Cave dwellers had no choice. You did what the big guy said. As tribes got larger, the king, the pharaoh, the emperor or the czar had total authority over their domain. You could not hunt deer in the forest or take fish from the stream without permission from the king.
Apparently there was little discussion or debate, and mental energy was in short supply. A little progress was made with the invention of the wheel and the use of fire, but thousands of years went by with little progress.
In earlier times, the king and the church demanded obedience. The earth was the center of the universe, and any fool with any common sense saw the sun rise in the morning and set in the evening as the sun traveled obediently around the earth.
But Copernicus disagreed. He argued that it was the earth that traveled around the sun and not the other way around. At first, Galileo agreed with Copernicus. But then the authorities threatened to execute Galileo for deviation from established doctrine. Galileo had to recant to save his skin.
But somehow, starting with the Greeks and later with the Magna Carta of 1215, cracks began to appear in the authoritarian foundation. People began to live longer and acquire more mental energy.
Groups of people seeking greater independence of thought, including religious thought, had to get the permission of the king to organize and collect enough money to purchase a ship and enough provisions to make it across the Atlantic Ocean. Even after their colony was established, they were not really fully independent, as they were often at the mercy of the authority of a dominant military power. The New York City area was under the control of the Dutch military before the English military took control. Even within the “rebellious” group, a hierarchy of authority maintained power. Creative thinking was organized and formalized by the American colonial elite with the establishment of Harvard College in 1636.
Until the American Revolution, land in the American colonies was allocated by King George and the colonial governors that he appointed. Only those considered to be descended from the British nobility were given land. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers of America were not commoners. Only Caucasian male landowners could vote. The American revolution was not led by commoners, but by the very colonial aristocracy that King George had established.
But as the United States of America was being established in the late 1700s, an entirely different type of revolution was taking place across the Atlantic Ocean. The French Revolution was an attempt to completely overthrow the French aristocracy. Aristocratic heads were being chopped off in the guillotine. The American aristocracy got the message. They taught their children to avoid showing off their wealth or their superiority and to always be generous with commoners. But to maintain their dominance, they used legacy almost exclusively in all the leading colleges. This bond of legacy, in turn, led to positions of power in government and in industry. Initially, who you knew was more important than what you knew. But eventually cracks began to appear in the American aristocratic hierarchy with the introduction of SAT and ACT tests as a consideration in college admissions.
Gradually commoners who rose through the ranks began replacing the aristocracy with a meritocracy in American industry and governance. Unfortunately, the meritocrats tended to judge themselves on the basis of their wealth and often failed to follow the modesty and generosity mandates of the old American aristocracy. Many failed to share their wealth and, instead, built up huge fortunes. The greedy pig theory of economics set in with the maximization of shareholder value mandate.
As America developed and expanded, the original colonists were greatly augmented by immigrants from an ever widening array of countries. This gave America a rather extraordinary advantage in that immigrants are typically not random draws from their original country, but instead immigrants are people with more independence and determination than average. In their countries of origin, this is sometimes referred to as a “brain drain.”
More often than not, human progress has come about through the efforts of rebellious “troublemakers.” Progress is made by people with enough mental energy to think independently and to refuse to blindly go along with the crowd. We have gradually come to realize the enormous benefits that come from encouraging people to think for themselves instead of blindly following “the dear leader.” Instead of imprisoning people who think differently, we now give them Nobel prizes.
A leader who wants to hang on to the past and demand obedience in following tradition to conserve mental energy needs “advisers” who are essentially “yes men” who go along with whatever the leader wants. Their job is just to tell the leader how great he is and to not raise any issues or concerns. Even today, people often conserve their mental energy by following a left-wing checklist or a right-wing checklist to decide where they stand on various issues and policies. Thinking independently takes too much mental energy and may separate you from your tribe.
Putin established such an authoritarian system in Russia, which led him to think that he could easily take over the Ukraine in a few days. No one dared challenge his judgement or question his authority. The result is not just a disaster for the Ukraine, but also a disaster for Russia itself with the loss of Russian lives and with many young Russian men leaving the country to avoid the “military incursion.” But Putin needed to warn of some external threat (NATO) to justify suppressing internal freedom. Ironically, before Putin’s “incursion” into the Ukraine, NATO was weakening, with few countries paying the full two percent of GDP for defense. Putin’s incursion has now greatly strengthened NATO with Finland and Sweden joining the alliance in response to Putin attacking the Ukraine, and now NATO members are significantly increasing their military expenditures.
Former President Trump now believes that he made the mistake in his first term of having advisers who offered advice, instead of offering unwavering praise and obedience. In a second term, he will make absolutely sure to avoid appointing any independent thinkers with too much mental energy for their own good. In every instance, they must be absolutely committed to following their dear leader and not their own thinking or the rule of law.
Trump could not come up with a credible military threat from Canada or Mexico to get Americans to give up internal freedom to defend their external freedom, so the best he could come up with was the external threat of millions of rapists and murderers with poison blood pouring over our southern border. That story would allow Trump (under Supreme Court official immunity) to further suppress internal freedom to protect us from such a horrific external threat.
The 2024 election appears to be a choice between either replacing the rule of law with the rule of Trump under presidential immunity as granted by the Supreme Court, or continue following the rule of law and thinking carefully with as much mental energy as possible from all our citizens with presidential advisers who provide criticism and advice and not just praise and adulation. Under Trump, “troublemakers” may be arrested for “disrespecting” the presidency just as Vladimir Putin can now arrest Russians for using the word “war” in reference to his military incursion into the Ukraine. If Republican politicians are afraid of offending Trump when he is not in power, imagine how obedient they will be if he regains the presidency.
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