Daily Inspiration: “Deception and denial can eventually lead even the greatest of all experiments into the finality of failure”

“Deception and denial can eventually lead even the greatest of all experiments into the finality of failure” – Futurist Jim Carroll

It’s July 4, 2022, and all the warning lights are flashing with massive intensity.

This will mark 245 years in the ‘great American experiment in Liberty.’ And to many people in the US and around the world, it is looking increasingly likely, if not downright certain, that the nation won’t make it to 250 years as a successful experiment in democracy, as it becomes all but a theocracy managed by a minority.

Indeed, I’m seeing some of my global leadership clients undertaking a very real assessment of the global, economic, societal, and environmental risks that accelerate when America ceases to be a democracy in 2024. Not only that, but the more serious discussions take those same issues and examine what might happen with the very real possibility that the US might separate into two or more nations going forward –  because what is clearly happening right now is the Disunited States of America.

I feel bad for many of my close American friends this July 4; the country is being torn apart by forces that now seem to be beyond its control. How broken is the country? You would do no better research than to read the report, The National Foundations of Societal Competitiveness, referenced in a Washington Post opinion article this morning, Nearly every American has a foreboding the country they love is losing its way.

TL/dr? This assessment:

America is losing many of the seven attributes he believes are necessary for competitive success: national ambition and will; unified national identity; shared opportunity; an active state; effective institutions; a learning and adaptive society; and competitive diversity and pluralism.

One of the observations is chilling:

Multiple trends are working to weaken traditional U.S. advantages. Several, such as the corruption of the national information space, pose acute risks to the long-term dynamism and competitiveness of the nation, raising the worrying prospect that the United States has begun to display classic patterns of a major power on
the far side of its dynamic and vital curve.

To my many friends and associates in the US, I wish for you, this July 4, a sobering moment of reflection on your determination to see that the nation does not fail. The world needs you, and can’t quite comprehend that we might yet see you disappear.