I started this week evaluating the success of our nation, and concluded that even though we are the sole "superpower", we've become the kind of nation our immigrant ancestors escaped from... that we've lost the freedom they were seeking, and the qualities that made America great.

I spoke of a decline in the literacy of our population, despite having a massive, compulsory education system that has taken the joy of learning and turned it into many wasted, expensive years of drudgery for our children. I related how that government school system was imported and imposed in order to "tame" our freethinking, risk-taking ancestors into a "more suitable" workforce for industry. It has succeeded. As Alfie Kohn wrote in Education Week :

We are living in an age when education is described as an "investment," when school reform is justified by invoking the "need to be competitive in the 21st century." The implication here is that the central function of schools is to turn out adequately skilled employees who will show up on time and do whatever they're told so that corporations can triumph over their counterparts in other countries.

Consider just how true that is. We've come to just accept that school is to prepare us for our future work life. Children are tested and pegged into occupational categories, as early as 2nd grade. We've come to accept that as normal and desirable... it is the path to "success". We set our children on a fixed path toward adulthood... do 12 years of brain-numbing qualification for college admission, then, if we can manage it, 4 or more years to graduate with a degree. Grades become qualification for admission to the corporate world.

Twenty-one years spent qualifying for good pay, and clean working conditions... and work that requires the same sort of quiet compliance students have been trained to accept. Another 40 years of corporate work, being rewarded for the same sort of compliance, and the child can be ready for a comfortable, secure retirement. During that comfortable life, a new generation will have been put into the system, even more eager to follow in the same path. It is the American Dream, isn't it?

There are many failures... many who cannot, or will not, accept the path toward corporate life. Failure has little to do with intelligence, or curiosity, or learning ability. We all know bright people who just didn't fit in. Truth is, those children who in the past would have developed into dynamic, well-rounded citizens are the ones most likely to fail. Those who really wanted to learn, rather than just achieve good grades. Those who could not stifle their natural energy and curiosity are now likely to become problem children. The school system will do everything it can to reform them, to correct them... even drugging them if they act out their dissatisfaction.

Every year it becomes more true... if you want the good life and it's financial rewards, find a way to resign yourself to following the rules. We have a large segment of our population who will spend their whole life having followed the path, to varying degrees of success. They will have spent their whole lives doing what millions of others have done, making no unique contribution, but just "going along".

What kind of citizens does such a system produce? As they were trained to be in school - compliant folk who dare not challenge the system for fear of losing their economic gains. We've reached a point where the majority of us are precisely in that position... satisfied economically by the system, and perfectly willing, even eager, to expand the system that has rewarded servitude. As I recently quoted Robert Higgs as having described us... willing, affluent slaves.

Our nation is divided in many ways, and one of the keys ways is into those who are willing to align themselves to the state and those who are not. There is no doubt in my mind that the willing are now in a majority, and they are increasingly throwing their weight around. Political correctness... enforced verbal and written compliance with the majority... is running rampant. The majority is willing to trade almost anything away in exchange for securing what they have earned through compliance. They are viciously enforcing their position, stifling and driving down those who are less willing or able to conform. Thus we have an ever-increasing prison population, more homelessness, more bankruptcies, more large corporations and fewer small businesses, and more people trapped in unfulfilling lives. The economic gap widens between the willing, affluent slaves and the rest of us.

We are becoming a nation by mob rule, and it's an ugly mob when you look beneath the surface. It's a mob that has been trained and rewarded by government... so well trained that it can no longer even recognize what our government has become... willing to vacantly accept what they know to be deception.

Remember, if you can, that in our nation's heyday, indeed in every free human state, rewards were earned by those who risked more, strived more, worked harder, and worked "outside the box". Despite that state being enormously successful, it is almost gone, replaced by a big-government system that rewards compliant mediocrity. Cradle-to-grave security is what we seem to seek, and we seem to be willing to give up all of our former greatness to get it.

As a measure of how far we have sagged toward mindless conformity, consider:

1.  The blind apathy of much of our citizenry toward a war that most who are paying attention see as an outrageous escapade. Barely half of us are really against it, and many only because it's an abject defeat and costing us too much. The compliant are willing to look away from the thousands of wasted lives and still support their government benefactors.

2. That we now have a gross percentage of our population imprisoned... ignored and accepted by those who are just glad it isn't them. The compliant are willing to pay to have the non-compliant out of sight.

3. That we're just watching, and hoping, as our mammoth Social Security blanket is about to cause huge economic problems, either for those who have counted on it or for our children who much fund it... or both. The compliant are just waiting, and trusting that somebody besides them will suffer to make it continue.

I could go on endlessly with other examples. New examples are created faster than one can keep track of them. What I've tried to show is just how "in bed", complacent, and compliant we have become with government, and what it is costing us as individuals... not just in taxes, but also in those individual characteristics we used to value so highly. It discourages me to conclude that the harder you look, the worse it appears.