As I have long maintained, the systems that modern-day Americans have embraced have served to produce a very dysfunctional society. The best manifestation of this dysfunction are the suicides of young people. When youngsters are checking out of life early, that’s a powerful sign that something fundamental is wrong.
There is also the fact that America is a drug-addled society, which is reflected by the fact that the U.S. government still has to maintain a vicious, nationwide drug-war police state. The government’s drug war is designed to prevent an estimated 70 million Americans from getting their hands on drugs and ingesting them. When around 25% of a society are checking out of reality in favor of drug fantasies, that’s a fairly good sign of a highly dysfunctional society.
But I have also long contended that another demonstration of the dysfunctional nature of American society are the irrational mass killings that periodically take place in our society. Yesterday, people in New York City experienced another one of these irrational killings. A guy entered a NYC high-rise with a high-powered rifle and killed four people and then killed himself.
It’s not just guns. Last week, a guy at a Walmart in Michigan went on a knife-stabbing spree in which he injured 11 people. Seven are in fair condition and four are in serious condition. There was no apparent motive for the attack.
Here is what I have long contended:
In every society, there are off-kilter people. In a healthy, functional society those off-kilter people don’t bother anyone. Everyone can see that they are off-kilter but most everyone displays tolerance, kindness, and consideration for them. “There but for the grace of God go I.”
But a healthy, functional society is obviously not the type of society in which we live. We live in a society where the government tightly controls, manages, regulates, and directs people’s lives and the use of their resources. In the process of doing that, the state, decade after decade, has engaged in a continuous process of tightening its screws on the American people.
It is my contention that this tightening of the screws causes something to go haywire within the off-kilter people. That’s when they go off and engage in their irrational killing sprees.
I’ve already mentioned the drug war, a vicious government program that has involved decades of screw-tightening on the American people with things like no-knock raids, asset forfeiture, mandatory minimum sentences, violent arrests, and humiliating pat-down searches.
There is also the U.S. national-security establishment’s own killing sprees in overseas countries, ones that have resulted in the deaths and injuries of millions of foreigners. The official attitude has always been that Americans need not fret about the fact that their government is killing so many people. So long as large numbers of U.S. soldiers aren’t dying, Americans are expected to focus their attention on their families, work, and vacation. I contend that those killing sprees — invasions, sanctions, embargoes, wars of aggressions, coups, provoking wars — trigger something in the off-kilter people that causes them to engage in copycat killing sprees here at home.
There is also the welfare state, where large numbers of Americans use the IRS to seize as much as possible of the income of other people, including their children, while, at the same time, everyone is using deductions and other tax devices to protect their income from being plundered. It is a system in which Americans are waging war against each other while acting normal and friendly to each other, especially in church on Sunday.
There is also the regulated society, which consists of an ever-growing array of rules, regulations, licenses, controls, orders, and directions, all of which add to the tightening of the government’s screws.
There is also the decades-old immigration police state that is now expanding beyond the borderlands into cities and towns across the country. With its brutal, vicious, and frightening arrests, kidnappings, incarcerations, and deportations, the government is now tightening the screws even more on both foreigners and the Americans who are hiring them, selling to them, and renting to them. Is it just a coincidence that the two irrational killings sprees in New York and Michigan have occurred in the midst of the reign of terror that Homeland Security, ICE, and the Border Patrol are inflicting across the country?
The worst part of America’s dysfunctional society is that so many Americans have been taught that the systems they have adopted are normal and healthy and, in fact, that they constitute “freedom.” I’d be willing to bet that if a survey were taken, at least 90 percent of Americans would respond, “Well, of course we live in a free society. We are Americans.” They have no idea that they embody perfectly the words of Johann Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved that those who falsely believe they are free.”
One problem is that Americans acquired this false mindset of “freedom” in the public (i.e., government) schools to which their parents were forced to send them. The state’s educational system, of course, constitutes more tightening of the screws. Another problem is that that when people deny reality, it compounds the problem because a denial of reality leads to psychosis.
In our public (i.e., government) schools, students are inculcated with the notion that Americans who lived in the Gilded Age were bad people because of the systems they adopted. Americans in the late 1800s hated and rejected everything Americans today stand for and favor. That’s why there was no income taxation, IRS, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, welfare state, economic regulations, minimum wage laws, drug laws, war on immigrants, paper money, Federal Reserve, occupational licensure, national-security state, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI, coups, state-sponsored assassinations, torture, and other such things that today’s Americans love and adore.
Ironically, those Americans also believed they lived in a free society, just as Americans today do who live under completely opposite systems. It’s probably worth mentioning that Gilded Age Americans lived in the most prosperous, most charitable, healthiest, end most educated society in history up to that time.
Interestingly enough, Gilded Age Americans did not live in a society that was besieged by irrational mass killings. Maybe that’s just a coincidence. Or maybe it’s because they refused to adopt systems that would permit the state to tighten its screws on them.
Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.
