The Right and Wrong Kind of Supermen

From the middle of the 19th Century to the middle of the 20th, we produced an abundance of the wrong kind of superior beings - all over the world, with the Nazis showing the world, how bad they could really be.

But in the last half of the last century, America showed the world how to be dysfunctional in an entirely new way. By taking Capitalism to a new extreme - and building new supermen and women.

We never proclaimed ourselves to be super beings, like the Fascists did - but deep in our hearts, we knew we were - and we acted on that assumption. There were two kinds of people, we thought - the rich and powerful (like us) and everyone else.

And for 20 years, or so, after WWII - America was the richest and most powerful nation in history,  and this wealth was fairly well distributed, with an active middle class. Going to college was cheap, and there were plenty of good jobs. Americans became a superior people - superior to the human side of themselves.

We never questioned our basic assumption - that we were superior people, and entitled to its benefits. As superior people, we looked down on dependent people - including our own children. We were only interested in power and its economic benefits. Business became our new religion.

This obsession with power was nothing new, people had been this way for thousands of years. But Americans had a huge advantage - they were a democracy, and shared their wealth, inside America, fairly equally.

Allow me to repeat that - wealth in America was shared equally (if not perfectly) and Americans agreed on this kind of income distribution - at least in theory. LBJ encoded this attitude into the Great Society, complete with Civil Rights, that were enforced, for the first time in a hundred years.

But this was followed, almost immediately - by the Vietnam War. And growing income inequality - that became extreme. And something even more important - Americans became socially unaware, and determined to notice nothing.

They still thought they were superior beings - but helpless ones. Unable to control their own destiny. This was being determined by other forces, they did not understand in the least - but had to obey.

This led to the Economic Crisis of 2008 - that made a few people extremely wealthy, and impoverished many more. This happened because Americans wanted a weaker government, unable to regulate the Financial Industry. The Government no longer represented them - but the Rich and the Powerful, that had most of the power and the money.

America (and the rest of the world) is now ruled by them - not by their own people.