Maybe you have noticed a recent phenomenon on your drive in to work over the last few years.  People driving below the speed limit in the left lane, using shoulders as a passing lane in traffic only to have to merge back in and slow traffic down even more, drifting across 3 lanes with no turn signal and no regard for anyone in those lanes.  Once upon a time, we followed the rules of the road in order to keep us all moving in the same direction at a relatively similar speed to get us to our destination quickly, efficiently, and safely.  We have collectively started to abandon these rules which once kept us all safe because our concept of freedom has shifted from a responsibility and a duty to all into a privilege.  We have come to expect the benefits but are unwilling to perform the work required to maintain them.  Perhaps JFK summed it up best when he said “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  

We the people have been sailing here for hundreds of years in search of many things including escape from religious persecution and to seek better economic opportunities.  When we first sailed here, conditions were rough.  We met a native population(with whom we have had a complex relationship, but more on that later) and learned from them how to survive.  Each colony had to be self-sufficient, forcing them to work together because the success of the colony was based on the success of each individual.  Every person had to contribute in whatever way they were able, but it was the responsibility of the whole colony to make sure each person was able to contribute.  It came down to cooperation or death.

The settlement of Jamestown was founded in 1607, but quickly descended into chaos.  The colonists lacked knowledge of the new land and were not able to cultivate it properly.  John Smith, love or hate him, implemented a “He who does not work, shall not eat” rule which is partially responsible for the short term success of the colony.  This may seem Draconic now, but in situations of life and death, such extreme cooperation is often necessary.  Today, we don’t have to work the farm to contribute to society.  We can do things like volunteer to help a cause we support, work in a field where you help others, create jobs and economic opportunities, or mentor others to contribute to society in a meaningful way.

A few generations passed and some of the colonies grew and thrived until a growing middle class became an attractive target for extortion by Mad King George the Third and his drunken sons who had bankrupted their empire.  They started draining our economy with their taxes and placing rules on us that hindered our ability to thrive.  Then in 1776, we gave the mad king the ultimate break-up text when our founding fathers wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

King George wasn’t very happy about this because the monarch got his power from God, and we were saying that he is equal to any of his peasants.  He was losing a lot of money that he desperately needed to prop up his waning empire.  Over 200,000 of us died making sure that we would never again be the subject of a king, because no one person is greater than another person based on birthrights or wealth and that no person is above another in the eyes of their creators.  Whoever that creator may be.

After a few years of blundering around as a loosely formed federation of states united under the Articles of Federation, our founding fathers wrote another banger.  “We The People”  A government of the people for the people by the people.  A system where everyone gets a say in matters that govern their lives.

The words that followed are even more profound.  “In order to form a more perfect union.”  Our forefathers knew that we are all stronger together, and that the role of government is to ensure all people within that union can enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, none of which can be achieved alone.  No matter how much we say we don’t need others, we do.  Even the most independent person still relies on hundreds if not thousands of people just to make the basic requirements of life operate smoothly day in and day out.  I highly doubt that you raised the cow or grew the wheat to grind into flour and made a bun for that burger you had for lunch.  Today, more than ever, we depend on each other but in ways that we never see, and that makes it easier to forget we need each other.

That was going well for a few years until the first of a chain of events happened.  The industrial revolution created a new class of wealth, the industrialist.  For the first time, ordinary people could achieve unimaginable wealth based on their ideas.  Ideas like the cotton gin, which turbo-charged the slave trade industry.  Suddenly, We the People forcibly added millions of individuals to our population, we just shifted our definition of “people” because there was still that hope in the back of our minds.  “If this person did it, so can I.”

For those who didn’t feel like making their wealth directly off the backs of others, they could head west into the great unknown to seek their fortune either through hunting for rare resources or claiming a farmstead.  We declared these as the “rugged individuals.”  The problem with this term is that they were not individuals.  They were families, and small communities. The prospector, the most isolated of the trades, came back to town to get supplies, food, and most importantly sell the metals they prospected.  Even the gun slingers and thieves banded together in gangs.  As this attitude proliferated and we spread west with the full fury of manifest destiny, it became easier for us to murder and steal the lands of the native inhabitants because “I need that land more than them.”  Suddenly, traces of the tyranny we fled just a few generations ago started creeping back into the public mindset as we taught that the lives of one group mattered more than those of others.

The civil war ended the legal slave trade, and we started the slow process of integrating the former slaves into our population.  It would be a long time before we finally started expanding our view of people until we included nearly everyone.  At the same time, there was a further concentration of wealth by the industrialists who rebuilt our devastated nation.  The industrialists continued to bring in lower wage immigrants to achieve maximum profits.  The hopes of the average person to become wealthy diminished as we accepted more and more moral ambiguity in the pursuit of wealth.  We the People were no longer seeking a more perfect union.  We the People were now seeking freedom through wealth.  Freedom was no longer life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Freedom had become having enough money to tell other people what to do.  The shift from “We” to “Me” was well underway.

The late 1800s and early 1900s illustrated that well in a string of massacres where the military or large police forces were called to stop unionization attempts and labor strikes.  The Haymarket Riot of 1886 left several police officers and workmen dead and established the 8 hour work day.  The Ludlow Massacre of 1914 saw the Colorado National Guard called on coal miners demanding safer working conditions.  This new Industrialist class regarded workers as an expendable resource and paid them accordingly while accumulating exponentially greater wealth.  They were not above having workforces attacked, or replaced entirely to keep their profit margins up.  When the Irish became too expensive, they replaced them with fresh Chinese immigrants and not all were willing.  Once one immigrant group had become too expensive, they were vilified so they could be replaced by a cheaper group.  A practice that continues to this day.

That continued until the world wars brought us back together just briefly enough to allow us to capitalize on the economic opportunities provided by the reconstruction of a devastated European continent.  Our industrial system had not been damaged in the war, so our economy boomed as we filled the gaps for the rest of the world.  This created income for workers, but further concentrated the wealth of this new ruling class.  As the boom faded, profits dropped and the focus became efficiency and cost reductions, and business schools started teaching that stock price is a corporation’s main product and it must be maximized leading to decades of increasingly morally ambiguous decisions in order to maximize share price based on the studies of Milton Friedman.  The shift from “We” to “Me” was nearly complete.

The final nail in the coffin of our more perfect union was the onset of the information age.  We have reached an age where we have access to all of the world’s information at the tip of our finger and we can convey information from one person to another only limited by the speed of our comprehension.  The rapid progression from telegraph to phone to cell phone to smart phone and email, each time we expanded our reach and reduced the “acceptable” delay time for a response.  We expect that anonymous voice from a call center in India to be able to solve all of our life problems faster than we would dare ask for a cup of sugar from our neighbors.  When the whole world is at our fingertips, it becomes easy to forget that we ourselves are not the whole world.

A parallel can be seen in the automotive and transportation world. Roads and carts for transportation have been in use since time immemorial.  What we once thought was a Roman innovation turns out to have been in use since the stone ages.  So why are we so bad at using them?  We have a system that maximizes our ability to go in the same direction at the same general speed, yet automotive related deaths have topped the leading killer list consistently.

Since roads have existed, there has been a code of conduct around them.  The Romans even buried their dead along the roads.  These generally agreed upon rules of the road kept travelers safe and economic routes flowing for thousands of years.  Eventually the rules of the road became codified in the laws of the appropriate jurisdiction yet the roads have never been less safe.  In 2023, 3,275 Americans were deprived of their lives, liberty, and happiness when they were killed by distracted drivers.  So how is it that what was once just a social contract became less effective as a set of enforceable laws?

It comes down to our perceived rights.  That person who cuts across three lanes without signaling believes that they have more right to be in that lane than the drivers around them have the right to expect a safe and orderly trip from point A to point B.  For the purpose of this section, I am going to refer to this driver as Don.  Don does things like use the shoulder as a passing lane in traffic and then forces his way back in because Don perceives his time as more valuable than anyone on the road and therefore has the right to break the rules to get ahead of everyone driving legally.  Don is on his phone while driving because he needs to fire off that email he forgot at the office.  Don puts illegal tints on his car, knowing they are illegal, and then yells at the officer who pulls him over.  According to the National Highway Safety Administration, 66% of traffic fatalities involved aggressive driving.

Don isn’t always an aggressive jerk either.  Sometimes Don is driving 10 miles an hour under the speed limit on the expressway.  Sometimes he’s driving a vehicle that is bigger than he is comfortable with because he can’t be bothered to learn how to handle his vehicle.  Between 2019 and 2022, total mileage driven decreased, but traffic fatalities increased by 18%.  The roads are getting more and more dangerous because we lack the respect to allow others to conduct their business free of the hindrances that we create.  

In all of these cases, Don perceives his need to get from point A to point B as greater than the rights that the drivers around him have to safety.  Perhaps even worse, Don will complain when he gets pulled over by the police for his illegal actions and make their lives more difficult.  Risky and distracted driving has been on the rise despite law enforcement trying to crack down on it.  And that poses an even fundamental question, why do we need to spend massive amounts of taxpayer money to perform a task which was previously just a social contract among users of the road?  I think we can all agree that law enforcement could be better utilized in our communities than as baby-sitters of the road.  They could be interacting with the youth of the community and building bonds for the good of all, but instead they are on the road doing their best trying to prevent Don from killing himself and others because he can’t be bothered to put his phone down.

We all do it.  I am not going to claim innocence, but I make an effort to be as safe as possible.  It is easy to fall into bad habits, especially in our vehicles.  After all, it’s just us in there, no one can hear us, and if anyone can see us it is not for very long and we will never see that person again.  Our vehicles are isolation machines, and that is the reason I love them.  We get in our vehicle and the world becomes ours.  Our music, the seats set just right, any destination we like, and our hands on the the wheel making over a ton of metal going where we command it.  It is a great power that has become so basic that we forget the weight of the responsibility associated.

Isolation isn’t contained to our vehicles.  We build a protective bubble of technology around us to keep us as connected or anonymous as we like.  It is easier to interact with only who and what we choose, building a sense of connectivity, but removes the option of civil discourse because the anonymity allows us to attack what we don’t like without consequence.  We have an easier time than ever finding others like us, but at the cost of experiencing different viewpoints, developing ourselves, and growing as a people.  Our communications have become an echo chamber of what we want to hear, and that removes the connection from communication.  When we connect with one another, we learn from each other.  That lack of connection leads to feelings of isolation.  In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General conducted a study and found that about half of the adult population of the United States experienced significant levels of loneliness.  How can that be possible in a society where we are in constant communication with one another unless we have stripped all of the substance out of our communication by removing peaceful debate?

Loneliness presents in different ways to different people.  Some become paranoid, some lash out, and some become a threat to themselves and others.  For the purpose of keeping this brief, I will only raise one example which perfectly encapsulates the problem, the epidemic of cyber-bullying.  I am of the age where your bully was in your face, or at least in the same vicinity.  When he started talking, I could look him in the eye as I stood up so I could make clear my intentions to flatten his face, and he was forced to either stop or face immediate physical harm.  Bullies knew that there was at least a risk of retaliation from their actions.  With the anonymity and breadth of the internet, there is no consequence for their words.  They can lash out and verbally attack anyone in the world for any reason.  They get positive feedback from their echo chambers enhancing that illusion of community while in reality leading them further into the comfort of isolation.  We are just reinforcing the norm that any one group is above another and that our opinions are more valid than those of another.

When the Founding Fathers wrote that we have inalienable rights, they meant all of us are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  If your actions inhibit others from any of these rights, then freedom can’t exist.  For us to be truly free, we can’t put ourselves first.  We must become a people again.  Like we did in places like Normandy, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and many others where we made a loud statement to the world that all men are created equal in the eyes of their creator, whoever their creator may be.

A freedom that impairs another’s ability to be free is not true freedom, it is only a freedom from the consequences of your actions.  True freedom is a responsibility, not a privilege.  Like Uncle Ben once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  For us to survive, we must cooperate.  For us to be great, for us to be leaders, we have to make sure the world is a thriving ecosystem.  Just like our communities need to be thriving ecosystems to make America great.  And that can’t be done if we put ourselves first in all decisions.  We must become The People once more.

Stephen Foster, Founder of The Catsbah and Catsbah Global Initiative