"A Quick Post On The Decline Of The West"
by John Wilder
"The evening got away from me. I’d love to tell you that I was doing something productive, but I was really just goofing around. I felt a bit blah (not sick, mind you, but blah) all week. So, I decided to goof around. If today’s thoughts are a bit shorter than usual, that should explain it.
When I was a young adult, I read "Atlas Shrugged." Now, I said, I read it, but when it got to the part where John Galt hacked into the radio to give a (what seemed like to me) 700-page speech that was just reiterating every point Rand had already made in the book, but this time with crayon, I skipped it. So, I read most of it. Except 90% of the speech.
One thing that stuck with me about the tone of the book was that it took place in a world that had moved on. Stuff just didn’t work. I seem to recall a broken clock, and broken rails, and the image of a society that had done great things but was no longer capable of them.
The mission of NASA used to be to send people and things up into space. The goal was to learn more about the Solar System, the planets, and the Universe beyond. The other part of the goal was to make man an interplanetary and, hopefully, an interstellar species.
NASA was doing one of the hardest things that had ever been done – inventing technology at the very edge of what humans were capable of, and then using it. It was one of the grandest adventures of the 20th Century. It was also staffed by young people. Gene Kranz, the “Failure is not an option guy” was the Flight Director for several Apollo missions, most notably Apollo 13. When Apollo 13 happened? Kranz was 36.
Our nation at that point had failures, sure. But now it seems like that’s the definition. And the things we’re failing on aren’t even new tech. East Palestine (The Mrs. told me, “It’s pronounced Palesteen, Froderick”) Ohio is suffering from one of the biggest failures of tech that is nearly 200 years old.
Then there was a fire at Oak Ridge involving uranium. Normally, one tries to avoid burning radioactive things. I mean, it’s not like this is Russia and all of us are protected from radiation via the consumption of massive amounts of vodka. There are others, of course. The Jackson, Mississippi water plant appears to not work (sometimes) because the people running it don’t know how to run it. I could go on and on.
In one sense, it almost appears that we’re suffering a crisis of people who just don’t care or are, well, stupid. I hate to say stupid, because water treatment has been around for hundreds of years, too, and is far simpler than the Apollo project.
One symptom, perhaps, of the increasing and accelerating rate of change (notice I didn’t say improvement, I said change) in the world is increasing failures of the basic systems of life. Sure, we can have Doordash™* deliver tacos, but the justice system is failing, too. And how many readers here trust our elections? In the race to be “efficient” we’ve made it easy to cheat. Even if there wasn’t cheating, creating systems that are opaque enough so they’re not shenanigan proof is a failure in itself.
Our social systems are failing. Our infrastructure is failing, and it becomes ever more obvious the things that bind us together are failing. Here in Modern Mayberry, the power has worked pretty well, but investment in power and infrastructure has made the system nearly third-world in some places.
I expect it to get worse. I don’t even think we’re close to the level of failure we’ll be seeing due to the incompetence of the leadership in the country. I see no real thoughts that our leadership will get better, since the idea of hiring smart young folks like Gene Kranz is out the window, and hiring people who share the same ideology, regardless of ability, is in.
We are living in the time science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein called, “The Crazy Years” – in his words: “Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses...”
I believe the signs are there that we are in that “mass psychoses” and that is the end of this cycle. The mere fact that truth can no longer be spoken in public due to the offense that it might give shows that the mental bending is built deep into discourse today. To be clear, there is little of today’s society when it comes to values and morality left to conserve – the Left has taken it all. No, where we are going into our future has nothing to do with conservation, it’s going to be about restoration. Failure is not an option. *There is no Doordash™ in Modern Mayberry, unless it's raining."
.jpeg)
