Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Multiculturalism is perhaps the most important issue facing America today, but a rational public discussion of the real issue is being aggressively obstructed by the lies and distortions of activists and politicians. Seeking to exploit the issue to benefit their own agendas, the loudest and most aggressive factions trying to stake a claim to the issue, are far more interested in creating confusion and misconceptions than contributing to the public understanding and awareness. The emotion-driven hysteria promoted by the main-stream media is contrived to obscure and obstruct public awareness of what is happening - and what is being lost. The evening news displays an endless stream of emotionally manipulative anecdotal side-effects and unintended consequences, while carefully avoiding any meaningful consideration of the underlying causes. It therefore comes as no surprise that most of the public discussion of the supposed "multicultural" issue completely misses the point.

One thing the issue is not about is legitimate immigration by individuals intent on becoming fully assimilated Americans. It's not about the source of legitimate immigrants. It's not about tolerating the ethnic traditions of immigrants. America has welcomed a far wider range of different peoples than any other nation in human history. A greater degree of ethnic diversity is available in pretty much any major American city than in any of the nations immigrants left to come to America. America has welcomed them all - as long as they came here to become real Americans.

America has always been a nation of immigrants, and has benefited substantially from the contributions of the diverse array of peoples who have joined our nation over time. Compared to the rest of human history, America has been exceptionally tolerant and even welcoming of the nondestructive ethnic traditions that immigrants from around the world have brought with them - food, music, art, vocabulary, etc.

My pro-immigration credentials are well established: three of my grandparents were immigrants - two from Denmark and one from Canada. My fourth grandparent's ancestors emigrated from England on the second Mayflower - old line New England Yankees, but immigrants none the less. My local extended family now contains a substantial number of recent immigrants from the Middle East - and I have no problem at all enjoying Persian dishes alongside traditional turkey and stuffing at family holiday gatherings. I also have recent immigrant relatives from at least Fiji, Southern Russia, and Asia. I don't know and don't much care about the details of where the rest of my relatives came from - we're all Americans now.

My extended family is a microcosm of America itself. Ultimately, all Americans have been immigrants at one time. Even those currently referred to as "native Americans" immigrated here from somewhere else - their only claim to being more "native" than later immigrants is the timing of their arrival. It could be said that there can't be any true "native Americans" since modern man had already evolved into our current state long before any of us wandered into North America. Modern humans are arguably only "native" to Africa - we're an invasive species everywhere else. And once here, our various ancestors tended to intermingle with the other ethnicities who found their way here. However, regardless of what we looked like, or our differing tastes in clothing, music, and food, the one critical commonality that made America possible was our common culture.

Civilization is not the natural state of man. Modern man has been a primitive savage during nearly all of the hundreds of thousands of years we've existed on Earth. We've only been experimenting with civilization for some six thousand odd years - a momentary aberration in a long time-line of uncivilized existence.

A civilization is an entirely artificial construct that results from a general agreement among its participants on a common culture of basic principles, interaction patterns, and expectations of behavior that will allow that civilization to function. Superficial group differentiation within a common culture becomes ethnicity.

America has never been a multicultural nation, and it can't survive as one.

America's common culture is composed of the essential principles that define our socioeconomic system and social contract - free enterprise capitalism, individualism, private property, limited government, the right to bear arms, trial by jury, a common language, etc. This unique common culture enabled its members to build a civilization that today provides an unprecedented quality of life to an unprecedented number of citizens, while achieving an unprecedented level of tolerance for ethnic, racial, and gender differences. While it's true that what is today often promoted as American culture has accumulated a lot of unnecessary clutter and agenda driven baggage, the original core principles remain as valid and mutually dependent today as two hundred years ago.

The essence of American culture is our unique voluntary free market/free enterprise society of sovereign freeman citizens. Everything else is just ethnic window dressing. Only America's common culture is based on liberty, and the purposeful subordination of the power of the state to the individual rights of sovereign freeman citizen. No other culture shares these fundamental principles, and so every other culture throughout human history is/has been by definition fundamentally incompatible with America's common culture.

In the past, America was a frontier nation. Immigrants coming to America tended to be self-selected, by the nature of their destination, for those who could best assimilate into America's unique culture. America was a land of opportunity for those who hungered for the individual freedom to make a better life for themselves and their loved ones - with the emphasis on "make". While the old world wasted its energies squabbling over the repetitious redistribution of old wealth, America excelled in the creation of new wealth through innovation and productivity. The nature of the American frontier tended to be less attractive to those desiring an easy life extracting unearned wealth from the cracks and crevices of byzantine bureaucracies, or those whose highest ambition was to be bribed into complacent subsidized poverty by the fearful elite of a decadent and corrupt society. Alas, this is no longer true.

America is no longer a frontier nation. Our free market/free enterprise individualist culture has become the prosperous engine driving a global industrial civilization. There are nations with more natural resources, and some who have adopted a subset of the cultural principles and practices that have worked so well for America. But no other culture has so fully embraced the principles of individual liberty and limited government, and as a direct result, America has become the most prosperous and powerful nation on Earth.

But a paradox threatens America's continued success. One aspect is that as our unique common culture has delivered an ever higher standard of living to its participants, meaningful understanding of the source of our prosperity has been increasingly lost - or perhaps more accurately discarded. Our public schools now celebrate and promote the failed cultures of the world while denigrating America's common culture. Few if any of the recent products of public education possess even the most basic understanding of the critical differences between a democracy and a republic - let alone why America is one and not the other. Nor do they understand the profound difference between the freedom to pursue one's own dreams and desires, and the illusionary freedom from want of the slave - or why they are mutually exclusive.

Having largely overcome the chronic traumas of famine and authoritarian oppression that have so dominated human history, the pampered products of America's unparalleled prosperity have become increasingly obsessed with our society's relatively minor remaining imperfections. Lacking a meaningful understanding of the unique common culture that provided such effective solutions to humanity's greatest problems, an ever growing segment of the American public has become all too willing to endorse superficially attractive false solutions to our relatively minor remaining problems - false solutions that directly compromise the core principles of our common culture.

Individual freedom has proven to be the most effective solution to what previously appeared to be man's most intractable problems. But today, our core cultural principles are being incrementally destroyed by ever expanding authoritarian "solutions" to problems that are themselves largely the unintended consequences of earlier authoritarian "solutions". We increasingly turn to intrusive government to impose arbitrary constraints on the freedom of our neighbors in the name of protecting civil rights, and turn over increasing responsibility for our personal lives to government in the name of protecting the public welfare. And each incremental expansion of intrusive government, becomes another incremental transformation of the freedom "to" of the freeman, into the freedom "from" of the slave.

Compounding American's internal loss of faith in its own core principles, is a fundamental change in the type of immigrants coming to America. Comfortable settled modern America no longer self-selects for individualists - the misfits, malcontents, and adventurers seeking the freedom to make their own way. Where once there needed to be some measure of desperation in the decision to emigrate to America, getting to America one way or another has become a reliable path to a better quality of life.

Undoubtedly, the most commonly voiced motivation for coming to America today is to find a job. Jobs are much easier to find in America's robust still partly free market economy, than in the corruption crippled authoritarian controlled socioeconomic systems of their home countries. There's certainly nothing wrong with an individual wanting a good job so he can feed and clothe his family. The problem is that just wanting a better life isn't a reliable indicator of who will become an assimilated American.

It seems quite reasonable to assume that the majority of the billions of humans on Earth would agree that a better life is desirable. However, many of those same billions would not agree that the American common culture of individual liberty and limited government should be preserved and protected. And all those who can't or won't assimilate and adopt America's core cultural values as their own, become a least a demographic threat to the collective acceptance of the common culture that makes America's free society possible. Some of those who refuse to adopt our common culture, come to our country actively seeking to undermine and destroy our core principles.

America doesn't have an immigration problem. However, the ever increasing number of foreign invaders who have no intention of becoming assimilated Americans are a very serious problem that must be addressed. These invaders enter our country without our permission or invitation, and then demand the "right" to recreate the failures of their native cultures here in America. The real issue is that the fundamental essence of America is being destroyed by those who come here not to join us, but to partake of the benefits of our common culture while attacking it from within.

The advocates of multiculturalism are demanding that the common culture that has served America so well, must now be distorted and suppressed to accommodate the inferior cultures of alien invaders. We're told that we are intolerant or racist if we refuse to honor and applaud the disrespect and even outright contempt these alien invaders demonstrate for the core principles of our common culture. There is no valid reason for those of us who value our American cultural heritage of liberty and individual freedoms, to allow them to be subverted or destroyed simply because the unparalleled prosperity and technological advancements made possible by our common culture are envied and resented by apologists for the failed cultures of the world.

The failure of our public schools to provide our nation's children with a full, honest, and accurate understanding of our common culture, is a terrible crime against our nation and mankind as a whole. These deceitful "political correct" assaults on the essence of America must be condemned, and their perpetrators reeducated in the core principles of our free society. A good start would be to put an end to using government taxing power to force freeman citizens to unwillingly subsidize those seeking to destroy our free society. Interest in building ivory towers tends to drop off fairly quickly when the would-be elite inhabitants have to honestly earn the money to build their own towers.

The most important immigration reform is to ensure that only those who have truly adopted our common culture are able to live and work here. Those invaders already inside America who reject our common culture must be expelled. Potential invaders must be preemptively dissuaded or proactively prohibited from violating our borders. Humanely if possible, but efficiently and above all else effectively. The survival of our free society depends on it. A free society can only exist among freemen citizens who understand, support and defend it.