Reviving the American Spirit

its the stories we tell ourselves

It seems America has lost her collective identity or at least seen a fracturing of it. But, what does it even mean to be an American outside of the obvious fact of citizenship. I write this as people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are becoming the subjects of frankly unhinged attacks (linked). These people who embody the ideals of human existence and the American Dream are increasily under siege for trivial or completely made up things, fake news?! You cannot only split up the Musk/Bezos Stans and haters among these 2 groups, the celebratory ones and the self flagellating, but also roughly divide the country along these lines. The celebratory group generally get the incredible accomplishments of these business magnates and the qualities that make America great, liberty, opportunity, equality, and justice to name a few. The self loathing bunch believes society would be better off without these evil capitalists and America was founded in sin, irredeemable, and the American Experiment must be torn down. Look at the twitter trending section, any article from Vox or the Onion if you want confirmation of this. Even a majority of my colleagues in the technology industry feel this way writing about the faults of America and character defects of Elon Musk, a person they don’t even know, while sipping on their cold brew during work hours of their 6 figure tech job; I suppose self loathing is a luxury reserved for the rich. They demonize Zuckerberg, while pandering to China. They ban new housing developments then blame the ‘billionaires’ for extraction. Success can only be achieve by oppressing someone else. This attitude, even meme-y as it may be, needs to stop. At best it’s annoying and at worst its culturally destructive. We should be celebrating Zuck, Elon, Bezos as heroes, and telling their tales of conquest and dragon slaying instead of hurdling unhinged attacks their way and flooding everyones social media feed with hit pieces on them. The stories we tell ourselves, shape who we are and who we will become, and we have forgotten our tales of old and let the self loathers replace them with their tales of doom, extraction, and sin.

America Founded on Greed?

Rockefeller built Standard Oil through partially monopolistic practices and helped to build the nations original infrastructure and advanced the living stands of thousands in the process. So was Rockefeller an evil profit seeking capitalist, using monopolistic tactics to run his competitors in the oil industry out of business for his gain? Or was Rockefeller a Titan of industry giving thousands good paying jobs and serving his nation by building up the railroad and oil industries?

America Founded on Racism?

America allowed slavery at its founding and was also the first country to end and outlaw the practice. So is America systematically racist because the country once supported the institution of slavery or is America the greatest force of for moral progress because it fought a civil war to end this evil practice while everyone else considered slavery normal and morally acceptable?

The facts of history are unchanging, but the stories we derive from them are malleable. Our modern day storytellers, the media, public schools, universities, and the internet have adopted the narrative that Rockefeller was evil and America is founded on sin, ergo irredeemable. While their stories aren’t necessarily lies, they are culturally damaging and a terrible reading of the history. These stories teach that man is inherently selfish, sinful, and destructive. Therefore, you must spend your life in a state of repentance or sacrifice. The inevitable conclusion, set you on a depressing path of servitude, and non-achievement. It’s also no coincidence that the same self loathers also lack any sense of humor, how could they if they truly believed this idea of ‘original sin’.

The worldview from the self loather’s stories is one with no belief in material advancement or the power of the mind. This manifests itself in the social sphere through all the virtue signalers trying to appear less racist, less homophobic, less classist, and so on than their neighbor. They want to advance up the social ladder of perceived virtue as they no longer feel they can advance in the realm physical and material wealth so they renounce it. It’s why you can’t even crack a joke about this pronoun ridiculousness. It manifests in their lifestyles of minimalism, mediation, yoga, diary-free milk (like WTF?!) and the carpe diem mentally, which amounts to carefully packaged nihilism. If you can’t achieve material success, renounce materialism all together. This appears in the physical world as our cities are literally crumbling before our eyes. Our infrastructure is in decay, the planes go slower now than in the 1960’s, the TSA slows down air travel to a halt, we can’t build bridges in under a decade when the golden gate took 2.5 years, our cities have unfiltered water, and our forests are literally burning around us. But do you use phrases like ‘believe science’, ‘Black Lives Matter’, or ‘cancel X,Y, or Z’. you do? Great, you are now more virtuous have redeemed your original sin, and together we have made progress and solved all our problems. However, virtue doesn’t build bridges, filter water, or dig tunnels.

Normally, I would say ‘Au revoir’, but America is the worlds final stand against the great stagnation of humankind as Europe kills itself with excessive regulation and Asia looks to create cheap rip offs of US inventions. This is the last place of freedom and inspiration on earth and we must fight this cultural decay. The alternative is to amuse yourself with travel, video games, pop culture, instagram, and day long European wine tours events till you die. However, in the early words of Socrates and later Hamming, the unexamined life isn’t worth living.

Some of my favorite stories are those involving Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, and Phil Knight.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the creator of Nike

These are the stories we should take inspiration from, discuss, and teach to our children. Outside of the phenomenal entrepreneurs and blockbuster companies, these are really tales of heroism, conquering unimaginable odds, the slaying of Goliath, and a celebration of the essence of human existence. The group of rebellious people that formed Uber were the 300 spartans lead by the modern day Leonidas, Travis Kalanick, revolutionizing transportation while battling the Persian legions of yellow taxicabs. America has always been a land of upstarts who wanted to chart a different course from the orthodoxy. It’s called the American Experiment for a reason. Let’s stop revising our history to craft new stories. Instead of tearing down statues and condemning America by cherry picking points in the past, let’s tell the tales of lewis and clark, the Apollo program, MLK, or Elon Musk to show our incredible progress and inspire us to go further. At its core American is a distillation of the spirit of exploration and entrepreneurship. As we explore the final frontier, in god we trust. Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg should be our modern day heroes, not villains. They are the embodiment of the spirit of building and dream.

At a deeper level we ought to tell stories that celebrate human existence instead of condemning it. Those who shame others into decisions or try to suppress speech via their feelings of equity, justice, or virtue have abandoned their minds. The present day woke mob and endless social media virtue signaling, are appeals to emotion, subtle forms of coercion, a complete rejection of the minds ability to perceive reality. Religion also encourages the abandonment of the mind by way of accepting dogmas in scripture. However, the great entrepreneurs don’t believe in religious miracles and don’t cave to the mob of society. They don’t instinctively reject popular opinion, but reason independently, from the ground up, and resist any pressure to conform. They embody the belief in the power of the mind, hence are the purist representation of human existence. Just days before the Wright brothers took flight The NY Times printed an infamous piece about how flight was at least a century away. These entrepreneurs observed the objective truths of the world, reasoned from first principles to give humanity these “miracles” like flight and currently AI, mRNA vaccines, and self driving cars. They combined the power of the mind with the objective laws of physics to will their creations into existence. They reject coercion by any human mob, religion, or virtue signal, and those who base decisions off immutable characteristics or various dogmatic beliefs. They idolize the mind, rationality, and raw ability, hence are only compelled to act by the reason of their mind, uncompromising morality. That is what it means to be truly alive.

America is the best representation and celebration of this human spirit. The nation was not founded because of tribal conflict over resources, border wars, or religion but by a group of founders who reasoned about the issues of governance from first principles which yielded the constitution and federalist papers. America is the first country on earth not to believe in the ‘original sin’ of humans but to celebrate the power of the mind and beauty of humans. We must use Elon Musk, Bezos, Christopher Nolan, Elvis Presley and others of exceptional ability who embody the spirit of human achievement to craft our stories. We must tell these stories and draw inspiration from them instead of vilifying them for their exceptional abilities or other minor character flaws. To fix whatever has gone deeply wrong in our culture, we must change the stories we tell ourselves so we can be inspired again, build again, and most importantly dare to dream again.

-Bobby Lee

[1] Morality vs Virtue as I define it at least

Moral - to perceive reality as best you can then do the objectively the right thing

Virtue - to do what you feel is the right thing, which may contradict reality