Cultures rise and fall like the stock market, only it takes longer and no one has come up with a really good index to tell you what’s happening. My guess is that American culture has been in a bear market since sometime around 1980, with the fiscal bear market only catching up to the larger reality in the last year or so.
These days you can clearly sense the cultural collapse just by watching our inability to deal with the fiscal one. To be sure, our leaders in politics, academia and the media are determined and decisive but then so are a lot of inmates in mental institutions. What’s lacking is logic, pragmatism, imagination, and common sense. Instead, they toss out trillions like confetti and call it policy.
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In fact, almost every elite institution – politics, academia, think tanks, the media – has failed us. These institutions have destroyed our national environment, constitution, integrity, reputation and communities.
To reverse what is happening, we must create strong alternative ideas and hardy alternative institutions and communities, a counter culture that rejects the myths of Washington and Wall Street just as, in the 1960s, a generation put the establishment on the defensive or in the closet.
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