While it’s very clear how we came to our Westernized and American way of life, there’s more to the situation that demarcates our present existence as separate from all written history.
The exact same lifestyle was present for 90%+ of humanity for thousands of years:
- A civilian peasant life with a career specialization involving subsistence farming, with a side job in basic homesteading.
- Children were educated in the family trade, with plenty of hands-on apprenticeship and quality time.
- Little to no literacy, and extremely limited information available to entire communities.
- Technology that involved domesticated animals for transportation, couriers (sometimes with letters) or carrier pigeons for communication, and social networks persisting in taverns and churches.
- Over 90% of their consumed products were grown or made on their property.
Consuming + Education
Starting with the Industrial Revolution, the American way of life changed dramatically. While the trend was slowly developing already, the introduction of mechanical engineering improvements meant that factories were able to mass-produce things at a fraction of the price compared to before.
The product of this change yielded multiple movements:
- Factories could rapidly produce affordable products, which allowed many entrepreneurs to develop nobility-grade wealth.
- Cheaper and uniformly manufactured products meant it started to make more sense to buy the product instead of make it.
- People could leave their home to work in a factory, which would generate more money for their household, thus perpetuating more opportunity and more possibilities of #2.
At the same time, there was an interdependent trend toward education as a growing industry. Beyond being merely an institution to provide information for specialized careers, Europe began in the 19th century to explore the idea of indoctrinating children toward a nationalist bias alongside training them in literacy and math.
The Progressive Movement’s advances included education, and their infatuation with European culture means they drew directly from that approach. However, while the European approach was oriented toward making good national citizens, people like John Dewey saw the approach as being a mechanical means to empower Americans to live the good life.
While education is at least somewhat necessary to understand how to live well, it’s not the constraining factor for most people. Instead, it’s a lack of sufficient desire driven by our moral state, and further information is only clouding that fact.
The result of the educational reform, over time, was a very specific, dysfunctional system:
- Borrow from both 19th-century factory automation principles and Europe’s holistic educational approaches.
- Require students to perform rote tasks that are allegedy necessary for understanding.
- Give the students formalized criteria for success based on their ability to leverage their memory towards busywork and tests.
The home education system for thousands of years had been replaced by an unknown institution, and this institutionalization combined with the above-stated consumerism engaged a precedent that started a trend.
Consumption + Propaganda
The adoption of the next trend came through the “public relations” approach to marketing. Starting in 1919, Edward Bernays had converted his uncle Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic work into a means to subliminally influence Americans through advertisements. Product placement became less of a competition in the conscious decisions of a person’s mind, and instead was a battle for the feelings and sentiments that fostered impulsive behavior and addictions.
In war, the availability of information has always been a factor for success: you can win absoltely any battle if you know everything about your opponent and they know nothing about you. With the development of mass media, starting with newspapers and radio, meant that now massive amounts of information could also be sent for strategic purposes as well.
The attempt to subliminally influence people went into a full-on presence after World War II. The propaganda came through every angle, including the newly developed television. As technology scaled, the information grew and traveled faster.
By the 1960s, a new type of youth blossomed in the United States, known as the “hippy”. These children were severely untrained for life by the tremendous working fathers that predated them. Their rebellion against “the man” represented their absentee father figure, and that sentiment followed them for decades. Most of the nation suffered under a sea of inexperienced adult children making the irrational demand for world peace.
The irony of the hippies’ desire for autonomy was that the public relations apparatus appealed to their sense of individualism and independence, but kept on marching along.
Eventually, the hippies became the yuppies of the 1980s: hard-working consumerist members of American society. On the other side of the world, the Soviet Union didn’t change much beyond the standard decay of bad management and breaking worldwide records in government-sponsored genocide.
War on Many Fronts
Various policies throughout the United States politically changed the landscape of conservative and liberal. “Conservative” transitioned from a libertarian-esque desire for autonomy to a pro-institution advocation of the Military Industrial Complex. “Liberal” maintained its pro-institution stance it had always held, but gradually shifted further and further leftward through the advancement of special interest groups such as gay rights and giving entitlements to the poor. This meant that most people wanted more government, but the debate raged on how the government should be associated with the free market. The Carter Years versus Reaganomics, government programs versus free enterprise (though government-subsidized).
During this growth from the continued Military Industrial Complex, the development of medical technology in the United States had also brought about a new power structure, slowly growing as the Social Security funding and scope increased to accommodate all Americans. As people aged, the need for elderly healthcare increased, and the truckloads of government money slowly formed the Big Medical/Pharma Complex (or colloquially “Big Pharma”). American health is inextricably intertwined with it.
At the same time that the hippies and Big Pharma were forming, American overseas conflicts with the USSR intensified through proxy battles. The increasing development of media technology in the US, specifically, made its wars progressively more unpopular: Korea, Vietnam, and on beyond the Cold War into Iraq.
The propaganda wars made everything into a battle for dominance and national pride, from education to space faring. In the noise, with the facts now largely lost to time, were many conspiracies and scandals present against the voice of the propaganda:
- To improve test scores, the United States seemed to consistently lower the criteria to boost their numbers, which over time has given high schoolers an effectively fifth-grade education.
- The “war on drugs” has often served to enhance police force presence, but hasn’t always yielded direct results that have diminished drug use.
- The assassination of John F. Kennedy, Jr., conspicuously after he said he was going to defund the CIA.
- The actual question of how far outside of Earth’s orbit humanity had actually traveled, given that the original blueprints for the craft have gone missing and it seems very difficult to get to the moon in the 2020s.
However, any societal decay in America was offset by the development of the computer. The 1980s became a vastly productive decade across the world, and the economic prosperity of a free society dominating over a centrally planned one triggered the end of the Cold War when the USSR collapsed and Russia gave up East Germany.
New Powers
The 1990s were a confusing period, with the United States now being free of any antagonist whatsoever. Calls for world peace resonated with idealized speeches in the United Nations, but there’s no profit to be made in world peace, so proxy battles and civil wars continued in Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, and others against tiny dictators. Some of them continue to this day.
The Military Industrial Complex continues their march, with absurdly overpriced military equipment being used to attack combatants with absurdly low financial net worth. It’s not uncommon for a missile to be fired by a soldier that’s worth more than that soldier makes in a year to hit an enemy that makes less than that in their lifetime.
Following the Cold War, the public relations push migrated beyond the advertising and intelligence operative’s domain into the political realm with Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign. Instead of dry lists of policy decisions, the election was won through the emotional sleight of hand regarding a candidate’s implicit sexuality and paternal characteristics.
The Connected Consumers
In the late 1990s, the continued development and expansion of the internet broke more long-standing human conventions:
- The library became a household object.
- Calculating and referencing became available to poor people.
- Easy access to financing blurred the demarcation between the social classes even further.
- The consumerism trend drove people to concern themselves even more toward how they looked than any inward qualities or personal preparedness.
As the internet developed, the world saw a period of relative peace for decades, which led to increasing leftward thinking as people misinterpreted the peace as a standard behavior and conflict as the deviation from the norm. By their estimation, society had finally “arrived” in a new, ever-increasing social development that would eventually lead to a utopia.
The powers-that-be, however, may talk of utopia, but they are also human, and would like to run that utopia. Their approach and political education eventually developed from the 1990s onward into the 2010s as a type of “eventual communism”, which posited that capitalism worked well, but was an intermediate stage for the communist utopia that would bring about a new age.
The arrangements made by the USA during the UN’s founding right after World War II had given poorer countries an opportunity to compete. The idea was that the US could become as powerful as Germany and take over the world, so it needed a buffer against that approach. China, more than any other nation, had taken advantage of the uneven trade arrangement, and they grew dramatically from it, all the way until the late 2010s.
Information = Power
A new industrial complex emerged with the development of the Information Age, though its roots started much earlier, likely as early as the 1920s. Consumer reports about credit worthiness is worth plenty of money, and the association to a person naturally converged on the legal fiction that represented through the Social Security system. By the 1960s, every American could have a report run to determine their viability for borrowing, simply with their name, social security number, and birthdate.
This system was expanded dramatically with the development of the internet. By the 1990s, consumer information bureaus had developed information-gathering techniques and standardized procedures to build a vast reporting system to monitor key components of Americans’ lifestyles. This has expanded in recent decades, all through the continued development of smartphones and other commonplace technologies like GPS devices, to capture a wealth of information for the purpose of making decisions that maximize consumer motivations.
On the other end of the information-gathering industry, the public relations apparatus has splintered into endless subdomains of niche demographics. Marketing data has become granular enough to accommodate vast specificities across many domains inclusive of age, family size, hobbies, religion, job role, job satisfaction, favorite color, known associates, favorite snack, criminal background, favorite music, and ethnicity.
Further, the echoes of the Cold War still resonate, and there is incentive to advance abject fear of an unseen terror. The purpose, however, is to keep people focused on media, which increases the price they can sell for advertisers to place their promotional material.
This entire apparatus of attention-fighting and background data has become the Media-Information Complex. A report of a person’s information associated with a specific niche is worth $10-150, and the anonymized data without the name attached is worth $20 on an open market. All of it is permitted by the United States Government, but it’s debatable if it’s even constitutional.
New Antagonists
In 2016, an outsider was elected as US President: Donald Trump. This caused massive chunks of the world’s accustomed methods to rapidly shift. Donald Trump imposed tariffs on China in 2017, and it devastated the Chinese way of life, and much of the establishment wanted him gone.
Around the same time, 2018 saw the emergence of machine learning technology, which allows computers to make rules through thousands of trained repetitions of the same inputs. The idealists had a new idol in this so-called AI supremacy.
In 2020, a disease called COVID-19 emerged as a pandemic across the world, starting from Wuhan, China. It was probably a biochemical weapon, but likely emerged before it was sufficiently complete. The government response across every major Western nation was a direct message pulled from Chinese propaganda: everyone must stay in their homes and shelter in place, civilization must stop, and everyone must conform to the Great Reset.
The political power in 2020 to sufficiently stop everyone from acting had arisen because most Western society had not experienced a direct war in their lifetime. If they had, they would have understood that they were being fed propaganda, and would have had a significant-enough skepticism of their leaders’ intentions.
Even so, by 2022 everything had resumed as it was in 2019, mostly unscathed but with many lessons learned. The credibility of all authority that had advanced the Great Reset’s talking points was gone. The aristocracy’s narrative had been ignored.
The machine learning revolution has trend repetitions of the 1990s internet: excessive spending that will lead to a coming collapse in the trend within a few years, followed by a revival when the technology becomes boring. The damage, though, has been the low-quality regurgitation of endless near-useless content across the internet, flooding computers with worthless data that drives an even further deluge of unfiltered tripe.
And, in the midst of all this, economic decisions beginning in the 1990s have led to an unmanageable United States government debt. It has been the most favorable reserve currency of the world, but it’s likely not a sustainable plan for a nation’s currency to be backed by more debt in its currency, which was the effect of Richard Nixon removing the dollar from being backed by any standard. They may adopt a different backing, such as blockchain, but only time will tell.
Where We Are Now
The United States is composed of 3 gigantic economic powerhouses:
- The Military-Industrial Complex, which has given us lots of tech and keeps America very safe, at the expense of tons of money.
- Big Medical/Pharma Complex, which keeps people alive for longer, but wants people to always be partially sick.
- The Media-Information Complex, which gives everyone what they want, but also tries to turn us all into addicts and passively monitors everything we do.
These systems only persist as long as the American public continues to be over-educated consumers who don’t self-produce. As long as that persists, the political question ends up being where the resources to generate the products are coming from: local American factories or foreign imports. As it stands now in 2025, almost everything in the country is drawn from foreign countries, with Big Pharma being a larger financial product nationwide than manufacturing.
This entire consumption/production system will stay stable, presuming the following:
- American citizens keep on happily consuming without enough civil unrest to overthrow the current order.
- The United States government can keep funding and subsidizing Americans’ consumption.
- The means of production never sufficiently goes away.
- No major upsets arise, such as a constitutional amendment for privacy or the US government defaulting on its debt.
The West in general, but especially America, has had most of its populace living comparatively better than royalty from 200 years ago. Even when hardship comes, it’s still more pleasant to the body to live in an inner-city homeless shelter than in a mud hut.
However, consider this thought experiment for a minute:
- Imagine Person A has a gigantic estate with many possessions in it.
- Person A hires Person B to maintain it, and Person B becomes to overseer of every aspect of the estate.
- After many years, Person A will lose power, simply from inexperience and disconnection from his own estate.
- If Person A were to ever get rid of Person B, they’d be utterly helpless, and worse off than before they had Person B manage anything.
In that sense, the American greatness of the 19th century or early 20th century can’t be revisited. It can only emerge as something new in light of current events.