The Great American Experiment

This is really about science, what we do here, what we say, how we speculate, hypothesize, not only about what is right but what is proper in an never-ending understanding, or struggle to navigate not just the waves which have already crossed our bow but to foresee and brace ourselves for what lies ahead. For, it was our fore fathers who ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in the name of reason and saw not our nakedness of body but the absence of dignity to our soul, stripped clean not by serpents but by tyrants and evident in their own nakedness, their short-comings, cast into elitism that they might use it and use it they did. They, against what might be considered sanity, abandoned a sanctuary of elitism, at least on paper, and engaged in nation-building. They gave us not only the Great Republic but the basis for the greatest scientific experiment of our species.

The myriad of data, facts, evidence that swarm about reasoning men like gnats pecking at their ears, distracting them, encompassing them to a breaking point of madness, serve their master as if he were the slave and remain unruly until reasoning men corral them into scientific scaffolding, breaking them down to stimuli, response, confounding or contributable factors. Thus, we create a framework for any scientific experiment: stimuli cast upon the subject followed by an observable, controlled means of measuring the response. With confounding factors set aside, the results can then be clearly attributable to factors intentionally and originally introduced. And, so it is with the Great American Experiment.

The above example is the framework used to determine causality. To illustrate this let’s take a common yet complicated topic and simplify it for purposes of clarification. Let’s say we hypothesize that smoking cigarettes causes ill health. To test this we would have to introduce our stimulus, cigarette smoking, to one of two groups of people. One group would receive the stimulus, the other would not. We would then monitor and record the health of these groups for an extended period of time and analyze any effect our stimulus might have had on the health of the group receiving it compared to the health of the group that did not. Of course, we would have to account for external or confounding factors such as genetic, societal and environmental influences. This would mean that both groups would have to have an equal distribution of age, gender, race, ethnicity, occupation, environment, income level, and personality types. Well, this sort of experiment would not only be immoral since you would be intentionally sickening a healthy group of human beings, it would more than likely be illegal as well and is why most causal experiments are performed on rats and other unfortunate animals.

Because of this, most human behavioral studies are correlative, meaning scientists start with an observed result or phenomenon and look back through the history of those people exhibiting the result searching for correlations or connections with similar behaviors among different groups of people that could account for such a result, i.e. 90% of those with lung cancer were found to have smoked cigarettes regularly during their lifetime.

The correlative argument is always a weaker argument than a causal one because it is an ex-post facto study and your subjects are chosen because of their defect and one can never really be sure if there was some inherent factor that led them to acquire this defect. This is what the tobacco industry has held their hat onto for many years; no one could prove causality with regards to tobacco and cancer because ethics would forbid a causal experiment in humans. However, in the case of the Great American Experiment we were blessed with a truly unintentional (seemingly), and miraculous causal study.

For simplification’s sake, let us pretend that our republic was the brainchild of one man, George Washington. Also let us pretend George Washington has access to a computer with software installed that allows him to test his nation-building skill, sort of a very, very early version of SimCity. So, from his knowledge of history and philosophy he enters in to the program a form of government that has precise, limited, enumerated federal powers overseeing a consortium of states competing against one another in a completely free market economy. The states are extremely diverse in their customs and social norms but all have a strong religious foundation and are mostly agricultural. Some are more populous than others, some employ slavery as a means of labor, and all trade regularly between themselves and the world. In fact, one of the federal powers or obligations is to keep commerce regular between the states and to prohibit some states "ganging up on others."

After a long night of setting his contingencies, he plugs in all his data and he lets it fly. He goes to sleep that night, is busy with the harvest for a couple of days, has business downtown and a few days later returns to his computer to see how his nation-building has worked out. To his amazement, over the last few days his computer nation has aged 150 years. The nation spans clear across the continent. There are more states than he’d ever imagined composed of all types of people from all over the world. He reads the history log to see what has transpired and it is more than he can comprehend, wars to save their independence, struggles to expand, the Great Civil War, the abolition of slavery, the industrial revolution and the building of cities at a scale and speed not seen in human history before, the advent of electricity and the electrical grid, massive advances in medicine, the hospital, the airplane, air travel, and of course world war. He is shocked, overjoyed, astonished and dismayed and needs days to literally weed through what has happened and what was the overall effect of his actions.

Now, the thing is, as a scientist if he is going to construct policy based on past performance and results he needs to look at data, not anecdotal evidence, though it can be so tempting to do so. To do so he needs to quantify his results then act accordingly upon them. Unfortunately, he is not a scientist so he will get caught up in the human drama. Instead of seeing history as an experiment he sees it as human drama. Instead of asking what caused society to take such giant leaps beyond anyone’s imagination he’s gotten caught up in the giant leaps themselves. This would certainly be more than understandable for an 18th century man as it would be for the 20th century men who were born into such advancements.

Along with mind-boggling metropolis, he looks at the swarms of people who have come from Europe and Asia, from destitute poverty, from famine to a country open and expanding in an unprecedented manner and although seeing how they’ve improved their lives, it is an existence he would not consider. He is a gentleman in a time of gentlemen and this future for him seems harsh, cold and alien yet he understands the greatness of this society. He becomes disenchanted with the power of business over the people. He reads of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the death of innocent workers. He reads how miners are paid in scrip, a currency only good in their company store and understands slavery still exists but in differing forms. Though man’s unkindness to his fellow man existed well in his time as did nobility, it appears the latter has no place in a modern, future world.

He sits for days contemplating how he could improve conditions for people in this world he’s created and finally comes to a decision. Direct intervention would be far from natural in the course of things and would most likely require his constant meddling from that point on. So, he decides to create a new generation within the program to do the "meddling," one which has a sense of fairness, compassion, intelligence, means and the willingness to change the world for the better. His timeline is 1920 and he sets this new generation in place as adults, in positions of power, wealth and influence and hopes for the best.

Exhausted from the mere inference of the future world he is delighted to return to 18th century life. He tends to work on his farm, his horses and takes to reading by the fire at night. He contemplates drafting a letter to Franklin imploring him to hold off on his experiments with lightning. When needing inspiration he grabs his Cicero, his John Locke and he straightens out the bird’s nest in his mind and he relaxes, resolute.
The following night he returns, apprehensively to the computer and almost squints as he braces himself to see the fruit of his efforts. He sees a society now into the 21st century but he immediately bypasses the cultural phenomena which he can’t comprehend, ubiquitous cell phones, the obsession with fame, the mass abandonment of what he knows as morality, trying to concentrate on the state of the republic he started. He’s learned from his last intervention not to be distracted by these cultural obscenities, these perversions of personal liberty, but to focus on the current structure of government.

He is astonished and appalled to learn of the size of the federal government. He understands the need for a standing army, something that he originally opposed but he’s read the log on World War II and the Cold War and understands its necessity but is outraged of the American military outposts (and their costs) throughout the world; it reminds him of the British Empire. He is baffled by enormous federal programs such as Social Security, Medicare and the recently pass Healthcare Reform. What happened to the enumerated powers? How did these things possibly get by the Supreme Court? Not that aid to citizens is wrong but it was never intended to be the role of the federal government. That’s what the 10th amendment was for, reserving all other powers than those enumerated to the federal government for the states. The states should be providing these programs if they so choose and if they work they will compete with other states for populace and hence power in the House. This is how it was meant to be. He sees the states engaging in no competition other than that for federal funds. He reads the logs on the Constitutional Revolution of 1936 and he understands. He sees the turmoil in society of the sixties and the programs of Lyndon Johnson exploding the role of the federal government and he is outraged.

Then he realizes this is the result of the group of people he inserted in his last intervention. Their thoughts, philosophies have spun out of control and have created a United States he cannot recognize in people and policy. He sees his great mistake, his focus on the negatives of capitalism and how he overlooked the many advances and benefits. Now this cancer was planted by his own hand and it has destroyed the liberty of the American people as federal government is now involved in everything from toothbrushes to transportation. He no longer understands the word "regulate" as this society seems to think it means "restrict" when he and the other founders meant it as keeping "regular." So instead of the federal government keeping regular commerce between the states it is controlling and restricting it essentially nullifying any powers granted to those very same states. The United States of America no longer are something but now is something and that something is tyrannical.

He sees a federal deficit of $14 trillion, total annual federal spending at $4 trillion all not backed by anything other than the confidence of others in paper and is astonished the economy has yet to collapse. He sits back depressed, concerned thinking what to do. He realizes he has one thing on his side: history. American history and the reverence thereof has taken a stronghold in a major sector of this society he’s created. It’s not just blind patriotism but a deep understanding of the basic ideals of a nation whose founders saw in all men the inalienable right to be free. He knows, he’s seen the logs, that Americans will die by the scores to preserve this, to keep this the vital part of their identity.

He realizes that his meddling in the past has done more harm than good and he is resolved not to do it again. He is saddened though as he sees the future for this society to which its members are currently blind. They do not have hundreds of years of perspective as is available to him now. They only know the world from their short lives. Because of his meddling they believe government is responsible to save them and not vice versa. So he will wait. He will watch because he knows no government ultimately has the power to do such and any government that would try is doomed to fail.

As the monetary schemes fail there will be riots as the people are withdrawn from the addiction of entitlement. It is the natural course of events. The ineptitude and impotence of the federal government will become more and more apparent as each layer is peeled from the rotting onion that is corrupt monetary policy. The federal government will implode unto itself resulting in food riots, violence, panic and despair but not anything greater than other generations have faced. The saving grace, the lifeline, will be the states and the rise of their power again, building from the ground up, eliminating entire levels of local government in order to just survive. The spontaneous organization of people at the ground level to look not to government but to look to their neighbors, their church, their temple, secure their family and then see who needs help. Once stability is restored the economy will start again but not with imports from foreign lands because their collapse will be far greater, far more violent, far more starvation as they are ripped from the American tit of consumption.

The hope, Washington knows, lies within the people. He’s seen them at Valley Forge. He’s read the logs on the Western Expansion, the Emancipation, Gettysburg, the Panama Canal, the Great Depression, Normandy, Iwo Jima, the Apollo missions; he knows what’s in their hearts, in our hearts. He knows that Washington must stay out of our way and so he can allow our heart and strength to forge us, as generations before us had, through a time we were born to endeavor.