In a public address for a dedication of Dodd Center at the University of Connecticut, President Joe Biden shouts how there are fewer democracies today than fifteen years ago, adding, “this cannot be sustained.” He vows to make human rights central to his foreign policy and wants to reassert America’s moral leadership around the world and lead with the power of our example.
Now, let me unpack this smorgasbord of self-indulgence for you.
Power Of Example
First, the power of our example is that the United States of America has failed to establish fair ideologies, has created broken systems that produce deplorable and nonrenewable outcomes for its citizens. The statistics that follow do not depict the power of our example other countries in the world should stand in line for:
- We have 500,000 children in foster care.
- We are the second most obese country in the world, with 40,000 people dying from obesity every month(!). 40% of Americans are prediabetic. Only 50 million Americans of some 400 million living “health conscious” lives. 57% of kids will be obese by 35 years old. 75% of applicants to the army today are considered unfit.
- Seventy-percent of Americans are chronically dependent on prescription drugs, the vast majority on anti-depressants. 86% of healthcare cost is devoted to chronic diseases. American families spend $10K in healthcare cost per year.
- Poverty leads to abjection, denial, and escapism. In 2020, nearly 70,000 people died from opioids, up 30%.
- 18% of GDP is spent on healthcare, with poor delivery. Bandaging instead of preventive care. American healthcare is twice as expensive as other western civilizations. American average age is already lower than most developed countries, in decline for the third year in a row.
- Americans have accumulated $140B in healthcare debt.
- American students have accumulated $1.5T in student debt, producing 44% underemployment in recent post college graduates, questioning the merit and releveance of our education systems.
- 41% of Americans spend more than half their income on rent. 60% are enslaved to a job that pays no more than $40K, insufficient to buy healthy food, take care of a family, or pay medical bills in America.
- About 33% of people in the United States have debt in collections.
- America spends $80B per year on the cost of imprisonment. While we are 5% of world’s population, we harbor 25% of the world’s prisoners. California spends more on incarceration than on high school education.
- 15.8% of Americans are considered extremely poor. 25% of children in the public school system are on food support. 48 Million people live on food stamps. Childhood poverty costs the United States $1.03 trillion per year.
- 57% Americans cannot afford $500. 55% of Americans have credit card debt. Freedom is not the inability to escape this predicament.
- We are 120th on the global participation rate of elections. Depending on election season, roughly 70% of the American public has disenfranchised itself from voting. Meaning, a President-elect gets the buy-in from roughly only 16% of the population. Do not confound the opinion of any U.S. President with the disenfranchised opinion of the American people.
- US national debt at $28 Trillion exceeds our GDP. Our debt is $229K per taxpayer.
Must I go on? I can.
Policy
I hate to bring it to you, but the President of the United States clearly does not understand the role of policy.
Setting policy means explaining and delivering the gameplay to consistently improve the excellence of human renewal. Today, no American can explain what the game plan for humanity, let alone America, is. Akin to a company tanking when the employees do not understand or subscribe to the business plan.
The policy must define first-principles, a theory, systems, and rules —in that order— by which predictable outcomes of its marketplaces can be achieved. Rules alone do not constitute a theory. The artificial policy we deploy today hopelessly tinkers with the infinite undesirable outcomes from a human theory left undefined.
Hence, Joe Biden, and all Presidents before him, fail to understand that government is responsible for defining the game plan. Governments should not be tinkering with marketplaces to yield the opposite of freedom.
Nobody would tolerate if members of FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, would suddenly enter the field and midgame adjust the size and position of the goal because it does not like the outcome of a particular game. This is what our government does all day, every day. They are not governing. They are interfering in gameplay.
In the words of Albert Einstein, the theory determines what can be discovered. And the buck stops with Joe Biden to define the theory of humanity that allows its citizens to be the best players of the human game we need to be.
When the theory does not produce the desired results, the definition of the theory must be adjusted, and a change in gameplay as a consequence will follow. Using Einstein’s logic, adjust the theory and you will discover different outcomes.
Human Rights
Just because I challenge the implementation of our democracy does not mean I vouch for Putin-style leadership—quite the opposite. We must seek a higher ground of alignment with nature upon which the human species depends for survival.
Democracy is a flawed manmade evolutionary concept, as the populism of human wants does not equate to human needs. We must deploy an evolutionary meritocracy, the definition of merit not defined by man but guided by nature’s first-principles that have proven to deliver its value over some eighteen billion years.
We do not mother nature. Nature mothers us. And like all good mothers teach their children, rights come with obligations. The obligations we have failed to define lead us down the many rabbit holes of laissez-faire vile-maxims and subpriming that propagate a narrow-minded standard deviation of merit and systemically refuses access to opportunity for all.
Leadership
Leadership is not herding cows.
Leadership, as glowingly self-attributed to the President of arguably the most powerful country in the world, is the definition of a new normalization of truth that produces a better game plan for humanity. That normalization of truth begins with the fact that human excellence and renewal are not defined by man but are subject to the principles of nature.
Real leadership does not repair the undesirable outcomes from a theory left undefined. Real leadership addresses the need for a new cause, a theory for humanity in sync with nature, that avoids and eliminates undesirable consequences systemically and automatically.
Indeed, we can and must inspire the world with new rigors of excellence we first and successfully apply to ourselves. To sell our current implementation of democracy as the vehicle of human excellence is outright stupid and ignorant, let alone an evolutionary false-positive.
We can and must reinvent ourselves. Upstream, not downstream.
