During the past two centuries, Americans have demonstrated that they, their form of government, and their institutions and institutional flexibility are well suited to the invention and implementation of science and technology. No people has originated more of the world's technological accomplishments, and no country has more institutional momentum with which to continue to lead the advance of human civilization. At the same time, Americans have fallen victim to a number of ancient scourges which demonstrate that we are no more than an ordinary people who have risen to extraordinary opportunities. Oppressive, enslaving taxation; extreme moral decay, especially within our institutions of higher learning; and the emergence of a vast welfare class of nonworkers and pseudoworkers have sapped our national strength and are gradually slowing the great flywheel of American industry. In addition to the personal talents, character, and faith of our individual citizens and those from other countries by whom we are continuously reinvigorated through immigration, we have two great resources from which to draw protection from these scourges. First, the ongoing advance of technology continues to yield surprising new capabilities such as those from the current computer revolution. Second, the accumulated wisdom of the most outstanding of our people is stored and available in our books and other literature. One of the greatest of these books was written by a 40-year-old black man (he would have said "coloured'') who lived the first few years of his life on the dirt floor of a slave cabin and who, freed from slavery at the age of six at the end of the Civil War, was put to work in a salt furnace and then a mile underground in a West Virginia coal mine. Yet, before he was 40, he (and three wives, two of whom worked themselves to death beside him) had built the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, a university with 66 buildings and 1,400 students, which had received such world-wide acclaim that the President of the United States and his Cabinet had traveled to Tuskegee, Alabama, to honor it. Many people, of course, have fought their way from humble beginnings to great accomplishments. It is not the Horatio Alger story in this book nor the racial aspect and post-Civil War setting that bring tears to the eyes of the reader. It is the great depth of Booker T. Wash-ington's wisdom concerning the specific knowledge, ethics, and actions that were needed by his people in order to permanently free them from all forms of slavery and prejudice. As we look at America today, we can see that only part of the black people bear the legacy of Booker T. Washington. Many others have fallen victim to the traps that he worked so hard to teach them to avoid. Moreover, a substantial part of the white population has fallen into those same traps and is now similarly enslaved. In fact, such a large part of our population is currently enslaved and unproductive that America's leadership in science and technology is weakening, and our future as a nation of opportunity, high living standards, and reasonable personal safety is insecure. To explain why, Booker T. Washington would only need say, "read my book.'' Science and technology do not exist in a vacuum. They must be melded with people - ordinary people with ordinary strengths and weaknesses - or they will be lost. The greatest weakness that Booker T. Washington saw in his newly freed people was the tendency to try to "live by their wits'' rather than by productive work. He taught that any man who produces something that truly enriches the lives of others will earn their respect and admiration. Whether that man is producing food, bricks, or furniture in 19th Century America or food, computers, or electrical energy in the 20th, it is skill and productivity that earns the cooperation of others and melts away their human prejudices. While many blacks have learned this lesson and thereby earned their way out of slavery to a prosperous, free life, a substantial part of America's white population has forgotten these precepts and sunk into lives of slavery and prejudice with some members of other races. Literal armies of bureaucrats, "decision makers,'' paper shufflers, and welfare recipients of various types make up a very large part of the American "work'' force. These people do not produce - they only consume, and they are continually in the way of those who are still trying to produce. Moreover, they do not have the respect of productive, useful people. They return this lack of respect with envy and subliminal hatred even of those who ultimately feed and clothe them. A man who does not do useful work - even if he is paid very handsomely for his nonwork - knows that this is so, and he gradually loses his self-respect. He comes to hate and even fear those upon whom his life actually depends. How long will they continue to trade him something for nothing? Science and technology are the modern tools of those who make the world work - those who do things. Moreover, these tools have made each individual person more and more productive and thereby widened the gap between the doers and the others. It is a terrible thing to be physically enslaved and unable to do things with your talents because you are constrained. It is far more terrible, however, to be so enslaved by lack of ethics and ability that you cannot do anything of value even if you are physically free. This sort of slavery twists the human mind to hatred. American technology will not have a bright future unless this sort of hatred is diminished. The mob of welfare recipients at a demonstration against nuclear power or Northwestern logging; the faceless bureaucrats who add years to productive undertakings; and the edu-crats who turn our schools into moral sewers for social engineering rather than places to hone the skills of our children's minds all have much in common. They are populated by people who have learned to "live by their wits'' rather than by their personal worth. We do not respect them because they are of negative value to our lives. They do not respect us because we seem to them to be an un-derclass that is not clever enough to live by its wits. We are not directly enslaved, but we are entangled in chains such as onerous taxation and regulation created by the unproductive.
|
|
Vol. 23, No. 4
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 23, No. 4 Date: December 01, 1995 01:30 PM Title: Up From Slavery
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
|