Why Is US-Africa Policy So Bad? Decline of American Culture!

I am frequently asked, why is US-Africa policy deficient in addressing the needs of Africans? On the African landmass over four hundred million people live in extreme poverty, making it the poorest continent in the world. Its total population is projected to expand to approximately two and a half billion people in the next quarter of a century. This portends global instability if the standard of living for hundreds of millions of Africans is not radically improved. The refusal of the United States to design policies to assist in the reduction of poverty in Africa may well turn out to be one of the biggest strategic blunders in U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century. To be honest, it is not just Africa, the U.S. is dangerously failing in its foreign policy throughout the globe.

The answer to the question cited above is clear and obvious to me, but I recognize that it may not be easy for others to grasp. It is the decline of American culture that is the cause of the current and impending disasters of U.S. foreign policy. As an American, who has been astutely politically engaged in the affairs of my country for over half a century, I can state with authority and certainty, American society has become decadent.

For conclusive proof, look no further than the June 27^th U.S. Presidential debate between the presumptive nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties. Ignore the incompetent chatter from the media and pundits with their superficial analysis, and the “hot button” rhetoric that each candidate spewed out on a fixed number of topics. There were no presentations to the public with idea content. Both candidates failed the debate. What is glaringly absent from both candidates is a vision for America and more importantly, a vision for America’s leadership in a developing multi-polar world.

Throughout this campaign cycle, neither of the candidates, or anyone else in the Congress, has articulated anything resembling President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Grand Design” or President John Kennedy’s “New Frontier” and his initiative for humankind to explore space. Neither candidate has shown himself capable of articulating a new paradigm that would be transformative in improving conditions of life for Americans and all citizens living on our planet.

It is clear that since the deaths of Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy, America has not produced a leader, who is also a statesmen with a true vision for the future of humankind. A reasonable question to ask is, why hasn’t America created such a leader? The answer may be difficult for some to digest. Americans have been dumbed down by our culture for over five decades. The beginning of our demise dates back to the second half of the 1960s, with the introduction of the “rock-sex-drug counterculture” following the assassination of President Kennedy and the decline of his space program.

No new ideas for the future of the human race. Image courtesy of Facebook.com

Citizens As President
The people who lead our nation emerge from citizens who compose our society. A degenerate culture will not generate qualified visionary leaders, much less statesmen. Hence, the U.S. is bereft of leaders capable of responding in this turbulent time of multiple crises.

In the better periods of Athenian culture, there was a belief that each citizen should be actively involved in contributing to the governing of their nation. They were expected to participate through reason and dialogue in determining the best policies for creating a better future for generations born and unborn. Some of our Founding Fathers, who studied Greek history were intent on founding a Republic, free from the domination of Empire, where individual citizens, not an unelected Oligarchy, would determine their future. The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution eloquently articulates the most essential principles to guide our newly created Republic. The creators of our Republic, emulating the best of Greek philosophy and culture, envisioned a population of citizen-leaders. It was intended that our citizens, though representing diverse sections and interests of our country, would nevertheless, through debate and discussion, guided by reason, decide the most propitious strategies for the development of our nation-state. However, for this to be accomplished our Founding Fathers knew the future of our Republic depended on, required, an educated citizenry. is Ideally, each citizen should be capable of strategic thinking, as if they were leading our Republic, as if they were in fact president.

The great Benjamin Franklin, upon leaving a session of the Constitutional Convention expressed this fundamental concern, in his pithy response to a question about the future of our country: “we have created a Republic, if you can keep it.” In other words, the only way the nation could survive was if the majority of its citizens were educated and informed, which is not the condition of Americans today.

The present threat to the very existence of the U.S., and the world, is in large part the absence of an educated American citizenry. Exactly as Franklin warned.

Development VS Poverty
For the last sixty years there has been no president with a commitment to partner with African nations to develop their economies. Worse, the very concept of development has all but vanished from our lexicon. Eliminating poverty and ending hunger in Africa is in the strategic interest of the U.S., and any qualified leader would know this, if their brain were functioning. The crisis facing us today, which we must address now, is the increase in poverty as the population of the African continent grows. Poverty is a major contributing cause to conflict, terrorism, alienation, rebellion, and coups. The greatest threat to civilization in this century, only second to nuclear war, is the spread of poverty across Africa.

Economic Development, including the right to electricity is a human right, which all human rights gr organizations and related NGOs fail to understand

Economic development is a fundamental human right. All the categories of hard and soft infrastructure, which are essential components for economic growth, should also be understood as essential human rights. The failure of the various mis-named human right organizations and NGOs to understand this elementary principle is scandalous. The perverted ideology of the “rules-based international order” that would like to impose its flawed constructs of democracy on the rest of the world will never achieve its purported aims. There will be no democracy when mothers are desperately searching for food to feed their children, and fathers are hustling each day to muster enough money for their families to survive. A productive, dignified, well-paying job is a human right. As is electricity, railroads, healthcare, and a home of adequate size to raise a family.

No one in the U.S. thinks like this. Why not? Because we no longer actually think, not in terms of profound idea-concepts.

As a result of the dumbing down of our citizens we have lost respect for human life; we no longer appreciate why human life is precious. The lack of understanding of the sacredness of human life, significantly contributes to the high rate of violence, murders, and mass shootings in the U.S.

We Are Humans, Not Yahoos
The crucial concept for understanding economic development, and for formulating fruitful foreign and domestic policy is knowing why human beings are noble. Let me briefly elucidate.

We human beings are unique and do not resemble any other animal species, because we are endowed with the spark of creativity. We humans, and only us humans, are born with the potential of creative thought. No animal has a creative imagination nor does any machine, computer, and nor does AI. As demonstrated by Socrates in Plato’s thought-provoking dialogues, the human mind’s ability to hypothesize new thoughts has no similarity with deductive or inductive logic. Human beings discover, hypothesizes new principles of the physical universe, perfecting our knowledge, but never reaching a final state of perfection. Through this constant but always improving process of perfection-knowledge, humankind acts on the universe for the advancement of the human species.

Socrates and Plato in front of the Academy of Athens, Greece. Image courtesy of reddit.com

This is the “secret” to the expansion of the human race over millions of years in harmony with the universe. Technological advancements derived from new human discoveries lead to transformations in society‘s economic mode of production, which creates the wealth necessary for sustaining more people and at a higher standard of living. This is a universal principle embedded in the physical universe, otherwise known as continual progress, resulting from human intervention. The great Ukrainian-Russian scientist, Vladimir Vernadsky, brilliantly discusses how the universe was transformed with emergence of homo sapiens-sapiens. This new “phase-space” of the universe, which incorporates human noetic activity, he called the noosphere. *

Society Got Dumbed Down
Let us now proceed to highlight several markers of the decline of American culture.

After reviewing the material below, it would not be unfair to suggest that America is on the pathway to becoming the new Roman Empire. This is not an academic observation. Our decaying culture directly affects how our foreign policy is conceived and implemented. This poses life and death questions for all nations, since the U.S. is still the dominant power in the world and possesses the largest nuclear arsenal.

At the risk of upsetting some of my friends, I am obligated to examine the most glaring elements contributing to our depraved culture, if we are going to understand the root cause for the tragedy of U.S. policy.

Following our successful American revolution from the most powerful oligarchy on the planet, the British Empire, the framers of our Republic wisely outlawed all forms of nobility or aristocracy. Yet today, in America, the fixation and idolization of Hollywood and sports celebrities has seeped in and corrupted our society. We have produced a new form of royalty. Every day, thousands of words are written, reporting on the latest gossip on the lives and lifestyle of celebrities. Who is breaking up with whom, who is dating whom, what house or car, or yacht they bought or sold, what clothes they wear or do not wear, saturates all media platforms. And what these people say, or who they support has become all important, not due to any superior intelligence, but simply because of who they are, their wealth, and their glitzy lifestyle. It has become almost as obscene as the obsession that British subjects have in their fawning over the extended Royal Family.

The phenomenal rise of spectator sports is also having a debilitating effect on our society. In the growth of children through adolescence, sports have a positive function. Team sports help youth to work together for a common goal, share a camaraderie, as well as learning to accept defeat. Sports in general helps develop hand-eye coordination and contribute to the healthy physical growth of men and women. Physical activity also helps us to be active and slow down the aging process as we live longer productive lives.

Fans erupting at an earlier Superbowl. Courtesy of bleacherreport.com

Not so with spectator sports, where grown men and women, spend hundreds of millions of hours watching others perform, either in front of a television or in person at a stadium. For example, each Sunday, over 21 million people watch football games, sometimes for the entire day. That does not include games played during the work week. Another 18 million attended in person at 256 football games played during the regular season. Close to 124 million watched the last Super Bowl. Almost as pitiful, is the day following a football game, when men, and women, young and old, spend hours zealously discussing the best and worst performances from the day before.

Instead of assuming responsibility for the future of our nation, deliberating on the profound issues confronting civilization, many, if not the majority of our citizens, respond to politics as rowdy spectators in a sports stadium, or worse, the Roman Colosseum.

Legalized gambling has become a key feature of our decadent society and has also expanded in recent years. In 2024, 68 million Americans bet a total of $23 billion on the Super Bowl. Almost a 50% increase from the year before. Americans wagered just short of $120 billion on sports in 2023, more than a 25% increase over what was waged in 2022. This is due to the expansion of organized betting via the internet, which became legal in 2018. In casinos, existing in 44 states, total revenues generated from slot machines, sports betting, and IGaming was more than $66 billion in 2023.

Winning big ambling in America, 2023. Courtesy of linkedin.com

Lotteries, legalized in the 1970s, became popular for people who thought they could win “big” to supplement their inadequate incomes. Essentially taxing themselves for the dream of becoming rich. Today, 45 states and our nation’s capital have lotteries, where over $113 billion is wagered, producing $37 billion in revenues for local governments.

Lotteries in 25 states directly fund K-12 public education. Maryland lotteries have been a source of revenue for public education for decades and are a line item in the state’s budget for anticipated income. Maryland, where I live, helps fund its Pre-K-12 school budget of $9.2 billion, with $622.7 million in revenue from the state’s casinos and $714 million from the lottery.

Funding the education of children, arguably the most vital task of society, depends on gambling! Are we not the modern-day replica of the Roman Empire, and behaving in a manner that will lead us to suffer the same fate?

This brings me to the subject of education.
Crisis in Education
It is hard to think of any other feature of American society that more categorically demonstrates the decline of our culture than the failure to educate our youth. The very existence of our Republic depends on quality public education from early childhood through high school and should include at least two years of community college. Is there a more important task of society than to guarantee that our youth, who will be our leaders of tomorrow, will be mature thinking adults? Our elementary school children, who in one generation, will be, or should be, in positions of leadership, guiding our nation for future generations. There is a growing body of evidence that indicates that they will not be prepared.

A report released earlier this year analyzed the reading levels of third graders. It found that only one third of the students had basic reading skills. This is especially worrisome because the operating theory is that from kindergarten through second grade, students learn to read, and from third grade forward, they read to learn. Without rudimentary reading skills, the child’s intellectual growth will be seriously impeded and will suffer from a lack of development of their creative imagination.

A study in 2011 found 91% of children ages 2-17, palyed video games-64 million youth. And that was over a decade ago. Image courtesy of yahoo.com

Educating America’s youth has become more challenging with the rampant watching videos and playing video games, readily available on smart phones and tablets. As a substitute elementary school teacher for four years, I was shocked to learn the excessive number of hours each day that students spent on their devices. i.e., screen time. It often exceeded five hours per day, compared to one hour or less of reading a book. The video culture and an obscene amount of time spent playing games on a screen is rotting out the brains of our youth. I discovered that thoughtful concerned parents not only limited screen time to a fixed number of hours per day/week, and in some cases even refused to allow their child to have a tablet until they graduated middle school.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends no screentime for children under two years of age, and a limit of one hour per day of high quality programming for children ages two to five years.

According to UNICEF, too much screen time can have negative effects on babies and toddlers including a shorter attention span, lower empathy, reduced ability to control impulses, and hindering their imagination and motivation

The Enemy Within
One cannot ignore the effects on society of the violence prevalent in today’s music, video games, and television. The rise of the video culture, the legalizing of drugs, the de-emphasis of classical music, art, and literature, is producing a population that is far short of the educated citizenry envisioned by the creators of our Republic. One hopes that the extreme severity of our current political-cultural crisis will produce the potential for new leadership committed to a cultural Renaissance. My recent visit to Italy and Greece, renews my faith that such a human inspired miracle is possible.

The author is at the Agora in Athens sanding between statue of Socrates, left (470-399 bce) and a statue of Confucius, right ( 551-479 bce ). Both philosophers, who influenced cultural and politics for humankind for over two millennium into the present.

The extremists of the “rules-based international order” attempt to whip up the population (somewhat successfully) that our way of life is threatened to be overcome by the rise of Russia and China. The truth of the matter is, we are destroying ourselves from within. We are committing acts of menticide against ourselves, especially our youth, willingly, if not out of ignorance.

We are living in unsettling times fraught with the potential of new and dangerous crises. Between now and the end of this year, civilization will be tested. Let us hope that we possess enough wisdom to survive, and eventually flourish in a paradigm based on global economic development.

*Much more can be discussed on this subject.

Lawrence Freeman is a Political-Economic Analyst for Africa, who has been involved in economic development policies for Africa for 35 years. He is a teacher, writer, public speaker, and consultant on Africa. Mr. Freeman strongly believes that economic development is an essential human right. He is the creator of the blog: lawrencefreemanafricaandtheworld.com, and also publishing on: lawrencefreeman.substack.com, “Freeman’s Africa and the World.