Reality Check

 

A Century of Unreality- Shall We Begin Another- by Mark over at Mark America

The last one-hundred years or so have been unlike any other in human history. From heavier-than-air flight, to widespread personal modes of transportation, to microprocessors that churn through massive calculations at mind-bending speed, our technical sophistication has created a world that none alive two centuries before would have had the audacity to envision. Even the greatest visionaries of the early nineteenth century could not have foreseen what has been accomplished by all of mankind, but particularly seeded in the West, and most particularly in America on the shoulders of one unalterable truth: Reality is real. What is, is, irrespective of what some profoundly pathological liar may say to a grand jury while on the witness stand. No country in human history had ever paid greater devotion or service to this truth, and yet with the beginning of the progressive era, no country has worked harder to undo the reality on which its existence and its prosperity depends. The question now confronting us, if we are brave enough to acknowledge it, is whether we have had enough of unreality and wish to return to our previous condition of growth and success, or instead remain fixed on a course of self-destruction in pursuit of an unreality for another century.

 

If we choose the latter, it will be a short century, for it shall complete our destruction. One cannot survive by pretending one’s belly is full, any more than one can pretend it will be filled without effort. Life is not sustained without action on its own behalf, and yet ours is a culture beset by the bankrupt notion that life may be lived without gainful effort. How much time in any given day is devoted to the effort of doing nothing? How many idle hours are exhausted in pursuit of relentless indifference to one’s own existence? The number is now incalculable, and yet we can see its cost all around us. This years marks the ninety-ninth that our nation has pretended that value can be created out of nothing. The Federal Reserve system, enacted into law in 1913, promises to use the manipulation of debts in order to add more currency to our circulation, but it also promised that we would gain wealth by this process. In 1912, sixteen US Dollars would have purchased for you one ounce of gold. Now, one-hundred years later, you will need more than sixteen-hundred dollars to buy that same ounce of gold. This is a measurement of the scale of our century-long unreality.

 

Read More