How America Got Mean
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David Brooks wrote an important article for the Atlantic that was simply titled, “How America Got Mean.” His conclusion was both insightful and deeply disturbing.
No one denies that we've become a mean-spirited culture. We've become increasingly rude and cruel and abusive and violent. Whether it’s toward a waiter at a restaurant, a nurse at a hospital, a teacher at a school or road rage on the interstate, we’ve become... mean. Coupled with this is our increasing lack of compassion and empathy for others. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity. In 2018, fewer than half did.
As Brooks notes, there are many reasons offered for this.
There’s the technology story—that social media is driving us all crazy.
There is the sociology story—that we’ve stopped participating in community organizations and are more isolated.
There is the demography story—that America, long a white-dominated nation, is becoming a much more diverse country; a change that has millions of white Americans in a panic.
There is the economy story—that high levels of economic inequality and insecurity have left people afraid, alienated and pessimistic.
And obviously, all of these are having an effect. But Brooks argues, and I agree, that the deepest issue is that we are no longer schooled in kindness and consideration. Which means we live in a world where people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein.
It’s all about morals.
In a healthy society you have a web of institutions – families, schools, religious groups, community organizations and workplaces – that help form people into kind and responsible citizens.
We don’t have that today. We don’t have moral formation, which, Brooks outlines, involves three things: first, helping people learn to restrain their selfishness; second, teaching basic social and ethical skills—things like welcoming a neighbor into a community or disagreeing with someone constructively; and third, helping people find a purpose in life.
We used to be concerned with teaching and developing virtue—with molding the heart along with the head. This wasn’t just in schools, but rather throughout all of culture—Sunday school, the YMCA, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.
And here’s what’s important: what was taught along those lines was not seen as a matter of personal taste. There was an objective moral order, there was transcendent truth. Further, human beings were seen as creatures who were, by nature, sinners against that moral order.
This isn’t about trying to paint the past in some airbrushed, overly nostalgic way. An emphasis on morality – past or present – doesn’t create perfect people. But what can be said is that any and all attempts at moral formation are now gone. Any sense of an objective moral order is gone. Any sense of transcendent truth is gone.
We now have little more than radical individualism. Morality is not something that we find outside of ourselves in, say, a spiritual faith, or even within a community. It’s in ourselves. It’s our own voice. We are our own moral compass. Along with that is the rejection of any sense of being sinners. If anything, we are seen as naturally good.
And psychology has replaced morality in terms of how to raise children. While psychology is all well and good, it’s goal – and specialty – is mental health, not moral growth. So you can even chart the decline of moral words in books, such as the words bravery, gratitude and humbleness.
Or look at college students. Researchers have asked incoming college students about their goals in life for decades. In 1967, approximately 85% of college students said they were strongly motivated to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. By 2015, the number one goal was to make money.
All this to say, as Brooks concludes, in a culture devoid of moral education, you have a generation growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world.
Whatever feels good to us is moral.
We do what makes us happy.
But that does not lead to a “You do you, and I’ll do me” world. Or, as we used to say, “What is true for you is true for you, and what is true for me is true for me.” What happens is that we become internally fragile. You have no moral compass to guide you, no permanent ideals to which you can swear ultimate allegiance.
The psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Victor Frankl famously said, “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear with almost any ‘how.’” But those without a “why” fall apart when storms hit.
Now play this out.
If you are morally naked and alone, having no skills to know how or even why to be decent or kind to someone, what does that lead to? Couple this with how we see ourselves as the center of the universe. Social media has helped us become addicted to thinking about ourselves.
We’re anxious and insecure.
We’re sensitive to rejection.
All of us this leads to triggers of distrust and hostility. When there is no moral framework, it leads to a breakdown of relationships. You become estranged from others. And sadness and loneliness often turn into bitterness. And violence. We get callous, defensive, distrustful and hostile.
Now here’s where this plays into the political situation.
Brooks notes that over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. We’ve become hyper-politicized. Ideology has replaced theology, even in the lives of Christians. Good and evil aren’t about the human heart—ithey’re about groups: us vs. them and good guys vs. bad guys. Morality isn’t about personal conduct, but rather where you are on the political spectrum. Much of it fueled by resentment.
And that is how we got so mean.
James Emery White
Sources
David Brooks, “How America Got Mean,” The Atlantic, August 14, 2023, read online.
The secret U.S. effort to track, hide and surveil the Chinese spy balloon
Nearly a year later, Biden administration officials say the threat was exaggerated, but U.S. military officials contend that too little has been done to detect high-altitude spy balloons.
If only there was a nationalized transportation system that has existed for decades that we could use as a benchmark to see how nationalizing Greyhound would likely proceed:
After posting historic spending deficits in 2021 and 2022, Amtrak is planning to spend more in fiscal year 2024 as federal funding expands to “unprecedented” levels.
Amtrak posted operating losses of $1.08 billion in 2021 and $886.8 million in 2022, far greater than pre-COVID losses, but is still going ahead with expansion. By comparison, Amtrak lost $29.4 million in 2019, the year before the pandemic hit.
The increase in spending was pandemic-related, according to Amtrak.
Amtrak asked Congress for a $350 million bump in funding for fiscal year 2024 to $3.65 billion.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) was signed into law by President Joe Biden on November 15, 2021. The law authorizes $1.2 trillion for transportation and infrastructure spending with $550 billion of that figure going toward “new” investments and programs. Amtrak will receive $85.2 billion via IIJA from FY 2022 through FY 2026.
And it’s curious that Jacobin doesn’t want competition for Greyhound’s services, when they exist as competition among the left for Salon’s longstanding goals of nationalizing every industry in the US:
“Like [the late communist Pete] Seeger and the FDR cargo cult, Salon also harbors turn-the-clock-back fantasies of their own: Last month, the publication called for the nationalization of the news media because it was uncomfortable with the glut of right-leaning news and opinion led by — you guessed it! — Fox News. (Hmmm — I wonder if someone in the FCC read that article?) Now the Website wishes to turn the clock back on the film industry because of a perceived glut of independent films.”
A new declaration from the World Health Organization has revealed that it wants the masses to eat less meat and more plant-based foods in order to supposedly combat "climate change."
This is a Christmas Carol that has always fascinated me. What does a Partridge in a pear tree have to do with Christmas? From 1558 until 1829, Roman Catholics in Ireland and England were not permitted to practice their faith openly. Someone during that era wrote a carol as a catechism song for young Catholics. It has two levels of meaning; the surface meaning plus a hidden meaning known only to members of their church. Each element in the carol has a code for religious reality, which the children could remember .A Partridge in a Pear Tree The partridge in a pear tree is Jesus, the Son of God. In the song, Christ is symbolically presented as a mother that feigns injury to decoy predators from her helpless nestlings, recalling the expression of Christ’s sadness over the date of Jerusalem: Luke 13:34-35 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings …” In Summary:
The turtle doves were the old and new testaments
Three French hens stood for faith, hope and love
The four calling birds were the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John
The five golden rings recalled the Torah or Law, the first five books of the Old Testament
The six geese a-laying stood for the six days of creation
Seven swans a-swimming representing the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit – Prophesy, Serving, Exhortation, Teaching, Contribution, Leadership and Mercy
The eight maids a-milking were the eight beatitudes
Nine ladies dancing were the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit – Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness and Self Control
The ten lords a-leaping were the ten commandments
The eleven pipers piping stood for the eleven faithful disciples
The twelve drummers drumming symbolised the twelve points of belief in the Apostles Creed.
What [Robert] Putnam couldn’t possibly have seen at the dawn of the technological revolution is how much worse the “bowling alone” phenomenon would get with the addition of the smartphone and the internet. I was waiting tables during the portable computer revolution. In the course of just a few years people went from dining together to dining together, alone. Entire families eating together, all looking at their phones.
My Gen Z nephews look at the TV like a telephone landline. Why would they be chained to one room, at the mercy of other people’s preferences, when they can roam freely from place to place, consuming whatever content their heart desires?
There is a line in Bowling Alone that made me laugh out loud. Putnam wrote, “Some see hope in the rise of news on the Internet or the all-news cable channels. It is still too early to predict the long-run effects of these new channels,” Putnam wrote. He adds, “That said, the early returns are not encouraging.”
Adorable. Cable news is dead. Cable broadcasts get fewer viewers than many YouTube streamers. Trump will probably be our next president, again. Now we are fat and lazy and also outraged and misinformed and distracted. Our attention spans are shredded by the multiple devices and social media constantly capturing our attention.
In the 1950s, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg developed a model for moral reasoning that follows a trajectory similar to Piaget’s model for cognitive development: Children progress from more concrete to more abstract thinking, from more rigidity to more flexibility. Levine says that what alarms her about the rigid, concrete take on right or wrong she sees in my generation is that without the “capacity to hear opposing points of view, you don’t develop empathy. And you’ll need empathy to end up with a good partner, to be a good parent and to be a good citizen.”
Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former Stanford dean, agrees: “We’re in desperate need of humans who can grapple openly with ideas, and disagree, as reasonable people will, without villainizing each other.”
I see teenagers unintentionally becoming more unforgiving and judgmental rather than open-minded and compassionate. When we can’t or don’t talk freely, we lose the chance to find real common ground, acknowledge complexity or grasp that even our own opinions can be malleable. If we listen only to those who already agree with us, we won’t make wider connections. We won’t grow.
Some people told me not to write this piece — that I could get canceled online, cut off by peers and perhaps even rejected by colleges. That’s a risk I’m willing to take.
I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I believe that daring to get past what’s acceptable and engage in open dialogue — as we did walking away from English class that day — is the key way to finding them and becoming the empathetic critical thinkers we need to be as we grow into adulthood.
Let’s start talking.
But that would require reasoning and — heaven forfend — even thoughtful debate! It’s so much easier (for kids of all ages) just to let those knees jerk and tear down the posters when confronted with a liberal ideology that causes them plenty of cognitive dissonance.
.Yet it is hard to imagine the current intolerant woke campus will change course unless we have a serious discussion about curbing the government's multibillion-dollar subsidies to elite higher education—winding down the massive research grants, tax-free endowment income, tax-deductible private gifts, and $2 trillion in federally subsidized student loans.
Given the gargantuan Ivy-League endowments and multibillion-dollar annual influx of “research” grants to elite institutions, these presidents and their universities apparently believe they are to be exempt from all criticism and enjoy a birthright to endless federal money.
Again, the only thing that can save the elite universities from themselves, and from their descent into the modern Dark Ages is to return once again to inculcating civic education, ensuring free inquiry, offering inductive courses—and showing some concern for their own middle-class taxpaying benefactors.
I think we can all agree on one thing: Harvard most certainly does not stand for “defending a culture of free inquiry”—at least as it applies to unfettered and free debate over, say, controversies such as Israel, DEI, affirmative action, grading standards, Christianity, Western Civilization, climate change, abortion, fossil fuels, transgenderism and sports, illegal immigration, or firearms.
There was a reason, after all, why The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) ranked Harvard dead last out of 248 universities in protecting “free speech”, and why Gay’s Harvard is infamous for bending to pressure to disinvite guest speakers, attacking any who do not abide by approved vocabulary, ostracizing faculty deemed insufficiently supportive of DEI agendas, and student mobs hounding professors whose published research they do not like.
This article is based on a speech delivered at Shift’s Defense Ventures Summit in Washington, D.C. on November 15, 2023. Scroll down for a video of the address.
Two years ago, I made a bold prediction, which is actually a bad thing for a venture capitalist to do because we’re so often wrong. During the Reagan National Defense Forum, I tweeted “Time is Running Out with Silicon Valley.” We needed to figure out how to get the Department of Defense to transform its laborious, unproductive procurement process. If they didn’t, start-up companies with breakthrough ideas were going to abandon military defense and move to more fruitful areas of technology. We had to move faster. We had to act with urgency. Because American defense—and the defense of our allies—depended on us.
And then just a few months later, that prediction became a moot point: Russia invaded Ukraine and reminded us why defense technology is not merely something to debate in theory. We were living in a new geopolitical reality. Time wasn’t running out. The sand was at the bottom of the hourglass. History had begun again, and we understood we were entering a new, violent age that would look different from the recent past.
In that narrow window before the world changed, I also wrote a thesis for a new category of technology company. At the time, this felt somewhat controversial, maybe even a little shocking, to my friends in San Francisco. In the essay I stated that my firm Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture capital firms in the world, was unabashedly and proudly declaring its unanimous support for America. That we were betting on America. And that this wasn’t a marketing gimmick or some ESG-adjacent nonsense, but a strategy. We’re in the business of value creation. Of taking bets on things that get very big, very fast. We concluded that America and our allies are best off when we’re building technology companies that support the national interest.
We believe a strong America means a strong world. A safer world. A more civilized world, which is a term we should use more. And that technology is the backbone of maintaining this order and civilization and always will be.
We called this movement American Dynamism.In the investing business, it’s all about calibrating risk and sometimes taking bets that others don’t see. But this bet was and is so obvious. It might have just taken a little bit of moral courage to say the word America out loud.
But others have said it. The great investors will tell you: one of the few certainties of the last 150 years has been the growth and dynamism of the United States. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, at their recent annual meeting in Omaha, repeatedly reminded their investors “never bet against America.” Buffett reminded the crowd that a young country like ours started out with half of one percent of the world’s population, and just 247 years later, here we are commanding 25 percent of the world’s GDP.
“A miracle,” he called it. That’s an oddly religious phrase for an investor, but an accurate one. Jamie Dimon prefers a poker analogy: that America has the best hand ever dealt to any country on this planet, ever. Whether it’s our geography, our universities, our peaceful neighbors, our natural resources, the rule of law, our work ethic, innovation in the core of our bones, the widest and deepest financial markets, and the best military on the planet. We will have this last item, he said, “for as long as we have the best economy.”
America is destined to win.
So why are we starting to fear that this miracle is now on shaky ground? Why do we sense we’re encountering the greatest global unrest since the Cold War? That we’ve entered the most precarious moment in our lives?
Because deep down, we know how you win a war against America.
You win a war against America when we stop innovating. When we become scared of technology, and the drive that resides deep in our bones. When we cease to be the world’s exporter of innovation and cede that role to China, or to global consortiums of dunces.
You win a war against America when you greet builders with suspicion. When your instinct is to destroy the weirdos doing new things on the frontier.
You win a war against America when old companies become too big to fail and ensure that the little ones around them are squashed instead. When we trust age more than we trust vitality, when everything is old—from our infrastructure to our industrial base to our political leaders—because we’ve conquered and discouraged the new.
You win a war against America when our identities become more important than our duties to each other. When we turn inward and focus on our neuroses rather than on the needs of our families and our communities. Around fifty years ago, sociologist Philip Rieff called modern man “psychological man” in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, noting that psychological man “is likely going nowhere, but aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in his going.” In 50 years, our new neuroticism is now a meme that mocks men who would rather build things and do things than go to therapy, an ethos we used to celebrate in this country.
You win a war against America when we believe the doomer memes and stop thinking life has meaning at all. When our faith in everything is broken: a recent Wall Street Journal poll found that faith, family, and the flag—the very things that used to define our national character—have eroded in the last 25 years. Less than thirty percent of people say patriotism is important to them, down from 70 percent two decades ago. Religion, having children, and community fared the same. You win the war against America when it’s nihilism all the way down.
You win a war against America when our great cities are ruled by crime rings. When businesses are shuttered because security is meaningless theater. When our police are derided. When good people are driven out by bad policy.
You win a war against America when fentanyl pours across our borders, manufactured by an adversary that still remembers the Opium Wars, and delivered by cartels that have no respect for human life. One hundred thousand of our countrymen and women are dead every year in a silent epidemic that’s being met with a collective shrug.
You win a war against America with toys like TikTok that give our adversaries direct access to the anxious minds of teenagers. You win a war against America when you invest billions of dollars in the CCP’s tech ecosystem and pretend that’s just the way business works.
You win a war against America when you have us both-sidesing terrorism. When “nuance” and “it’s complicated” gets in the way of condemning barbaric enemies who slaughter children in their bedrooms as they plead for mercy. You win a war against America when we no longer believe in good and evil, civilization and destruction, just fine people on both sides.
You win a war against America when many in our media and universities seem more aligned with the propaganda of Hamas than the interests of this country. When we forget about hostages because the news cycle thundered to some other Current Thing. You win a war against America when the debate is no longer about security versus privacy but our modern and more dangerous debate of security versus grievance.
You win a war against America when you can no longer speak freely in the land of free speech. When we consume more than we create. When we attack capitalism, the engine of our growth, as though we don’t deserve and shouldn’t celebrate the fruits of our building.
You win this war against America silently, methodically, and without firing a single shot.
But the good news is we know how to fight back. And we’re here because we heard the call to build against these dark forces we face. We know technology is the escape hatch from a nihilistic world. That democracy demands a sword and sometimes we have to use it to defend ourselves, our allies, and civilization.
Some have been critical that we named this movement American Dynamism, but I’ll tell you, never have two words in the investing community meant so much and stood for real, civilizational truth. We often focus on America—the obvious beneficiary of our building. “American” was meant not only as a symbol of what we build for but the unseriousness we reject, a global elite that would be so foolish as to have Iran chair a UN Human Rights forum. America is order—the order we want, the order our allies want. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say that.
But even more important than our choosing the word America is the word Dynamism, the teleological end of technological supremacy. We aren’t American defense, or defense tech, or hard tech, or deep tech, or military tech. Those are means to the end we aspire to—but what is that end?
Dynamism is growth, movement, momentum, and opportunity. In his techno-optimist manifesto, Marc Andreessen wrote, “We believe everything good is downstream of growth. We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.” Dynamism is life. And we embrace dynamism and the values upon which the country was founded because they are true and worth defending. Dynamism makes America the country people want to be from, to immigrate to, and to build a life, career, or company in.
Alexis de Tocqueville described America as many things, but he was struck by the insatiable spirit of American dynamism and opportunity:
The American lauds as a noble and praiseworthy ambition what our forefathers stigmatized as servile cupidity. In America, fortunes are lost and regained without difficulty, the country is boundless and its resources inexhaustible. . . . Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its strength, and its greatness. Commercial business is there like a vast lottery by which a small number of men will continually lose, but the State is always a gainer.
The State is always a gainer. America always wins.
So how do we ensure we continue building dynamism? How do we win a slow and methodical silent war?
Well, it takes will and it takes courage.
Every day I talk to smart young people who want to work in tech or become founders. And I ask them a simple and obvious question—one that should be instinctual to answer. Not about their revenue goals or their product or how they’re going to scale a team from 5 to 50. But a more essential question: What do you believe? Why will people follow you? I might as well ask: What is your creed? What will you shout from the rooftops even if you’re maligned for it?
We don’t win a war against bad ideologies unless we know who we are, what we stand for, and where we’re headed. And if we lose this silent war—the ultimate war for American ideals—it’s not because we don’t have the know-how to build missiles and hypersonics and attributable systems and drone swarms. It will be because we doubt our inheritance. Because we doubt the beauty and nobility of what we’re building. Because we doubt that American Dynamism is true and the key to a safer, more prosperous civilization.
Katherine Boyle is a venture capitalist and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. She is the co-founder of the American Dynamism practice, which invests in companies building to support the national interest. Follow her on X @KtmBoyle.
