American Cynicism

We Americans are always wary of someone else putting something over on us. You better not try because we're ready for your scam. As George W. Bush so wonderfully butchered the old saying: "...fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me...you can't get fooled again.” Yes, we're obsessed with being cheated, swindled, and made fools of. Undoubtedly this is rooted in a long history of actual large-scale swindles, lies, and cheats like the Mississippi Company, Teapot Dome, Gulf of Tonkin, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Ohio presidential election of 2004, Watergate, Iran Contra, Keating Five, Savings and Loan debacle, and the most recent financial scandals and Ponzi schemes.

Don't forget smaller but no less consciousness embedded schemes such as traveling snake oil salesmen, shady preachers, athletes on steroids, and con artists. These people and companies make up a rich and tawdry part of our history. People love to read about these affairs, watch television programs like Jerry Springer that spotlight bad behavior. If there is a way to cheat, steal, lie, swindle, or misrepresent, we likely have heard about it.

One of the obvious downsides to this culture of scandal is that we have become deeply cynical and are not willing to trust very much. We find it difficult to trust in personal relationships, in our professional relationships leading to workplaces often filled with intrigue, sabotage, and lack of communication. We also have difficulty believing claims regarding intangible and unobserved phenomena such as peak oil and global climate change. Particularly in America we are unwilling to believe that staggering change is looming because it seems so implausible that our comfortable little lives could be significantly disrupted and also because vested interests and their mouthpieces continue to castigate, belittle, and discredit those who research and report on such phenomena. This is a highly effective strategy in a severely cynical society.

Unfortunately, the real scam has been perpetrated on those who fall prey to the propagandists and public relations specialists who continue to try to protect a dying cultural and economic model up until its last raspy breath. By extension they are at minimum doing this world a massive disservice and perhaps more likely threatening a reasonable and sustainable future for our species. Only by exposing these vested interests and their endgame of misdirection can the path to a better society be available. Exposure can only be effective if people are open and receptive to new and different information regarding an emotionally charged and highly personal issue. Perhaps the only way to approach this is to disentangle love of country from an ideological system which has been modified over the years to resemble little of what the founding fathers intended or would respect. But in the end, effective reform of American democracy may be too steep of a hill to climb and lasting solutions will probably be most effectively advanced from the local. Go to it.