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America 250: Not in Kansas Anymore
I believe in Douglas Adams’ famous answer in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy to the question of the meaning of life, the universe, everything. He had the computer Deep Thought ponder the question and come up with the answer “42.”
That’s a joke, son. Adams is saying that we don’t have a clue.
But, ever since the Dawn of Time, we humans have gussied up a theory of the meaning of life, the universe, everything, with the idea of God, with a creation myth, and a moral system as a guide for living life. I suspect that the meaning of God and religion and creation myths and morality are an attempt to avoid the war of all against all.
In the past 500 years, because science, the question of God, creation, and moral systems have been in a turmoil.
That’s because science. Never mind that Eratosthenes determined that the earth was round in 280BC, because of the different angle of the sun at midday on Midsummers’ Day measured at Aswan and Alexandria. If the Earth was round then sun gods riding their chariots across the sky didn’t make sense.
When Copernicus proposed in 1543 that the Sun was the center of the universe, things really got serious. Did God really create the Earth in seven days? Then Galileo got into a spot of trouble observing Jupiter’s moons with a telescope.
Then Newton came along and explained the movement of the spheres with his mechanical three laws of motion.
So, in 1776, 250 years ago, our beloved Founders were all over the map on God.
George Washington: Christian with Deist leanings
Thomas Jefferson: Christian with Deist leanings
Benjamin Franklin: Deist with Christian leanings
James Madison: Christian with Deist leanings
Alexander Hamilton: Christian-ish
Thomas Paine: non-Christian Deist
So, they pretty well all believed in God.
If you read German philosophers, Kant and Hegel are trying to fit God into modern philosophy. But by Feuerbach, not so much. By Nietzsche, not at all.
Let’s say that our Founders were trying to adapt God-centered Christianity to explain the meaning of life, the universe, everything in the heliocentric, Newtonian mechanical world of 1776.
But then, a century later, Maxwell proposed the wave theory of light and a constant speed of light. Michelson-Morley showed that that the speed of light does not change relative to the Earth’s motion. Then Einstein showing the relation of mass and energy in:
e = mc2
Then we get to quantum mechanics and the Big Bang theory of creation in 1927.
So, what is God, and what is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, now?
They asked Big Thought about that, after he had come up with the answer “42.” What is the question? He said he’d get back to us.
Seriously, in the last 2,000 years we humans have utterly demolished our ancient understandings of God and the universe, and creation, and the meaning of life.
So what do we do now?
In the last 200 years we have tried a secular religion, associated with Marx, that combines religion and politics and promises Heaven on Earth. The results were not good.
We have tried a secular God the benevolent Father, with the educated class directing and staffing the welfare state and administrative state that proposes to solve all our problems with rigid hierarchy and a government spending 40 percent of GDP.
We are experiencing the revival of Islam, combining religion and conquest, as originally practiced by Mohammed.
And we have stumbled and bumbled around with the adaptive practices of the market economy that some people think is the best way to interact, and others think is the epitome of injustice.
So what is the answer?
One big problem is that, on my Three Peoples theory, there are three kinds of people in modern society.
People of the Creative Self
People of the Responsible Self
People of the Subordinate Self
But Curtis Yarvin has different ideas. Nevertheless, the problem is to create a theory of life, the universe, everything that concedes the fact of different people in the world that need different things to create meaning in their lives.
And then there is the fundamental difference between men and women, where men like a competitive culture and women like a cooperative culture.
Now, I am drawn to Nietzsche, and his self-overcoming notion as the royal road to the Übermensch. And I think that the start-up venture capital culture of tech world is a worthy instantiation of Nietzsche’s idea.
But the fact is that we have barely begun to think about where we are, where we are going, and where we ought to go.
That’s what religion and God and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything are all about.
We are not in Kansas anymore. For sure, we find ourselves in the Land of Oz, just like Dorothy. But what does that mean?
| Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:04:57 GMT |
America 250: The Great Enrichment
As we celebrate 250 years since the Founding of these United States and our beloved Founding Fathers, I want to look through a wider lens.
And my favorite way of looking at this is The Great Enrichment, proposed by Deirdre McCloskey. I have a Great Enrichment page on my website. Here is a log graph.
Per capita real GDP goes from $4.7 per day in 2017 dollars in 1800 to $191.2 per day in 2017 dollars. That means that real personal per capita income today is 40 TIMES what it was in 1800.
Really, nothing else matters alongside this. As President Trump says about everything: “there’s never been anything like it.”
Now back in the day a chap forecast all this. In England, Carew Reynell wrote in 1685: “Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer." He was thinking of manufacturing.
But do you note something important with the chart? Exactly. It is shaping up as an S-curve. Meaning that our best days are behind us, unless AI sets the curve back on the up-and-up.
The other thing to notice about the curve is that there's only been one real disruption, in the Great Depression of the 1930s. I interpret that to mean that the politicians and experts and robber barons and oligarchs and activists don't really move the needle. Unless the Federal Reserve Board lets 5,000 banks fail in four years. Unless you have social scientists Stalin and Mao in charge. There is something bigger, deeper, at work than mere politics and mere markets and business.
In the 250 years since the Declaration of Independence we have seen a steady progress of understanding of the economy, from the idea of the “invisible hand” to the prediction of disaster by Marx because of the conflict between labor value and exchange value to the Marginal Revolution of 1870 that said that prices are prices. We have seen five technological revolutions, with AI the sixth. We have seen staggering advances in science from the discovery of oxygen in 1776 to Einstein’s e = mc2 as a prediction from his special relativity to the crazy world of quantum mechanics.
It has been, you might say, a remarkable time to be alive, and we are blessed by the remarkable people that made it all happen.
What comes next? Do humans become multiplanetary, or do we go extinct because of declining fertility?
Stay tuned.
| Fri, 03 Jul 2026 01:32:59 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
A punitive peace leads to Literally Hitler.
Politics and government are all about force; law is all about private property; religion is all about morality.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Mircea Eliade and the Primitive
