There is little doubt in my mind that September 11, 2001 was the tipping point toward the U.S. transformation to an illiberal democracy. After the events on that day the prime directive of the United States shifted from liberty to safety. While safety is important in the preservation of liberty, making it the prime directive makes one willing to give up liberty for the sake of safety. In fact, all which are necessary for liberty or the consequences of having liberty are deemed as unsafe and must be reduced to the point of not being recognizable for our own safety. And if one does not accept the foundational idea of liberty for all, then that leads one to elaborate the prime directive further to only mean safety for me and not for you.
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- I am reading this interview of Dan Wang by Russ Douthat of the New York Times and find it fascinating how Wang describes the difference between China in terms of engineers and lawyers. Wang says the current China is founded by engineers, who in my experience put great value on efficiency. I think Elon Musk's DODGE was/is very much a rise of engineers in the United States who believe they know better about running a country than lawyers. Whenever you have a group of people who are dominated by ego to think they alone are the smart people and therefore know all the answers to all the problems, you have a high potential for tyranny. Democracy and liberty is not about efficiency, it's about peaceful co-existence. If one insists upon efficiency you end up being like the other countries, such as the old USSR and China, who likewise make efficiency a prime directive.#
- Here is the money quote of Dan Wang in the article:#
The game goes to he who outlasts the adversary. But what the Chinese want to do is to just keep things really, really stable and just wait for the Western countries to collapse.
#- China plays the long game while the U.S. plays the short game.#