Inert America: Crossroads to the Future

by Gary Griffin

  Poverty as a social problem is not so easily solved, eliminated, or healed as is so often portrayed on TV by popping a little white pill. This particular problem requires something more than a drug created in a lab.

  Money, many think, is such a drug. The idea that if we throw enough money at it, the problem will be solved is especially prevalent in American thinking. Wrong! On the surface, money does seem to solve certain aspects of this problem called poverty. But if you look closely, you’ll realize that money only alleviates the symptoms of the problem, and the problem persists as it has throughout human history. When money is readily available to a large number of people, it masks the problem and provides temporary relief.

  For America to remain a prosperous nation for all future generations, poverty must be defeated. It’s often depicted as an ailment that afflicts only select people. However, if we view poverty as the inability to access the basic necessities of life, then poverty becomes systemic. It is systemic for two reasons. First, the Republicans were in control from 2000-2006, and they established social policies that made the current economic system into one that supports, enforces, and reinforces the inequality and unequal access to resources. This system puts the control of those resources into the hands of a few because it’s the hands of a few who control all the money in America. These people live lavishly, and yet they don’t work? How is this so in America? Who are these people? How did they get to such an exalted position? In short, the pendulum swung too far to the right.

  When I first began conducting research for this book, and specifically for this chapter, I thought that the major social ill that has imprisoned America was poverty. As I dug into the issues with more analytical and discerning eyes, I realized that to understand and address poverty, we must also recognize and address the partners in crime—greed and division. It is, after all, the three of these working together in cohort that create and reinforce one another. It there was no greed, then poverty would be eliminated. If the was no poverty, greed would disappear. If there was no division such as by race, sex, morality, or social class, then both poverty and greed would find no safe havens. It is through such divisions that we are made weak as a nation. We are divided and our power is transferred to political parties, the government, and the very social structure that enforces and reinforces these conditions in America. It seems strange that an individual’s power is transferred in such a way, but this is truly how it works.

  The social contract that is represented by the U.S. Constitution supports the very social structures that make this possible. I will discuss this in more detail in chapter 5. It is through this transference of power that the political economy of the United States is created, and thereby such divisions facilitate both poverty and greed through the inequalities that persist throughout the social structure. These form the dominions of power that hold people captive. These dominions serve their master and their master is intent upon enslaving the population through these centralized mechanisms such as political, social, economic, and philosophical structures. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but even in America, you are not free.

  Freedom, from this perspective, in America is a false illusion. This illusion is part of our problem because we have been led to believe that it is part of the American dream. The American dream is just that—a dream based on an ideal. This ideal is a set of related ideas that serve to keep Americans working toward a goal. These ideals support capitalism as the economic system. When political parties control social policies and create those policies in forms that give control and advantage to those within certain social positions, it is an abuse and misuse of government power.

  There’s nothing wrong with goals, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with work. Hard work is the cornerstone of what makes America tick. Work is a necessary part of life and living. It becomes a problem when only a few work to support the many in achieving that ideal. Such has become the state of affairs in America. Only certain segments of the population are working—the middle class—the rest are along for the ride.

  This problem doesn’t manifest itself clearly when there are many jobs and everyone is at work. However, when there’s a severe downturn in the economy such as was experienced in 2008 and 2009, this problem becomes much more recognizable. Unfortunately, this problem manifests itself by putting more people into the category of poverty. Although poverty may be relative for some; it at least forces them to feel a sense of lack. When this situation occurs, there often is a transfer of political power such as witnessed in the 2008 elections with the Democrats now in control. One of the reasons that there is such drastic shift in power is because more people have moved toward the poverty line. Democrats, once in control, begin to put into place social programs to support people in times of need.16 This may not create jobs, but it certainly addresses a lack of access to resources felt by so many in the population. These types of social policies are said to support the economic system of socialism. In short, the pendulum begins to swing back to the left. This creates the second problem—it makes people more dependent on the government, rather than fostering independence and self-sufficiency. The fiscal problem is that someone has to pay for these social programs. In the United States, these programs are paid for by the collection of taxes on income, which comes from people who are working. When unemployment is high, this places that burden squarely on the shoulders of the few who do have jobs. This solution doesn’t solve the social problem of poverty. In fact it creates another whole host of problems, and the cure is almost worse than the problem. Poverty is not eliminated; it often causes the problem to persist over a longer period of time. What is this creature called poverty that has plagued man since the beginning of time? Is it just part of the human condition, and we must be content to deal with it?

  In short, work is the only cure for poverty. Work is how we earn money, which represents the value of our time and labor; money is the medium we use to exchange out time and labor in order to acquire the basic necessities of life.17 When there is no money, there is lack. In short, you’ve just been introduced to that social condition called poverty, and he is a constant companion to your pain and suffering. A simple definition, then, might be that poverty is the lack of resources to meet the basic needs for subsistence and survival. In economic terms, it is consumption. Consumption, however, is not independent of production. We must produce in order to consume. This translates into an economic system and a political system that support work for everyone in the United States population. Everyone who is capable of working must work in the twenty-first century to support and maintain the country as a prosperous nation.18

  The total destruction of American society is at hand. Although this statement elicits stark images of devastation, it need not be so. This type of destruction won’t happen in the same way a building is demolished. Nor will it happen like the explosion of a bomb. Perhaps you’ve seen such images on TV when a building is imploded or seen bombs dropped in a war movie. Such images are dramatic and induce fear.

  I’m not talking about imploding buildings. This type of destruction is slow, subtle, and almost unnoticeable. It’s social change that I am describing. The changes we are experiencing right now in America are social changes that will result in the destruction of the existing social structures of our society. America is undergoing massive social changes. These social changes are reflected in the tearing down of existing social, political, economic, and even philosophical social structures that are the essence of the American ideal. These structures are the foundation of American society.

  A good analogy of this process of change is illustrated by an apple left on a table over a period of time. If left untouched, the apple eventually rots and then decays. The physical evidence that an apple once existed is no longer evident by any of the senses humans have become accustomed to relying on. You can’t touch, taste, hear, smell, or see it. It’s gone. At most, we can only deduce that it once existed. We know this is the truth because something is left be
hind—seeds. Whereas a single apple may provide a person with food for a single meal, when the seeds are planted, nurtured, and reach maturity as an apple tree, then we have many apples that can feed many people for many meals over many years. Such is the cycle of life. We are born, we live, and we die.

  All things that make up our lives—our social reality—must conform to this same cycle of life. Social structures, too, are things—objects, if you will. These objects must conform to the established universal laws or the natural laws that control our universe.19 It is unavoidable, and it cannot be violated. Social systems are objects too, and they also have a life cycle. When they cease to meet the needs of society—in this case, America—they, too, must rot, decay, and cease to exist. Here seeds are also left behind that can also be planted for a new beginning. A brighter day is dawning, and a new America will emerge if we simply plant the seeds to make it happen. While our transition period seems chaotic and random, it is not. It is all a part of the natural cycle of life controlled by universal laws.

  It’s a silly man who thinks anything can be created that does not have to comply with the laws of the universe that were established before the dawn of time. The laws of physics must be adhered to even within social systems. One of the laws states that no two objects can occupy the same time-space continuum or else they will collide.20 A political system is an object. An economic system is an object. American society is an object. To replace the old object with new ones, the old one must die, decay, and cease to exist. What are left, however, are seeds. We are faced with planting new seeds for our society. These seeds of our society can be planted, and a new system can emerge to replace the old. Such a transition from the old social structures to the new and the accompanying human experience of that change is aptly termed social change.21 What is social change?22 Why is this important of us to understand? How is this connected to poverty?

  SOCIETY AS A SYSTEM

  Although most people rarely think of American society as a system, when framed from within this context, the current situation in twenty-first century America begins to make more sense. Let’s define society as a first step. Society or human society is the manner or condition in which the members of a community live together for their mutual benefit. By extension, society denotes the people of a region or country, sometimes even the world, taken as a whole. Used in the sense of an association, a society is a body of individuals outlined by the bounds of functional interdependence. More broadly, a society is a political, economic, social, or philosophical infrastructure, made up of a varied collection of individuals. Human societies are often organized according to their primary means of subsistence—food, shelter, and clothing. People of many nations united by common political and cultural traditions, beliefs, or values are sometimes also said to be a society (such as Judeo-Christian, Eastern, and Western). Admittedly, a society such as American society can be all of these; it is a complex system of individuals who live, work, and play together.

  A system is a set of interacting or interdependent entities forming an integrated whole. The concept of an integrated whole can also be stated in terms of a system embodying a set of relationships that are differentiated from relationships of the set to other elements, and from relationships between an element of the set and elements not a part of the relational regime. The scientific research field that is engaged in the study of the general properties of systems includes systems theory, cybernetics, dynamical systems, and complex systems. They investigate the abstract properties of the matter and organization, searching concepts and principles that are independent of the specific domain, substance, type, or temporal scales of existence. Most systems share common characteristics, including:

  Systems have structure, as defined by parts and their composition;

  Systems have behavior that involves inputs, processing, and outputs of material, energy or information;

  Systems have interconnectivity: the various parts of a system have functional as well as structural relationships between each other.

  The term system may also refer to a set of rules that governs behavior or structure. American society is such a system. It is dynamic, and it is deterministic. The dynamical system concept is a mathematical formalization for any fixed rule that describes the time dependence of a point’s position in its ambient space. Examples include the mathematical models that describe the swinging of a clock pendulum, the flow of water in a pipe, and the number of fish each spring in a lake.

  At any given time a dynamical system has a state given by a set of real numbers (a vector) that can be represented by a point in an appropriate state space (a geometrical manifold). Small changes in the state of the system correspond to small changes in the numbers. The evolution rule of the dynamical system is a fixed rule that describes what future states follow from the current state. The rule is deterministic: for a given time interval only one future state follows from the current state.23

  A deterministic system is a conceptual model of the philosophical doctrine of determinism24 applied to a system for understanding everything that has and will occur in the system, based on the physical outcomes of causality. In a deterministic system, every action or cause produces a reaction or effect and every reaction, in turn, becomes the cause of subsequent reactions. The totality of these cascading events can theoretically show exactly how the system will exist at any moment in time.25

  The word system in its meaning here has a long history that can be traced back to Plato (Philebus), Aristotle (Politics) and Euclid (Elements). It had meant total, crowd, or union in even more ancient times, as it derives from the verb sunìstemi, meaning uniting or putting together. In engineering and physics, a physical system is the portion of the universe that is being studied.26 Engineering also has the concept of a system that refers to all of the parts and interactions between parts of a complex project.

  In physics, energy comes from the Greek term energeia meaning activity or operation and energos meaning active or working; is a scalar physical quantity that describes the amount of work that can be performed by a force, an attribute of objects and systems that is subject to a conservation law. Different forms of energy include kinetic, potential, thermal, gravitational, sound, light, elastic, and electromagnetic energy. The forms of energy are often named after a related force. In American society, this force is human beings, and the energy is human creativity.

  Any form of energy can be transformed into another form, but the total energy always remains the same. The conservation of energy is a consequence of the fact that the laws of physics do not change over time. Although the total energy of a system does not change with time, its value may depend on the frame of reference.

  In physics, power is the rate at which work is performed or energy is converted. It is energy per unit of time. As a rate of change of work done or the energy of a subsystem, power is

  where P is power, W is work and t is time. The dimension of power is energy divided by time. In American society, when human power is restricted, work goes undone.

  THE CHAOS OF SOCIAL CHANGE

  Chaos theory is an area of inquiry in mathematics, physics, and philosophy that studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.27 This sensitivity is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect.28 Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.

  Social change is neither a new idea nor a new topic of discussion for social scientists. Theodore Caplow in his book America Social Trends provides an excellent overview of the various theories that have arisen to
explain this human experience of social change.29 He writes that nineteenth-century observers in Europe and America were interested in finding the magical key that explained unprecedented growth in population and production that was accompanied by new machines and new forms of organization. “The quest for the magic key eventually produced three influential models of social change: the linear progress model, the transformation model, and the apocalyptic model.”30

  The linear progress model presents social development as a steady upward ascent of mankind at predictable stages marked by parallel improvements in technology, social organization, and moral excellence. With this theory, social problems were expected to solve themselves. The transformation model predicted the modernization of all societies as traditional forms of social organization transitioned to modern ones.31 Finally, the apocalyptic model describes modern societies as a change in the fundamental social fabric that would make them different, almost unrecognizable. This version is best illustrated by Marx’s version of class struggles where the proletariat wins and abolishes all social classes.

  Most of these grand theories have failed badly to explain social change because they have inadequately met the task for which they were designed. Namely, they failed to clearly establish the connection between scientific-technological progress and social change. This failure came in spite of the fact that clear evidence showed a direct effect of technology on social organization where technology, population, and productivity began an unmatched upward trend beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century. The easiest thing to do was to equate social progress with technological progress; however, the two don’t always go hand in hand. Social progress often lags behind technological progress. A modern interpretation may be that social progress is a lagging indicator of productivity, while technological progress is a leading indicator.32 Such indicators are easy to measure when they consist of people and things, but they’re much more difficult when they deal with the invisible things such as beliefs that define the human experience. I will discuss more fully in chapter 4 how these beliefs are just as important to deal with because these beliefs form the basis of human action. It is action that is required to bring about the systemic changes we need in twenty-first century America.