Part 1

It is rare these days to have successful Hollywood productions that are six hours long. American attention spans are simply not equipped to weather such torture. I was therefore surprised at the success of the movie John Adams. To my relief I later learnt that the six hours were divided into one-hour episodes and shown on HBO before they were sold on CD. It was well worth it. The movie provides wonderful insights into the foundations of the US polity and democratic institutions while telling a personal story. I will not say much about the movie so as not to ruin the experience for those who may choose to watch it.

One of the profound revelations in the movie is how particular to a culture and history the formation of a new state can be. Despite the revolutionary leaders’ identity as aristocratic Englishmen, the system that they founded had very little in common with the governing system in London. But it did closely resemble the aspirational hopes of Britons like John Locke. Puritan discipline combined with economic transformation and cheap firearms allowed revolutionaries to refuse subordination to a foreign power and helped assert democracy. Well sort of.

…a low tolerance for cognitive dissonance leads most propagators of falsehood to self-deception; they tend to say what they believe, having first come to believe what they say.[1]

“Cognitive dissonance is a condition first proposed by the psychologist Leon Festinger in 1956, relating to his hypothesis of cognitive consistency. Cognitive dissonance is a state of opposition between cognitions. Cognitive dissonance is a perceived inconsistency between two cognitions in which the person believes one thing but then acts in a different way from what they believed. For the purpose of cognitive dissonance theory, cognitions are defined as being any element of knowledge, attitude, emotions, belief or value, as well as a goal, plan, or an interest. In brief, the theory of cognitive dissonance holds that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the human mind to acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to minimize the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions,”[2] since it is very hard to live with cognitive dissonance.

Notes and references have been omitted from this version to make it reader-friendly. For the footnoted version, click here(PDF)

Adam Smith summed up the vile maxim of the elite class as follows (back in 1776): “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” To be sure, there was only contempt in the US for the “vile maxim” during the 19th century among industrial workers (including the lively and vibrant working class press), who bitterly condemned the advance of the Industrial Revolution and much of what it entailed, more concisely, the “‘New Spirit of the Age’: gain wealth, forgetting all but self.” This would have been inconceivable under conditions of brotherly love, solidarity and subsequent equality of condition (not just opportunity), which is a democratic imperative.

Even though money-hungry marauders (political and economic masters) know that only very few of the many who seek wealth will find it, still, it is of inestimable importance for them to instill that value nevertheless, so that by mindlessly and pathologically seeking wealth, forgetting all but self, we destroy our sense of community without which we cannot renew democracy and regain, or gain for the first time, our status as sovereign citizens, hence cannot thrive as a human race, cannot realize our fullest human potentialities.