressively less – by wishing.
The Great Question before us is not..what next? Not when you have *no* way to get there and formidable obstacles [but not formidable people] in your path.
The Great Question before us is: what Now?
“The Great Question before us is: what Now?”
Create a mass political movement that will build-down the dying blue model and replace it.
Or, that is standing by when the thing falls apart completely, having resisted reform to the end.
What is going on now is not sustainable.
We may as well exert ourselves and try to turn it around.
Having a picture of the future America we want is a start.
We need to have something to work TOWARD.
Otherwise we concede the initiative always and everywhere.
I am not inclined to do that.
Sir with affection and respect..
It’s not a plan.
It’s lamentation.
America NOW will fall apart..
ah. probably.
And when the music stops who already has comfy and secure chairs?
[Qualified: COMFORT is certain, indeed opulent luxury. SECURE rather qualified – see Law Enforcement Nullification].
So who’s best positioned to build the most likely next New Republic?
Mmmm?
They took you once. The safe bet is they’ll keep taking you.
Ready standing by? Till? What? I who have lived and not died by estimate of men judge the default is to STAND BY until the Crack of Doom. You think the choicest plum in history falls simply into the lap of he who waits?
Mass political movements. Do you mean the Demos? Well. As it happens..they are happening. They awakened, they are aware they are the frog slowly being boiled. And now their mad rulers in the same month announce their Sacred Scrolls Dead Parchments of the Past and demand they disarm. Within a Month!!
Your desire requires a series of miracles Sir. Your transition plan is in a word: Miracle.
AND YOU STAND BY AS THEY UNFOLD BEFORE YOU. The people awake. Of all matters they grow even further resolved not to DISARM, instead they strip the shelves of guns and ammunition and the police in no small part make it known they want no part of enforcing disarmament. MIRACLES.
Further the gods make their wishes towards our ruler manifest by making them publicly Mad.
So lament no more. Make your own decisions, but at least recognize someday is now…