This problem is particularly confusing for Americans, because, more than any other nation on earth, we are a hodgepodge descended from Europeans, Africans, Asians and native Americans. We are Christians, Jews and atheists. We are capitalists, fascists and socialists. We are a dynamic conflict of many competing interests all bent on getting more than their share of the national pie. No student of society, government or economics can look upon us without a sense of bewildered amazement. If life is a temporary state of dynamically imbalanced conditions, and it is, America is certainly very much alive, but that such a chaos of conflicting schemas can flourish is due in large part to the stupidity of Americans who resolutely refuse to perceive inconsistencies where they exist. Only those who are stupid enough to try to understand what is going on find that it could not possibly "Make sense". Oddly, there is both security and danger in the incomprehensibility of the American experience: we are too complex to be wrecked by deliberate planning, but we have lost control of our own fate.

The basic problem of America is one of breadth without depth. With so much to draw on in terms of both human and natural resources, national character was shaped by pragmatic, short-term policies geared to specific and often isolated situations. So often, as both the New Dealers and Watergate Gang found, solutions became problems: the reaction to bad business and bad politics was bad government. The only thing we do not have is an American way of wrecking the country. American stupidity is creative in that there seems to be no limit on the ways we can find to take a bad situation and make it worse.

Ironically, the national commitment to our own well-being has become a fatal break preventing us from achieving the progress politicians are always proclaiming or promising. Progress is a matter of passing beyond an existing state of affairs. In a material sense, this means developing a higher standard of living, and this we have achieved. However, attaining the physical comforts of material prosperity has made us both proud and uneasy, as there has been no progress toward peace of mind. Behind our pride exists the gnawing realization that immediate compassion and concern for the downtrodden and dispossessed cannot be converted into legislative programs of any significant long-term success. Slums, apathy, ignorance and stupidity remain as real and potent as ever before. In human terms, America represents little in terms of progress or even promise for the future.

stupidity.com

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