It’s Our Behavior, Stupid!
For many years I have heard that what determines voter behavior is the economy. Some have even taunted, “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” In fact this rule-of-thumb has become axiomatic in political discourse and analysis. The talking heads all say it,” so it must be true”.
They are flat-out and deadly wrong, in my opinion. As a professor, I tracked critical indicators of the quality of America’s social behaviors for decades, starting in the 1980’s forward and (in many cases) extending back to the beginning of recorded data on our behavior patterns as a population. In almost all of the “critical indicators” that I found, or read from those collected by others, the quality of our collective behavior has had deteriorating trends over many decades.
It is my argument, that the earliest indicators of a culture in decline are worsening measures of the quality of its population’s behavior patterns. In my view, economic indicators of failure are very late indicators of sociocultural decline.
This is exactly the way things have played-out and I will therefore argue that my views are probably correct. Contemporary economic events confirm my predictions. Yes, our economy stinks. But our behavior has stunk long before our rotten economy appeared.
I fear that, try as we may, we will not have the human behavioral capital in sufficient quality and quantity to turn this mess around. This fear is exacerbated by the fact that many of our finest Americans are being killed and maimed in a war of attrition that we cannot win through modern conventional means. Radical Islam is degrading our vitality through uncontrolled immigration, stealth Jihad, and unremitting terrorism around the world.
I judge that economic manipulations alone will not turn our economy around. That will also require a restructuring of our socioculture to produce stronger moral and ethical behaviors within our replacement population. This will take at least a couple of generations to accomplish, if it can even be done.
I also suspect that to vanquish Islamic Terrorism and stealth Jihad will require a social restructuring and a military savagery that we will be unable to conceive of executing until it is too late.
This is my fear and expectation and I will pray that I am wrong.
Wake-Up America!
V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D. , 8/10/11
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