The Three Mistakes That Led to the Collapse of the English-Speaking World

How America and Britain Became The Globe’s Laughingstocks and Idiots

Here’s a shocking stat. I read today that just one third of American school kids can read at a competent level. But it’s just one among many. Then there’s falling life expectancy, a shrinking middle class, declining real incomes — not to mention the erosion and corrosion of democracy, trust, meaning, and purpose.

One of the things we have to admit — us Anglos, us pure English speakers, Americans and Brits — is that our societies are collapsing. We might not want to admit it. We might not like to. Especially if we’re the much maligned white dude, we might have a hard time, because we’ve been told for so long that the world belonged to us. But the evidence is indisputable — and the implications are dire. Our societies are in severe disrepair, in ruin. They might not make it.

I often point out that we’re considered now to be the idiots of the world, its jokes, and I mean that in precise ways, not as an insult. We made three colossal, tragicomic, astonishing mistakes, which are more or less unique in history — the rest of the world didn’t make them, because it couldn’t, because it wasn’t the richest and most powerful. Only we were. Whether or not we can undo them is up to us — I’ll return to that. But everyone should learn from them. If we’re the idiots, the laughingstocks and jokes and ignoramuses of the world now, my friends, your first job is not being one.

The first mistake that we made — the one which really makes us the dumbest societies in history — is that we were the world’s richest countries…and we squandered all our wealth. We literally threw it away. We could have done almost anything, built almost anything we could have imagined. And what did we do with it? Look around. Nothing at all, really. Nobody else has made this epic, astonishing mistake of squandering history’s greatest fortune, because nobody else ever had (anything close to) it. And that, my friends, is what really make us the dumbest countries in the world: nobody else in history, really, has been remotely as foolish as we have.

Imagine that you were the head of a family. What would you want for your kids? You’d…