Written by bruce k.   

Having just seen the first installment of Ridley Scott's video
series of Phillip K. Dick's book "The Man In The High Castle"
I have been thinking of alternate histories and what PKD meant
in that brilliant book. This is a kind of thought experiment based
on the ideas I got from the book and the video.

--

Here is a view from the Moon of a possible speed-history of the US
since WWII to put a little perspective on American Exceptionalism,
as well as American Imperialism. Don't take this too seriously,
it is a kind of parable designed to make people consider a
kind of alternate reality instead of getting too embedded in the
ones they are sold from people with ulterior motives. I mean
this to be a kind of loose meditation on history.

The thing with America is that when "we" reached a modern age,
the age in which we realized that the larger "we", humanity, could
possible destroy itself, or worse destroy its chance at freedom,
along with the rest of Western Civilization, which had attained a
certain not quite perfect maturity, ( I'll use "we" despite the
silly sound of it ) we realized the world is always at war and
sooner or later war or conquest or coercion would makes its
way to our shores and were we not ready we would fail.

WWII was is the start of the world getting smaller, the
understanding of which was made even stronger by the moon
landing and that photo of the blue Earth hanging in space.
Technology is what got us to the Moon, and enabled us to get
powerful enough to blow ourselves up, and technology needed
to be controlled, or atttempted anyway. Technology must be
constrained in a way that served our nation, and the world.

BUT, how to maintain Americanism, whatever that is, in
the face of a kind of fatalistic predestination and put the need
to survive as the prime goal displacing the individual? A tough
concept to contemplate. To be or not to be, that is indeed the
question!

The answer, as all great American thinking was in pragmatism,
a courageous and honest understanding of the problem.

The answer was to base the economy on war, defense, i.e.
military technology, and put the social and economic efforts
of the country into a kind of empire, but not any type of
empire ever before envisioned.

You see the germs of war, competition and conquest in
everything this country does now, but when we do not
understand the big picture - that is quite destabilizing.

The American empire, a new vision or steady state progress,
backed by Western philosophy, but not backed into a corner
by dogma or even law. We collect the brains from around the
world, and try to create our own intellectual and engineering
capital as well here - and then develop technology in a sort
of socialized technocratic way for military use, then distribute
it to private companies to make consumer goods the rest of
the world would be unable to match.

To keep up our defenses, we went on offense, little wars,
to keep us in practice and debug our technology and
military strategies - but also to bring this secular, rational,
and pragmatic system to the rest of the world ... not
in a really conquering way, the US is really beyond that -
though there are echoes of it still and relapses which are
exaggerated in a defensive claim by the tyrannies that
still remain in an attempt to make us doubt ourselves for
their own survival.

The point is, it makes sense, it is self-sustaining, and it
works as much as anything works in a chaotic and
unpredictable universe containing biological intelligences,
us.

The broader problem is that our system is more or less
unconscious. You, people and society do not really understand
this, because if we all did - they could misunderstand it, and vote
on it - and in this area we are anything but democratic.

Our society has been counter-programmed in a way that
has made us almost unfit for American Exceptionalism and has
thrown our survival into doubt. We have become consumers
and products ourselves. We need to take the blinders off and
face this brave new world ... because unlike Huxley's story,
truth is always stranger, and better than fiction.

Survival trumps Capitalism, survival trumps the Constitution
and survival trumps any other system of government in this
world as well, but once we have our survival ensured, we can
indeed have a new enlightenment and Renaissance. We can
argue back to the generals and strategists for our rights
and our place in society.

The longer and the more we do not see our responsibilities to
ourselves and others the closer we walk to the cliff and the
more we throw our futures and others into danger.