...from the man,
Robert A. Heinlein,
...from To Sail Beyond The Sunset
"""
The exploitation of space flourished unbelievably. Mr. Harriman's decision to keep it out of government hands, let private enterprise go at it for profit, was vindicated. While Pikes Peak Spaceport was still new, Spaceways, Ltd., was building bigger, longer, and more efficient catapults at Quito and on the island of Hawaii. Manned expeditions were sent to Mars and to Venus and the first asteroid miners were headed out.
Meanwhile the United States went to pieces.
This decay went on not just on time line two but on all investigated time lines. During my fifty years in Boondock I read several scholarly studies of the comparative histories of the explored times lines concerning what was called "The Twentieth Century Devolution."
I'm not sure of my opinions. I saw it on only one time line, and that only to the middle of 1982 and in my own country. I have opinions but you need not take them seriously as some leading scholars have other opinions.
Here are some of the things I saw as wrong:
The United States had over six hundred thousand practicing lawyers. That must be at least five hundred thousand more than were actually needed. I am not counting lawyers such as myself; I never practiced. I studied law simply to protect myself from lawyers, and there were many like me.
Family decay: I think it came mainly from both parents working outside the home. It was said again and again that, from midcentury on, both parents had to have jobs just to pay the bills. If this were true, why was it not necessary in the first half of the century? How did laborsaving machinery and enormously increased productivity impoverish the family?
Some said the cause was high taxes. This sounds more reasonable; I recall my shock the year the government collected a trillion dollars. (Fortunately most of it was wasted.)
But there seems to have an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously--after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows is important . . . so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was spreading.)
Consider these:
1) "Bread and Circuses";
2) The abolition of the pauper's oath in Franklin Roosevelt's first term;
3) "Peer group" promotion in public school.
These three conditions heterodyne each other. The abolition of the pauper's oath as a condition for public charity insured that habitual failures, incompetents of every sort, people who can't support themselves and people who won't, each of these would have the same voice in ruling the country, in assessing taxes and spending them, as (for example) Thomas Edison or Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie or Andrew Jackson. Peer group promotion insured that the franchise would be exercised by ignorant incompetents. And "Bread and Circuses" is what invariably happens to a democracy that goes that route: unlimited spending on "social" programs ends in national bankruptcy, which historically is always followed by dictatorship.
It seemed to me that these three things were the key mistakes that destroyed the best culture up to that time in all known histories. Oh, there were other things--strikes by public servants, for example. My father was still alive when this became a problem. Father said grimly,
"There is a ready solution for anyone on the public payroll who feels that he is not paid enough: He can resign and work for a living. This applies with equal force to Congressmen, Welfare 'clients,' school teachers, generals, garbage collectors, and judges."
And of course the entire twentieth century from 1917 on was clouded over by the malevolent silliness of Marxism.
But the Marxists would not and could not have had much influence if the American people had not started losing the hard common sense that had won them a continent. By the sixties everyone talked about his "rights" and no spoke of his duties--and patriotism was a subject for jokes.
I do not believe that either Marx or that cracker revivalist who became the "First Prophet" could have damaged the country if the people had not become soft in the head.
"But every man is entitled to his own opinion!"
Perhaps. Certainly every man had his own opinion on everything, no matter how silly.
On two subjects the overwhelming majority of people regarded their own opinions as Absolute Truth, and sincerely believed that anyone who disagreed with them was immoral, outrageous, sinful, sacrilegious, offensive, intolerable, stupid, illogical, treasonable, actionable, against the public interest, ridiculous, and obscene.
The two subjects were (of course) sex and religion.
On sex and religion each American citizen knew the One Right Answer, by direct Revelation from God.
In view of the wide diversity of opinion, most of them must necessarily have been mistaken. But on these two subjects they were not accessible to reason.
"But you must respect another man's religious beliefs!"
For Heaven's sake, why? Stupid is stupid--faith doesn't make it smart.
I recall one candidate's promise that I head during the presidential campaign of 1976, a campaign promise that seems to me to illustrate how far American rationality had skidded.
"We shall drive ever forward along this line until all our citizens have above-average incomes!"
Nobody laughed.
"""
(if you are unfamiliar with Heinlein,
don't let the material above shy you away from
the graciously gratuitous sex, polite wit, and emotional lucidity
that fills the rest of the pages...)
