This writer has written about cults off and on in America and yes we are a culture infected with cult, but cult is not the bottom of our problems; merely a symptom.  Cults come and go and are usually time limited simply because they are lead by men or women whose grandiosity and self-inflation are out of their control. Cult leaders either burn out or blow up in relatively short order and the followers are stunned in sanity by the clear wholesome air that follows the demise of the blowhards. Paradigms are different.  Paradigms count the time of the culture, last a long time, and are hard to change.  Paradigms operate largely below society’s consciousness and a good paradigm will dance a culture through hard times creating good decision points.  A broken paradigm will run a culture and its people right off the cliff before anyone consciously knew something is really wrong here.  Paradigms play the strings of intuition.

Think of a paradigm as music.  The paradigm’s bass line sets the unconscious timing of the cultural dance, and the common voice of the paradigm is the melody and refrain.  Right now the bass line for the USA has shifted to thump out. the values and timing of unregulated capitalism generating massive wealth for a very few people.  Meanwhile the refrain and melody has We the People  singing: “I too am doing well enough and maybe will all days prosper” but are feeling the dissonance..  Except that is no longer true or even possible unless we retune the bass line. We have a cacophony and the nation can feel it. The bass line is tuned to a false value called wealth, and the melodic refrain cannot alone fix this.  We need to fix our paradigm to match our national values.  Unregulated capitalism will destroy this dream of a country

Modest Proposal for Good

A bomb has massive power but will not drive a car.  A car is only possible because we have designed the internal combustion engine that is a carefully regulated genius symphony of timing and small controlled explosions propelling useful transportation.  Simple money is much like gasoline. The symphony of investment at critical times and places can shape the future of a nation. Pouring all your money into a few silos can destroy us in a single overwhelming ignition.  Wealth alone cannot be sum total of our value.  Too much concentrated private wealth will burn out the fabric of our society.  We need to come together on a design of values that shapes a future we can see and live with.  Our paradigm must have a regular and regulated bass line that dances this culture forward.   If we cannot create and see a pattern of commonly valued future we are done for. Our current divisions are not our nation’s true differences rather they are deliberate engineered distractions making way for the social dissonance necessary for wealth concentration to occur for the few while ‘the many’ run on the ever more demanding treadmill.  Lets build and invest for all to resynchronize our culture’s refrain with a positive bass line.  That would be both a good decision and the next paradigm.