America is a Nation of markets, or at least that is the elevator-pitched-perception many single-minded free marketeers would want you to believe they believe. And yes, in many ways we are. We are a Nation of spirited and restless creatives willing to put their well-being on the line to further impact and ensure legacy through profit-measuring success. Albeit, with many permissions and privileges purposefully prohibited (see “The Road to Serfdom”) for those hatefully and needlessly deemed unworthy to be included in the Nation’s perpetual makers and takers. And yet, “We The People” have continually and willfully voted on and employed prohibitions to undermine who? Ourselves. For instance, ‘vice’ or the ‘immoral and/or wickedly’ deemed activities of the many are a popular variety of markets we have collectively adjudged, over-regulated, and abhorrently policed. Hope, or the “feeling of expectation and desire,” is the most American of these vices, often overlooked, and, outside of the slow realization that “Yes, We Can and Do Smoke Marijuana,” the first “black” market that we need to turn “grey” or “white” in 2021 (Who coined these terms of fuckery?).
Hope has been accosted, assaulted, and weaponized through monetization over the millennia. Still, most recently, it has been violated in the past seven decades as pseudo- and young sciences like psychology, biology, well-being, and their cultural “symbiotes” consumed the public square and sphere’s oxygen, replacing belief distribution hubs like organized religion. Religion was the purveyor of hope until the trickery of “tax-free” started to wain on people perpetually fighting for equality, and the charlatans moved to analog and then new media to profiteer. And as we have seen most recently if poisoned by lies and damned lies, belief will fester like cancer on democracy, wherein truth and compromise are the legged marrow of sovereign existence. Yes, the irony of me writing this on the corner boy self-help-hope-hock website of Medium is not lost on me, yet it showcases the issue here. Hope is, as Descartes argued, a complex building block for other cognitive experiences, so it is not salable on its own since it is analogically similar to a concrete recipe. However, like Rome’s concrete, when effectively utilized and applied for good, hope, much like the freeing of vice from the shackles of Victorian teetotaling, will help America and Humanity prosper.
Thanks for reading… more to come at No More Giants.
