The root cause of America’s ongoing material failures is our complete moral failure, which stems from over 50 years of pro-selfishness propaganda. Now, if you talk about morality with most Americans — including almost all Republicans and Democrats — they will tell you that:
- All human behavior is based on selfishness, which is not only inevitable but basically a good thing, and
- Anyone claiming to be behaving for the greater good or out of altruism is a fraud and hiding that they are actually more evil than most people.
Neither of these things are true. Cooperation, rather than selfishness, is one of the primary reasons for the success of the human specie, and although there certainly are a lot of con artists out there, most cons involve appealing to the mark’s selfishness — they’re not typically about a false display of caring for others. It is true, however, that when capital claims to be trying to solve a problem (like climate change or access to health care), typically it’s a mere performance of morality designed primarily to increase profits; they, not the altruists, are the real con artists.
While certainly not the only source of this cultural debasement, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is probably the most famous source text for American immorality. And they made a trilogy of movies about it that is apparently slightly better than the novel. Here’s a review from a progressive:
Atlas Shrugged is old material, but when an idea gets lodged securely in a culture, it starts reproducing itself everywhere, much like how a virus invades your body and starts tricking your own cells into making copies of it. Here’s an example of that: Rick and Morty, which is a show I definitely enjoy watching. You might have thought Rick and Morty was an example of leftists media (because of the naughtiness), but the text of the show clearly portrays the worst person in the universe constantly triumphing over the forces of idiocy.
Like American culture as a whole, Rick and Morty conflates selfishness with intelligence and altriusm with stupidity; this is directly counter to leftist ethics. Here’s a video about that from the same guy as the above, but after he was radicalized:
This meme of selfishness — and of altruism being the “real” evil — has a function whether or not an individual who is reproducing it understands that function. That function is to make evil people seem normal — or even good. This meme is the reason why voters choose the lesser evil in every election and dismiss good people as idiots or “dangerous leftists”. This meme is why we believe the Republican and Democratic parties when they tell us that a centrist political position like democratic socialism is a dangerous, impractical ideology.
If we want to make America great, we’re going to have to start by making America good, and to do that, we must end the meme of selfishness. Think about the media you consume. How often is the evil character the protagonist? How often is the evil character also the coolest character? What’s that doing to your mind?