History

Threading the Needle to Balance Liberty, Commerce, Justice, and Power

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Threading the Needle to Balance Liberty, Commerce, Justice, and Power Figure TR Threaded the Needle I first discovered the magic of a Mercury Dime in my grandparents’ kitchen playing with a toy slot machine. To my young eyes, they were the most beautiful coins I had ever seen. As I grew older, I understood the …

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Reconstructing History, Part 10: Means, Motive, and Opportunity

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The unions and MNCs have rallied behind these efforts to re-construct US history. While rank and file members most likely seek what they see as fairness to minorities in education, the leadership and the MNCs see power and control. They have the means, motive, and opportunity to drive the effort.

Re-constructing History, Part 9: Is the Education Institution a Cult?

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Part 9 IS THE EDUCATION INSTITUTION A CULT? looks at cults and cult tendencies. While calling an entire institution a cult is a stretch, the education institution does exhibit certain cult-like traits.

But even if we do not call something a cult, examining it within a cult-framework may provide some insights into how to address it. This applies not to just the education institution, but to the Trump campaign. If the Trump campaign honestly looks at itself through the lense of the seven signs of a cult, it may learn something about itself and how to address Trump’s high negativity, especially among independent voters.

Margaret Singer, Ph.D. psychologist author of “Cults in Our Midst” stated:

Deprogramming–that is, providing members with information about the cult and showing them how their own decision-making power had been taken away from them.

Restoring critical thinking and effective decision-making needs to be the foundation of all reform and recovery efforts. It is the first cult sign listed in the table above and at the heart of the other six. It is the only viable way to ensure sustainable liberty and prosperity.

Re-constructing History, Part 8: First, Do no Harm

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Part 8 looks at the charge in the Hippocratic Oath, “first, do no harm”.
1619 seeks to re-write American history to show slavery is at the root of every institution in the US. CRT aims to show this as well as with the concepts of institutional racism, white supremacy, white privilege, and white fragility. Part 4 of the Maskirovka series covers these issues. The question is whether the Social Justice Warriors (SJW) employ these concepts to excise a cancer or to kill the current social structures and institutions. If they argue racism is permanently rooted in every social structure and institution in America, then they argue for a wholesale restructuring of American society and new institutions that are not tainted with slavery and racism.

This path does harm on several dimensions. Harm that may be far worse than the disease. There are many sites that provide arguments against CRT and 1619, so I will focus on the harm they cause, regardless of any merit they may possess.

Reconstructing History, Part 7: Conflict, History, and the Future

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Social Justice movements do not try to re-construct American history because they do not like it. They do it to break the historical path dependency and set a new future based on their ideology. The questions are:
Do they have the power to completely break the path?
Will other forces counter-act them?

Reconstructing History, Part 6: Culture, History, and the Future

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Reconstructing History, Part 6: Culture, History, and the Future Culture is a difficult topic. For some, any discussion of culture, especially looking at them objectively for the results they produce, is a third rail. I discussed this at length in Part 5—Does Culture Matter? of the Maskirovka series. Part 5 looks at cultural assessment. The …

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Reconstructing History, Part 5: The Education Institution and Creating History

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Part 5 looks at the Education institution and how it has changed. We may want to say this all happened recently since it is now in the open and parents are challenging this transition of the schools’ role and what they teach. But if we look at the radicalization of the students at our colleges and universities, that simply cannot be true. The education institution radicalized them starting in elementary school, long before they arrived at the universities. Sure, some students were radicalized in the 1960s, but they were nothing compared to the widespread radicalization we see today.

Reconstructing History, Part 4: Multiple Punctured Equilibriums

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Since 2020, the US has gone through a series of trigger events that upset the established order. The two events in 2020, COVID-19 and the George Floyd death, broke a strong path dependency in American history, opening the way for Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project to re-write American history. Then the Virginia elections in Fall 2021 called that newly emerging equilibrium into question. As Americans were starting to sort out these issues, Russia invaded Ukraine, adding further complexity and uncertainty.