#233 - Is America a Failed State?

Today's Big Idea

What does it mean to have faith in your country?

Do you have faith in the currently selected leaders of your country?

Or only part of the country that you agree with politically?

Or maybe you believe in the founding fathers’ ideal of your country after the constitution was signed and the bill of rights added?

Or maybe you believe in a past period of your country’s history?

I don't know. I've never thought about it until now.

I believe in a country like America but one with sound money, personal property rights (which includes rights for all humans, not just one skin color), and that stays out of global conflicts.

This means I don’t believe in America today.

So there's probably not a point in time in my country's history that I could have ever fully believed my country and the government supposed to uphold these hard-fought values.

The US has been "at war" about 93% of the time since the Declaration of Independence.

Some examples of the destructive American machine throughout history include:

The Iraq war was about the Petrodollar. So was Afghanistan. Bin laden used to work with the CIA and his family was Saudi Arabian construction billionaires. Watch the Petrodollar film.

Three countries that were wanted to sell their oil for something other than dollars, like the Euro, were attacked by the US government.

Iraq, Iran, and Egypt, all had dictators overthrown by the US government, each of which was trying to get around the U.S. dollar to sell their oil. Fishy, huh?

The Civil War was about half the country wanting to succeed had little to do with slavery, even though Lincoln gets credit as this great humanitarian.

Vietnam was just a political sham.

Hawaii took over: On Jan. 17, 1893, Hawaii's monarchy was overthrown when a group of businessmen and sugar planters forced Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate.

On and on the list goes.

In fact, for 97% of the time since the signing of the declaration of independence in 1774, the United States has been at war.

Since then, the public narrative feeds the masses through mainstream media, and the industrial education complex (which includes higher education too) has been convincing Americans that we are righteous and just.

America, The Global Bully

The reality is, America has been a bully for years. Since World War 2, we've been raping and pillaging the world under the banner of "democracy" and "freedom" when it's been about money, power, and control.

What makes this possible are men—yes, mostly men, though there are some real warmongering gems of people like Madam Albright in this psychopathic response—that tell themselves stories to justify their actions, such as: "it's for the greater good," and we need to "free the people" by basically destroying them first, so on and so forth.

Power corrupts, and absolute power absolutely corrupts, as Lord Byron said.

This has nothing to do with power and everything to do with human nature and power.

Human beings are not designed to have power this way. Let's take a very quick break to explore and anthropologist observed anecdotes from a hunter-gatherer tribe. Forgive me as I forgot the source, but it went something like this.

Excerpt about shaming the meat.

By understanding a ritual like this, we can get a glimpse into nature's way of evolving human groups and human biology, which were designed to thrive in this group setting since we have removed violence and social rituals like this that would have otherwise created a decentralization of power by keeping everyone on the same level (known as "fierce egalitarianism", you would never have a human amass so much power.

Human Bullying

Another interesting