On cultures that build | new blog post

https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that-build.html

A few months ago Marc Andreeson wrote a call for action: "It is time to build." It was a plea from Americans to take their fate in their own hands, and to look forward and build things again.

This is my response.

My response ranges wide--it is directly relevant, I think, to @DouthatNYT's new book on on American decadence, @patrickc's "progress studies" and the general project advanced by a great number of people--in Silicon Valley and outside it--

to once again make America a place that creates the future.

To build more, we must understand why we stopped building. My thesis goes a bit like this:

Another way to say it: "building" happens most often in a cultural environment where people have been habituated by life experience into *feeling* that the right response to any problem is to gather together a group of people and go about solving it themselves.

It was this sense of agency and this impulse to create action-oriented committees and associations that Tocqueville thought distinguished Americans from other peoples of his day.

It distinguishes us no more.

One might say we live in Tocqueville's dystopia -- though worse than Tocqueville imagined, for people are not just managed into the dust by government bureaucracies, but by bureaucracies of all sorts, ones Tocqueville never imagined.

A culture that has lived three generations underneath the influence minor government functionaries, university admins, and Bob from HR is a culture of men and women who have internalized that the most effective way to solve a problem is to petition the management.

To "build" like we once did we need to work on creating a *culture* that trains people to build in the old way. Silicon Valley's existence suggests that building cultures like this are still possible.... but read the full essay here: https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that-build.html