The Myth of the Average American

One would be hard pressed any more to say exactly what or who an "average" American is. There probably was never a time when this could really be answered with any degree of certainty, but there were also many eras, decades in fact, when one could come up with a pretty reasonable stereotype, with each period different than the one before.

The average American nowadays, statistically speaking, probably will not be of "white" background and may not even speak English as a first language. In this assessment, we must distinguish analytically between what might be called the "typical" American (there really isn't a "typical" American, only different stereotypes of Americans) and what might be called "typical" American culture. 

If we are looking for cultural patterns, defining culture as that shared between people in different ways, then there is much that can pass in the name of being typically American. American culture remains quite strong and in place, and even has a pattern of near universal incorporation of "ethnic subcultures," even if Jane American herself has become somewhat changed and different, statistically at least, than before. But it is also quite true that there is probably far less cultural consonance today than at any previous point in our collective history, and there are far more competing cultural models and paradigms operating within the American system today than during any previous epoch of our national or colonial history.

Most Americans are proud of their country but quite naive about the realities of the rest of the world. The United States has become dramatically transformed during the last quarter century, to become something fundamentally more different in character than it had been in the entire previous two centuries of its existence. The celebration of America's bicentennial in 1976 was perhaps a critical turning point in our history, though no one at the time would have thought it to be so.

The major issues the US confronts today are both domestic and international. Globalization and modernization have gone hand in hand in the transformation of American society and civilization. At the center of this transformation has been the core structural dialectic of being an American. The United States has always been founded upon the struggle of private enterprise, on the one hand, and the pursuit of greater equality through democracy and universal emancipation, on the other. In the course of American history, these two contrapuntal tendencies have come into collision with one another around issues of slavery, minority rights and the struggle of rising immigrant under classes to gain a foothold of prosperity within the American system. It seems that we must always be mindful of the trade-off between the promotion of greater productive and organizational efficiency and the realization of greater equality between social groups.

The other dialectic that has been at play is between the promotion of individual freedoms and liberties, and the ascendancy of the organizational person, the bureaucrat, especially within a communalistic framework. This is found in a great deal of our superman mythology and traditional collective representations about our selves. We as Americans live with the paradox of becoming our own persons while at the same time functioning effectively as team players. This is reflected in the contradictions of our class system as well, for on one hand our class system is ideally open, at least in political principle if not in social practice. On the other hand class differences are frequently exaggerated to the point of making the critical difference in deciding whom plays and who remains on the sidelines in their lifetime.

Americans have long lived with the illusion that they are unique, special, and above a lot of the corrupt nonsense that is common in the rest of the world. This is not necessarily so, and becoming less and less true as the differences between ourselves and our proverbial others are disappearing, and even "switching" places. 

Americans have traditionally prided themselves about having at least a relatively uncorrupt system. Bribery, nepotism, chronyism and favoritism were seen as qualities just not befitting American culture. To some extent, these aphorisms about our selves were true, but these qualities have been increasingly exposed for the fictions that they have been by subsequent experience. At the same time, and connected with this transformation, has been a rise in administrative and other forms of social authoritarianism, to degrees that have come to resemble the kinds of leather gloved systems of the rest of the world.

Most Americans remain and live oblivious to the contradictions of their own system. They are shocked and somewhat incredulous to be told that they may in fact not be that much different from the rest of the world, that the US has come to increasingly share many of the problems found in the rest of the world. People here do not want to accept that the class system has become increasingly closed and vertical in its complex pattern of stratification. Higher education as a clearing house for social mobility and a market place for better jobs has consistently failed to live up to its promises, as it also become transformed by the same process of globalization that have been affecting the rest of the country.

Ronald Reagan was perhaps the most influential American political leader who accomplished, in the first several years of his administration, more structural transformation of the American system than any other President in the history of the United States, save perhaps for Roosevelt and Lincoln. This is not to say that Reagan's reforms have made Reagan one of our greatest political leaders. He was an actor, and rhetorician, and he basically gave the global capitalists a free hand to do as they pleased with the American system. The transformations that have occurred subsequently have mostly had a long-term negative consequence upon American society. If American society has grown more prosperous subsequently, it was not through any government policies, but only by the resilience and adaptability of the American people, and their special genius for effective business organization, that has won America increasing economic dividends.

For this reason, in spite of received rhetoric to the contrary, I would claim that Ronald Reagan was historically one of the worst and most destructive President's that the United States has ever had to suffer. It is a paradox, I believe Bill Clinton ran a close second to last place against Reagan.

It has been my interest to approach the problem of the contemporary culture and society of America from the standpoint of a cross-cultural anthropologist who has long attempted comparative research. I also address the problem as an American whom has most of his life grown up in and lived within the American system. I address what I take to be common and collectively shared prejudices and worldview of most Americans that are held because they are culturally embedded. Lived culture remains for the most part implicit and transparent to the way we lead our lives and the vaues and interests we bring to the world.

Globalization as a recent historical phenomenon has not been well studied. It is an inevitable process for any country that is bent on modern development--it is inevitable even for those few countries that are seeking alternative pathways to development. And yet globalization itself is merely an historical process of a series of actors across the world's stage playing their parts. Global culture that has emerged with the disappearing skylines of modern city-scapes, whether one is in Shanghai or Los Angeles or Paris or Moscow, is in effect a constructed cultural system that embodies certain core values and entails certan core contradictions about it. Whereever it occurs, it is not achieved except at great cost and sacrifice by many people.

In the forging of a collective future, we must ask what is the appropriate role of government, of any government in the world, but of the American government in particular, since so many US corporations are leading the way of globalization in the world. Is government to act as a promoter and facilitator of globalization processes, however short term these goals may really be? Or is it the responsibility of government to attempt to put brakes on the rapidity of globalization and to minimize the kinds of social and human damage that such globalization invariably results in? It is clear that for the past quarter century, the US government has consistently acted in favor on the side of globalization, even to the neglect of the interests and security of most Americans.

If the theory the social construction of human reality is scientifically correct, which I believe it to be, then it provides us ultimately with the ethical option of deciding for ourselves what we want our world to become. We can construct, in other words, the kind of cultural realities that we think most suitable for ourselves. Granted, there may ultimately be little common agreement as to what these realities ought to be, but the option, and responsibility for chosing, remains our own regardless.

The critical blessing the American society harbors is the US constitution, the Delaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. No politician or private interest group or firm of lawyers has yet figured out how to manipulate these basic documents defining the American system into meaningless oblivion, though without a doubt many today would attempt to do so if they could. But the basic foundations of American society have become challenged in a manner historically unprecedented. American citizenship has largely become compromised, almost literally sold out, by the lack of secure and safe borders, and by the deliberate manipulation of a system of multiple standards. These domestic issues in the long run may pale in significant to what may become more pressing and larger background issues looming upon the horizon. These are of course issues relating to global overpopulation and the loss of global ecology. If and when nations begin slinging around weapons of mass destruction, then any scraps of paper, like the US dollar or the US constitution, may become quite meaningless in the aftermath.

The tragic events of 9-11 caught most Americans by surprise. It proved to have been an embarrassment to the American government that found itself looking rather weak and irresponsible in the eyes of the American people. It is not surprising that the American President and Congress enjoyed peak popularity ratings for a long time afterward as it is the nature of such disasters to rally the people behind their government, regardless of other factors. The ineptitude and totally effective nature of the immigration and naturalization services, which provided the ring leader of the terrorist plot, Mohammed Atta, with permission for flying lesson several months afterword, demonstrated unequivocally and categorically the need to take radical reform measures. To date, almost one year later, very few reforms if any have been instituted, beyond tighter security at airports, and it continues to be business as usual as presidential and congressional ratings continue to fall to even lower levels than when they started.

The capitalist mandate in our country that is leading globalization and political economic development worldwide, has been for the last 30 years encouraging an open border policy that permits the relatively unrestricted immigration of foreign born people. During this period, illegal immigration from the Southern border across Mexico has been something of a cross between a game played on both sides and a racket. There has also been occurring, on another level, a brain drain that has attempted to draw from foreign societies the most talented and educated individuals. Similarly, there has been a resource drain that has encouraged foreign investment, often lock stock and barrel, in the American system, by wealthy foreign interests.

Cheap labor that undercuts the minimum wage structure mandated by federal law, foreign and cheap brains that undercut the traditional educational system for social mobility, and capital resources that undercut the small business structure of the American system, have all been promoted and protected under an ideology foisted upon the American people promoting diversity. In the year just before 9-11, at the peak of the communications-cyberspace boom, Congress mandated the importation of half a million more "computer experts" from nations like Pakistan, India, Taiwan and Japan, on the pretext that these workers were already trained and qualified to fulfill the growing needs of the industry. Now, post 9-11, and after the collapse of the stock market, little is said of what became of these lucky 500,000 new yuppie professional Americans.

Other countries, especially Great Britain, the common wealth countries, and some of the Western European countries, have pursued very similar kinds of policies, though none to the scale that was achieved in the US. Australia nearly doubled its population from a mere 7 to 14 million through purely foreign immigration, before it realized that it could no longer afford to do so. But there has been no country on earth, other than the US, that has so consistently sacrificed the interests and security of its own citizenry for the sake of the advancement of the interests of foreigners and the capitalist elite.

Any system contains limited resources. There cannot be unlimited inclusion of foreign groups without some policies that exclude other groups. The targeted group in this case have been the lower and middle class White Americans, the real silent majority. This is the only group who are not permitted to directly organize themselves to voice a sense of communcal solidarity or interest, even though if they did this solidarity in its true form would take the form of patriotism and pro-Americanism. Other minority groups, racially or ethnically defined, who have established a platform in American society, are able to excercise communal solidarity and organize themselves into exclusive networks without fear of recrimination by the government because they fit the stereotypical rubric of the "White Man's burden."

While for them such ethno-political organization and mobilization is voiced as empowerment, and becomes the launching pad for the importation of new Americans. This relationship is de facto and implicitly at the expense of mainly white Americans who are rubricized as WASPish and are not afforded similar, reciprocal arrangements in society unless these are paralegal or nefarious. This is in spite of the fact that the tax burden for these social reforms and the promulgation of these policies fell squarely on the shoulders of "Waspish" middle class Americans.

Behind this failure of the American government must be seen the growing conflict of interest of most political leaders and the administrative appointees, that increasingly serves private political-economic interests over a sense of the collective or common good for the American people as citizens. This has reached scandalous proportions in Washington and the State Capitols, and there is almost no sector of the US economy or of our social structure that has not become adversely affected by these trends.

The average American who was defined as middle to working class and upwardly mobile, is finding that their horizons for opportunity and social mobility are rapidly vanishing at a faster rate than they can compete or keep up with. We are living within an increasingly polarized society with wealth accumulting on one narrow end, and a growing rate of endemic poverty at the other end. The government has relied upon a newly restructured communications media that assured that no effective counter-voice of dissuasion would reach the eyes and ears of the majority of Americans. Americans were lulled into a false and naive faith that their government was serving their best interests behind the guise of promoting radical pluralism and deregulated capitalism.

To voice criticism or complaint against these developments in American society was to risk a fate worse than death, as it was to risk losing one's job and one's means of working support within the system. American society has found that social ostracism and denial is an effective form of social control, far more effective in fact, an less risky, that more direct methods of social repression which tend to backfire within the American legal system.

9-11 brought out the worst suspicions of a growing number of people and the expert knowledge of a few anthropologists that the promotion of radical pluralism in any context is not risk free. It is rather prone to lead to violence through the colonialistic restructuring of society that results in politics transcending and perpetuating deep cleavages between groups in society. The radical promotion of unlimited globalization and radical diversification of society has permanently jeopardized the inherent security of our social system and threatened the internal long-run stability of the system.

9-11 was a wake up call to many Americans who were lulled to sleep in a false sense of security and belief that their government was undoubtedly supporting their own best interests. Americans were suddenly made to feel vulnerable and helpless in a way they never felt or thought of before and they had a rude awakening as to the more violent realities of social diversity and social politics. Politics is, after all, in a divided world, a question of winners and losers, not of right and wrong. The day that genuine diversity in the world can be achieved, will be the day that the world as total system achieves democratic unification. Until then, the ethno-political interests of the American people, can be safeguarded and better preserved by a government that is made to assume greater responsibility for its own decision-making and style of life free of vested interest, nepotism and cronyism.

But 9-11 was really only the tip of a huge ice-berg of contradictions and corruptions within the American system. Perhaps, in many American's eyes, it was the can opener that finally cracked the can of worms that was festering deep within their own political and social system. Americans themselves are mostly obedient, God-fearing and devotely loyal to their government and their way of life. Minor episodes after 9-11, such as the court ruling striking out "under God" from the pledge of allegiance, have induced major reactions that political leaders at all levels should pay heed to. Americans have grown quite weary of having their own system, their own unique culture and way of life, bashed and jeopardized, especially by people who are seen to jump the line to the American pie. Americans are also patient and democratic, and they will voice their feelings and choices at the polls in the forthcoming elections, regardless of what politicians say or do and regardless of whether they are given any real choices or not.

Democracy has been under threat in this new globalized, diversified American system, for democracy depends upon education and information, and not misinformation. Today, our system really teeters at the edge of being called even remotely a Democracy. The working ideal of the ideology of radical pluralism is the hegemony of competing minority groups who increasingly identify and define themselves as special interest groups. The basic tenets of this political philosophy stands diametrically opposed to the foundational basis of American democracy that was rooted in the ideals of social contract theory--that the government was empowered by consent of the individual whose interests would be served in a collective. A sense of cultural homogeneity, of what it means to be an American, has been sacrificed in the name of the celebration of multi-cultural heterogeneity.

The basis of American democracy was essentially what can be defined as universal political equality. Universal political equality remains essentially a "color blind" policy that all people, no matter their creed, religion, station or color, are equal in the eyes of the law. To a great extent, the promotion of ideals of social equality and cultural equality, which are defined in terms of inter-group realities and identities, has been a tradeoff of the foundational concept of political equality. This has opened the door to arbitrary authoritarianism and hence double standards, manipulation and corruption in political and administrative offices at all levels in the system, in the situational definition of varying forms of equality, at the expense of political equality. It has lead to a confusion of interest of the American government, to serve all people politically in an equal manner, or to serve select groups of people, often defined by rather spurious labels and definitions, differentially and preferentially over other groups. One consequence of this, I believe, takes the form of the protection and promulgation of group rights and social rights over the question of individual freedoms and liberties. Group rights have invariably been defined in inter-group contexts, and have consistently taken precedence over the realization of individually-defined rights. Again, this is due to a shift away from definitions of political equality toward definitions of socio-cultural equality and opportunity.

The federal mandate has been the promotion of an open border system, and relatively unlimited flow of new immigrants into the US. This flow has been based upon the assumption that the new immigrants will bring at least their labor, if not their money, into our system, without significant displacement. Thus, we have developed a capitalist economy based upon the rapid replacement and transition of resources, including people. Americans have come to live with the socially induced reality that people are replaceable and long-term job situations tend to be unreliable.

At the same time, the federal government has foisted upon administrative systems nation-wide, and upon all levels, a system of multiple operating standards that is based upon the ideology of competitive race relations and the requirement for the bureaucratic encapsulization of race-defined identity and the expression of communal solidarity. One consequence of both these trends has been for the federal government to have structurally created for itself a fundamental conflict of interest between serving on one hand a sense of the collective good, and on the other hand, the serving of private interest. At the same time, somewhat arbitarily defined notions of social equality have come to replace definitions of political equality based upon the original social contract theory implicit in democracy. We have been in a sense living in a period of the hegemony of the minority, rather than the expression of the will of the majority. Thus, representatives of the federal government, whether seen as appointed or elected, are no longer viewed as reliably serving public interest in any collective sense. There are not public officials today, at any level, who are not somehow compromised by conflict of interest. Perhaps this has always been structurally the case, but never have private interests won out so completely over public interests in the leadership of our nation as they have since the the early 1960's. Trends that emanate from the highest levels of our government reverberate throughout the system to the most local levels, to the extent that such conflict of interest has become the implicit sanction of our political culture and life and not the exception. As a result, the following can be said to exemplify the current situation of American society domestically:

1. Our nation now has lost a sense of population equilibrium, and faces the dilemmas of becoming the third most populous nation on earth. This impacts upon the social system at all levels.

2. A significant proportion of the new population can be said to be culturally heterogeneous and represents a population that is largely undocumented and with a divided sense of commitment within the American system.

3. There has been a shift away from contract government by popular consent, toward a form of government rooted in communalism and competitive ethno-national groupings vying for political power and a greater share of the total resource budget.

4. There has occurred a consistent and deliberate policy of government restriction of vital information, and the manipulation of information given to the media, such that it can be said that we are no longer a nation governed ultimately by informed consent, but by the prejudices that are the consequence of misinformation and manipulation. Media-bytes and media-hype create more presence in the public imagination than factual information and reasoned opinion, and there is an implicit norm operating that only what is received as politically and culturally correct is permissable and publishable.

5. There has also occurred a degree of historical revisionism and selective "forgetting" of the past that entails that misinformation will be uncritically carried forward in lock-step to the promulgation of government policies.

6. The structure of the US government and its promulgation of a kind of naive multiculturalism has resulted in the failure to separate issues of efficiency from those of equality. Every context, no matter what the framework, becomes politicized and overshadowed by considerations of an ethnically defined sense of social equality and thus no situation remains immune or uninfluenced by this process. Most workplace contexts are or should remain essentially color blind and ethnic free contexts where these issues have no place except perhaps in the nature of interpersonal relationships. They become the central defining issue when advancement and employment hinge primarily upon these factors and not upon capabilities, experience, and seniority.

These trends are likely to continue unaltered into the future, but with final long-term outcomes that even the government itself cannot predict or ultimately control. Instead of asking how much better we might become if we corrected some of these issues, we cast out instead upon the rest of the world and say that at least we are not that bad. We suffer the costs of null opportunities and null productivity when we gatekeep capable people from careers, meaningful jobs and access to the resources and prestige this entails, due to political definitions of race and ethnicity. We suffer costs of an overburdened system and lack of overall accountability to the system when we import foreign labor and brains without reasonable limits or even the necessary controls. We suffer therefore increasing sense of insecurity and the increasing incapacity of the government to maintain effective standards of security and control without adopting increasing measures that tend, in the long run, to circumscribe the platform of individual freedoms and liberties upon which our government was based in the first place. We can no longer afford a basic symbolic consensus of cultural values or worldview, as Americans, that will not be fundamentally compromised by pluralistic alternation, conflict and discrepancies of relativistic realities. What is lost in this case is a sense of a single, uniform set of standards, normatively and ethically, legally codified, that are non-arbitarily applicable to all people in all contexts.

It is likely that the American population will continue its exponential expansion into the indefinite future, and that social resources to manage this increased population at standards enjoyed by previous epochs will proportionately decrease in conjunction. The outcome of this is the only outcome that can be expected from any case of overpopulation, stress on the system, a growing mass of endemically poverty-stricken people, increasing disparity between wealth, resource-rich classes who control access to resources, and the poor who lack any effective screens of support at all except the most minimal. These are the patterns that are observable in any national context where population can be said to exceed reasonable levels of equilibrium, as for intance in China, India and Indonesia.

Side-effects of this process will be for the government to be forced to adopt increasingly drastic measures and mechanisms for control and management of the population, and an increase reliance upon media manipulation to effect this control. If certain ethno-cultural classes have been gaining unfair advantage within the system by the status quo, for instance, Hispanics and Asians, this trend cannot continue indefinitely, and even these advantaged groups will come to experience increasing disadvantage in a system that becomes increasingly stressed.

Another consequence will be the increasing trends towards lack of accountability and manipulation of information by government at all levels. The most predicted outcome is a form of interference competition, expressed through government control areas of employment, where position and advantage will increasingly, statistically become the prerogative of the wealthier and powerful classes, including newly emergent ethno-classes. For all the rest of the people, there will be an increasing kind of scramble competition for essentially "trickle down" or "left over" resources.

We have been experiencing these effects already over the last 22 years, as an increasing majority of Americans, white, black or otherwise, find themselves dispossessed of careers they thought they had and chasing forever the vanishing horizon of middle class security and comfort. No election or leader elected has made any significant difference in these trend lines.

The central argument of this book is simple and straightforward:

If the government of the United States intends to preserve a serious and effective sense of democracy into the indefinite future, if it does not wish to further undermine and erode the foundation for a constitutional government based upon the principles of the Declaration of Independence, then the most important and pressing thing that it can do is to curb and control the processes of immigration and consequent population growth in the country.

If the American people of the United States wishes to gain greater public and collective accountability from its leaders and their administration, then it is vital that certain kinds of governmental reform, such as campaign contribution limits, etc., be set in place as soon as possible. It is apparent that the government cannot be counted upon to control or restrict them selves further in this regard.

If the government and people of the United States desire to restore a genuine contract-based form of government by informed consent, then it eliminate as soon as possible a system of multiple standards and gate-keeping selection based upon politically constructed definitions of race and ethno-cultural identification, and adopt a single set of selection criteria that is the same for all Americans regardless of their identity. In short, it will restore, once and for all, a truly color-blind system guaranteeing true political equality for all citizens.

These are the socio-political measures that must be put into place quickly if the American people and their government wishs to restore some sense of equilibrium and long-term structural stability to their system. There is no other nation or government on earth that has been able to afford the luxury of uncontrolled mass immigration for an indefinite period of time. It is evident that the American government has been consistently working against the best long-term interests of the American people in numerous interrelated ways, and this government can be said to have grown increasingly parasitic, corrupt, inefficient on the backs of the American people.

The tragic events of 9/11 underscored the failure of the American people to secure themselves domestically from attack that was of the scale of the attack by the Japanese Empire on Pearl Harbor. It clearly brought into stark relief the ineffectiveness and irresponsibility of the INS in failing to enforce the laws that were or should have been in place. It comes therefore as something anti-climactic to realize that in the year since 9/11, there have been almost no internal reforms or changes of policy affecting the number and kinds of people we let into the US. History teaches us that those lessons that go unlearned are soon to be repeated. 9/11 also brought to the foreground the anthropological realities of an administratively enforced multiculturalism. That the promotion of ethnic and racial diversity leads to deepening cleavages and communalism within a society that results in increased potential for violence.

At the same time, it is evident as well that certain kinds of broad based economic and developmental reforms must be instituted or at least mandated centrally by the federal government. These kinds of reforms are in keeping with the predominant patterns of globalization and the possibility of alternative development toward sustainable futures, and entail domestically the reregulation many sectors of industry, and internationally, the promotion of genuine developmental and social reform programs targeting the most hard hit and needy populations of the earth. The lessons of the last twenty years have clearly been that big industry will not police itself, and if left to its own means completely, has no intrinsic sense of social responsibility beyond its own profit maximization. It is the role and obligation of the central government therefore to put in place and to effectively enforce standards of control over industry that will lead to more ethical management and results in the long run, and thus a greater measure of shared and collective good for all people.

These processes have not been a necessary reality. They have largely been self-induced, and the bottom line has been that pure greed has driven its development. We have become a society in which the pursuit of wealth and the almighty dollar has become our primary purpose. Affluence has bred upon itself to create greater demand for wealth, at almost any cost. One side-effect has been the devaluation of human relations in society, or rather the increased spuriousness of most social relations that are defined primarily upon the principle of non-reciprocal, market-based exchange.

One of the central lessons of the last quater century will be that "an once of prevention is well worth a ton of cure." Once basic contradictions and complexes of authoritarianism in government have been created, once the base population has allowed to so exceed reasonable limits in carrying-capacity, it is much more difficult to restore and regain a sene of long-term balance and sustainability than to have prevented this from occurring in the first place.

The central question that remains to be answered is not whether these things are true, but what will become the long-term outcomes of this general trend in our nation's history. At what point, in other words, might population become stabilized and the larger system capable of restoring itself back to some kind of normal balance.

What is not so obvious will be sociologically the kind of society that will develop as an outcome of these processes continuing indefinitely into the future. For instance, I am of the opinion that one's ethno-class situation, a situation that is largely the result of the constructive labeling processes of our society, and the socioeconomic outcome of these policies being promoted in a blanket manner, has become the primarily determinant of one's most likely life-path trajectory in this society. One can attempt to go against the odds that have been prestructured by societie's mandate, one that is socially and structurally reinforced at every level, but increasingly the odds on winning a state lottery becomes almost as unfavorable. If people are fluid, then their mobility will become increasingly defined either as intra-social within the ethnoclass framework of one's own situation, or else this will be increasingly defined, as it is in India, the plural society par excellence, by means of the mobility of entire groups or even entire ethno-classes vis'a vis other classes or groups. Hypergamy and ethnoclass exogamy will become alternative means of mobility for people who may find themselves otherwise in a not so favorable ethnoclass position in life.

The central argument that this book makes, for increased responsibility by the American government to the American people, to stop selling the Americans out to foreign dollars or private interests, is bound, in our day and age, to fall unheeded and ignored upon deaf ears. But at least 9/11 has served as a wake-up call to the American people themselves, an alarm that something is terribly wrong with the way we've been conducting ourselves in the world. It is hoped at least that the American political system, slow if ever to mend its ways, will at least regard as not unreasonable the plea to adopt alternative strategies for future development, especially if these strategies lead to increasing wealth and security for Americans as well as for other people abroad in other nations.

In giving a free and helping hand to big business exclusively, and in shortchanging the interests of the average American in the process, the government has served to interfere and frustrate the development of small business frameworks in the US, which framework has been traditionally vital to the health and development of new economic structures in our society. If we are enjoying continuing growth and affluence in spite of a flagging stock market, it is only due to the remaining openness of this system that permits at some level entrepreneurship and innovation in the business field. This does not mean that this growth is the best that can be had, nor does it mean that there are not better ways for achieving a superior sense of economic success at fewer long term costs to the American people. The average American has long been treated now as second and even third class citizens of their own country. They were not born in Europe, even if they had European ancestors--they are natives to American soil, no less so than the Native Americans themselves. It is to them that the administrative overlords, the elite who presume to know what is best for everyone and to introduce reforms affecting the very structure and foundations of our society without careful consideration of the consequences, owe their allegiance and ultimate accountability. If Americans have been made more replaceable than before, administrators should remember that they are Americans too, and are therefore no less replaceable than any other average American.

*****

One consequence of the turn of affairs in American society has been the loss of intellectual productivity and creativity at the higher levels, due to the almost repressive air of "correctness" of working in received paradigms, and of the level of gatekeeping required in publication and teaching at higher levels that constitutes virtual censorship of alternate theoretical orientations. The repressive air of academia has assured that only certain points of view, and only certain people's points of view, will be promoted and rewarded, while any other alternative points of view will not only not be promoted, but lead to ostracism and systematic exclusion from the ranks of the intelligentsia. The product of this has been a society that is failing to forge ahead at a level of thought and new ideas due to a kind of academic inquisition that is rewarding conformity of intellect over creativity and power of intellect to explore new noetic landscapes.

The publish or perish imperative is the central instrumentality of this form of intellectual conformism, as it is the central means of sanctioning published dialogue, and hence of controlling the dissemination of information and ideas in public forums. The gatekeeping concept has been pushed to new levels of intellectual control over ideas by its exclusive reliance in the determination of hiring/firing decisions in academic departments. This is doubly the case when the publishing forums themselves have become increasingly bottlenecked due to the increasing competition as well as political-economic circumscription of published resources.

Standards of inclusion, seen from a sociolinguistic point of view, require mastery and fluency in a certain speech style, or professional jargon that is itself narrowly constrained by certain norms and implicit standards requiring agreement and consensus. Usually, this goes along with an exclusive in-group orientation marked by a status hierarchy or pecking order of members, in which the privilege to pontificate, criticize and castigate is in direct relation to ones perceived rank within such a hierarchy.

The consequence is that sophistry and sophistication, and criticism, takes priority frequently over a form of dialectical question-answer inquiry and appreciation of alternative perspectives. To a great extent, the predominant and fundamentally important viewpoints go unquestioned and uncriticized and accepted at face value, while there is almost an exclusive and unquestioning emphasis and preoccupation with the articulation and problematics of evaluation of such a viewpoint. That this pattern reflects what Thomas Kuhn might have referred to as the operation of a normal paradigm is correct, but it has become the case that the normal paradigms that control and bound our knowledge have themselves become politically ossified as somewhat sacrosanct ideological institutions. In such an intellectually conformist and intolerant atmosphere, no marginal or alternate points of view can arise because such points of view are not permitted either to exist or to be published openly without undue ridicule and ostracism resulting. Such alternative points of view die a natural death by a form of unsponsorship or benign neglect.

It is troubling and beguiling, from an intellectual standpoint, to realize how deeply controlled we have become in our noetic imagination and capacity to view the world through alternative frameworks. It leads to a conclusion that American academia has largely become the structural-functional handmaiden of the state through top-down administrative pressure and funding structures. Its main function is the secondary reinforcement and legitimization of the received symbolic framework of the state, and the necessary academic "encapsulization" of any alternative viewpoints that must exist. One's rank and progress in such a system will be in direct proportion to the degree of intellectual conformism one achieves through one's intellectual work and expressions in writing.

This is also reflected in an emphasis upon practical applications of research versus the theoretical ramifications toward conducting basic experiments. We applaud the production of "great scientists" as long as the scientists serve primarily as gifted technocrats who are hyperspecialized on specific problem sets and whose intellect does not drift to dangerous waters. Often we witness thus the banalization of talent and intellect over problem solving that can, in the larger scheme of things, be said to be trivial and without great import in the world.

This of course would be received as an extremely controversial point of view, mainly because most high achieving academics want their cake and eat it too and to remain above the pale of critique and criticism in their work and orientation. They are not usually conditioned to think in terms of the possible unfreedoms that surround their well-protected and often over-valued intellectual freedom, but in some ways they are even more conditionally constrained to think and work in some ways and not others more than the average human being. This is not only in lip service to political correctness in the classroom or to the maintenance of some professional code of ethics. It assumes I believe a more invidious form in the social politics of the department and the status mongering and networking of the corridors.

There is ultimately no safe-guard or guarantee of immunity from some form of social persecution or even political retribution from freely expressing one's ideas or point of view, and this fundamental sense of academic insecurity works as a kind of intellectual straight-jacket, or should I say, chastity-belt, in a manner far more effective than any overt forms of control measure. I have carried on extremely productive and confidential conversations in central China, always with the fear that someone may in fact be listening in or of being reported to the authorities, when, in supposedly open contexts of American academia, I would not be permitted even to voice my opinion or thoughts because either my status prevented it or it was somehow construed as "inappropriate" to do so.

I believe that the loss at this level is a loss of a certain critical aptitude for dealing with reality in a reasonable, unbiased and realistic manner that is not influenced by the politics of speech events, words, and the social implications of the ideas they evoke. We are training brilliant minds not for creative exploration but for critical conformism and an unquestioning acceptance of fundamental frameworks as if these were not reified constructions of reality but reality itself. This is a subtle, symbolic issue of how much in our advanced state of the sciences and technology, we have managed to reify some basic frameworks in such a manner that they are part of a received and unquestioned sense of reality. This is not the challenging of Darwinian evolution, for example, with pseudo-creationist theories of "intelligent design." It is rather the failure to take the Darwinian framework to task on a more general scientific frame of reference, and to try to build an even better and possibly more comprehensive theory of biological systems than possible within a strict Darwinian framework.

All knowledge is important, but some kinds and forms of knowledge are more important than others, and some forms of knowing are critically necessary if it comes to enhancing scientific understanding. To be told in a doctoral program, as I have been told on more than one occassion, that some ideas are either too sophisticated or inappropriate, is tantamount to drawing arbitrary boundaries around the structure of knowledge. It not only foreshortens the imagination, but it leads to a form of repressive conformism that places performance of the tried and the true above the learning and acquisition of new ideas.

I make this indictment because in a sense many of the issues affecting the larger host system are brought to focus and are being played out in microcosm in the academic context. To a great extent, academia becomes not just the bureaucracy of the intellect,

*****

The human social realities that the world now faces have been essentially human-made problems. Globalization that affects our country as it affects the rest of the world has been the product of the promotion of an unrestrained capitalism that has served to create vast disparities in the distribution and control of resources, concentrating these resources in the hands of a very small fraction of the total population, and providing the symbolic-social apparatus for the reinforcement of this gross reality of political-economic inequality that now exists in the world.

While globalization in the US is usually equated with a new experimental form of pluralistic democracy, which ideology disguises the brain and labor drain that it serves to legitimate, the promotion of a globalized and highly developed domestic economy in the US has usually meant the demotion of democratic development abroad, and the maintenance of the status quo of authoritarian regimes and hierarchy in many underdeveloped nations in order to provide a stable framework for industrial operations to be advanced in those countries. The leadership structures of these underdeveloped nations really have no choice but to participate, and to coerce their people into participation, in the global economy, because otherwise they will find themselves sanctioned and ostracized from the global system and left to their own means entirely, which are usually inadequate, especially in tropical or desertified or oceanic regions.

These realities have not been necessary realities. Alternatives and other choices were always available. They have been the long-term consequence of the decisions of many policy makers and people, and the result largely of culturally relative and biased attitudes and behaviors. The kind of development that is now occurring in the world is based largely upon an administrative articulation of social reality that serves to maintain the status quo of hierarchical class systems. The system that has developed has neither been the best nor the only possible system that could have been or still might be developed in the world.

It has been the central purpose of the development of metasystems theory and application to provide viable and productive alternatives to current predominant processes of globalization, especially before it quickly becomes too late to undue much of the damage that is being done, or to restore to the human population a sense of balance, equity and stability that will create a new world system that has a brighter and more optimistic outlook for more people.

It is not a matter so much of the confiscation or redistribution of the wealth that has already been created in society, so much as it is a matter of the creation of new wealth in the world, and the reorganization of the control of this new wealth that allows it to exist in a complementary sense alongside of the old wealth that already exists. It is therefore the best of all possible worlds in which no one loses and everyone serves to gain. Only the future gains that due occur will not be to the exclusive benefit of a very few and to the detriment of all the rest.

A new and improved form of alternative globalization will not come about on its own through a lack of planning or deliberate coordination of effort by many nations. It is in a sense a new game plan for humankind that requires that it let go of many of its authoritarian structures that result in so much violence being perpetrated in the world, and that permits poor people the freedom and the means to develop themselves to their own potential.

*****

It becomes important in this understanding to move beyond the cultural biases and relativities of worldview and values of contemporary American culture. Frankly, many policies that are official and received lines relating to pluralism, imigration, dislocations of population and the promotion of development abroad are essentially self serving programs. The political realities underlying such statements, promulgations and their social action, must be understood within a framework of competitive race relations and ethno-political stratification. To understand the realities, one must see through the rhetoric and examine the actions and behavior of people within a larger context. One must examine as well the functional and structural processes and relationships that are being served through the perpetuation of such systems of belief and behavior.

It is quite unfortunate but true that the American system is in a sense a minimal democracy. Government interests, especially upon a federal level, are not necessarily to be relied upon to put the collective interests of the American people always in the foreground of their policy decision-making.

By far, the biggest problems facing the United States in the 21st Century will not be the threat of terrorism or horizontal proliferation of weapons of mass destruction abroad. The threat to our security will come from within. By far, the biggest and most pressing problem that will face the American people will be the problem of over-population. We have grown from a condition of population equilibrium with zero-population growth in the early 1970's to a current condition of being the fastest growing population on the planet, now currently cresting 300 million souls. We have, in a few short decades, blossomed into the third largest and most populace country on earth. By far, almost all of this new growth, which as amounted to an increase of about 2 to 3 million new persons per year, has been due either directly or indirectly to immigration, and this has been a phenomenon unparalleled in the history of the world. Already, open public institutions in Southern California and in other areas hardest hit by immigration patterns, have become inundated and are finding themselves resourceless to deal with the tidal wave of new people making demands upon their system.

This problem was essentially an unnecessary problem in the first place, and the official government line has been to deny that a problem of overpopulation ever even existed. Of course, denial, both officially and socially, has always been a part of the problem in the first place. Immigration laws were either completely ignored, or essentially bent until they were broken. The INS has been turned into a mockery of bureaucratic contradiction and inefficiency, with citizenship and residency being bought, bartered and blackmailed at the borders. At this stage, the surging population has grown out of equilibrium and it is resulting in increasing stress on the social system to be able to manage so many people effectively with the same standards that Americans once enjoyed. Failing to obtain an accurate or correct count during the lastest national census, the first time in the history of the US that the census has failed, the most the head of the census bureau could state is that we should now all be happy to be living in the most diverse place on earth that the world has ever witnessed. Proclamations of the untested virtues of such radical pluralism provide little comfort for the restless masses whose framework of security and social support are being increasingly eroded from beneath by the continuing influx of new immigrants and the rising surge of the babies they are producing in the name of US citizenship. Such proclamations reveal, more than the ignorance of those who believe them, the emptiness and moral hypocrisy of those who make them. The trouble with the immigration problem is that now there really is no end in sight, and once in disequilibrium, the ability to reestablish control over population growth will be next to impossible unless drastic measures are implemented similar to those controversial birth control and family planning policies adopted in India and China. Giving the history of organized and cultural resistance to such population control measures in the US, it is unlikely that the American government will be ever capable of enforcing an effective policy of population control. The most it can therefore achieve are reformed policies of population management, which has so far gone under the official guise of "mutliculturalism" and that leads ultimately forms of bureaucratic mismanagement and neglect.

The second biggest problem facing the United States in the 21st Century will be a direct correlate with the problem of overpopulation, and this will be the problem of maintaining peace, domestic security and preserving the institutions of freedom and liberty within an increasingly radical pluralistic society that is founded upon the notion of competitive race relations between different ethnocultural groupings. By far, the largest competitive ethnocultural grouping will be the Mexican or "hispanic" population, and they represent a force of "hispanicization" of North American that will pose an increasing threat of structural and social alternation to the traditional American pattern. All the rhetoric of multiculturalism will mean little once the ethno-political interests of the Hispanic block make themselves felt increasingly in cities and states across the US. These interests will further compromise the territorial integrity of the United States as well as the structural and symbolic integrity of the domestic institutions of our society.

The tragedy of 9-11 has resulted in no substantial reforms or change of policy of the American immigration laws, and this tragedy has been due in the first place largely to a failure to enforce the laws governing immigration that have long been in place. In fact, it appears as if capitalist and government interests, long in collusion over immigration, have a vested interest in continuing the status quo regardless of the long-term consequences felt by the society as a whole. Few Americans want to seriously admit that there is any such problem, and most either rationalize the problem as good for America's prosperity or as a reflection of our multicultural heritage. Politicians, finding increasing voting blocks among minority populations, will no longer touch the issues of immigration headon, as it is seen as political suicide to do so.

Since denial is also a big part of the problem, and the failure to face the contradictions of having laws and not enforcing them by the same standards for everyone, this problem, it is believed, will continue to be exacerbated without resolution for the indefinite future. The kinds of consequences forthcoming from this continuing state of affairs will be those natural consequences of failing to prevent a problem that develops in the first place.

If the naive and anthropologically blind promotion of radical pluralism as a foundation for democracy in the US has been an experiment, it has been one entirely without precedent or proof in the history of humanity. What evidence does exist suggests that, instead of providing a platform for the growth of increasingly democratic institutions, the functional pluralization of any society due to misguided adminitrative policies generally results in the increase of political insecurity and instability with rising political-economic competition across deep cleavages of society. As a consequence, authoritarian government becomes not only the functional norm for such a society, but a necessary evil for the preservation of peace between competing groups.

Not only will public institutions in the US increasingly fail to meet the needs of the people for whom they were originally designed, but the social stratification between wealthy and poor classes will continue to grow with an increasing disparity of wealth and disproportion of status and resources in the hands of a few people. Within unlimited population increases, the consequences will be that the vast majority of Americans, of any color or ethnic background, will find themselves increasingly dispossessed and left bereft of almost any screens of opportunity or realistic chances to improve their condition of life in the future. The economy by this time will become truly a trickle down affair, and the competition for limited resources at the bottom will become truly a scramble for a few bones disguising a pattern of interference competition from classes and socioeconomic groups from above.

The ideal Jeffersonian democracy was founded upon the principle of universal education for all its citizens. I believe this ideal has been replaced by a somewhat surreptitious agenda of government sponsored misinformation through the mass media. Thus, control that was originally designed for the informed voter in a democratic society has been passing increasingly to those who are able to manipulate the opinion of the masses in service of their own short-range and narrow interests. Misinformation is ultimately a form of propaganda and persuasion, but it is a persuasion that relies upon the collective ignorance, and apathy of the average American, for the critical issues at hand. It relies upon the systematic manipulation of the collective imagination, the selective limitation of the common stock of knowledge, and the socially reinforced construction of alternative realities, primarily through the mass and communications media, that serve to disguise the historical realities of the present predicament and its contradictions. One way of doing this is by blocking critical information on a selective basis from reaching the eyes or ears of most people. If central and pressing problems can be kept out of the public eye, then they are no longer serious "problems" from the standpoint of the social imagination or the social construction of relative realities. This is further augmented by the structural annonymity of the state as a superorganic, corporate system that is larger than life both symbolically and behaviorally. It is also reinforced by the process of conveniently and collectively "forgetting" those aspects of its social history that contradicts its status quo, and if unable to forget them, at least then "revising" these past realities to better suit contemporary interests.

In such a social atmosphere, America does not need direct censorship of information. It relies primarily upon the self-selecting capacity of the American public to conveniently ignore what it finds distasteful, contradictory or annoying. Public opinion in America can swiftly castigate and chastize any would be boat-rocker far more effectively than any secret censorship agency.

Though this may sound like grand conspiracy theory, I doubt the entire affair was ever been the deliberate policy or coordinated strategy of any single group of people. Many different people, from LBJ and Richard Nixon, down to George W. Bush and his brother Jeb, have had a hand in it. It was moreover a long history of shortsighted blunders by people who were primarily motivated by their own self-interest and greed. It was a strategy that the Americans found themselves, step by step, foundering into year after year. Domestic policies of affirmative action and federal mandates toward greater civil equalities became somehow conflated and "bought out" by capitalistic interests that, as is known in the history of capitalism, has a habit of marketizing and thereby banalizing ideals and dreams that were originally grand and well intentioned. It was indeed an unexpected but in hindsight logical consequence of the response of the American capitalist system to governmental policies.

The result, I would claim, has been a globalization of the North American economy marked increasingly by a similar kind of hiearchical social stratification and social authoritarianism that characterizes most societies on earth today. Today, the real division of class in our society is increasingly between an administrative elite and their business and political leaders, and the rest of the people. The main value shared by the administrative elite, the "white collar" class of yesteryear's Middle Town, are the preservation of the status quo of the system at all costs, and the promotion of increasing inequality of such a system at almost any cost.

In this state of affairs, American society that once prided itself on the integrity and honesty of its public officials, is no longer any stranger to the kinds of petty or white collar corruption that characterizes most other authoritarian states in the world. Double standards and evasion of the equality under the law become the implicit norms of a system that must continue to function with some degree of effectiveness inspite of its own unresolved and unaddressed contradictions.

If modern China has been truly the Orwellian 1984 dark utopia of big brother and newspeak, then the modern United States has become the comparable Huxlian Brave New World of the rule of modern technocracy, population tracking and the canning of ideological diatribe. The point is, beyond our capitalistic heritage and their totalitarian communism, as modern state societies, there is not that much that is so different beyond the American and the Chinese system in its day-to-day functioning and bureaucratic dynamics that is not a matter of degree and quality. Many of the same, often surreptitious goals are achieved within both systems, and many of these goals have much to do ultimately with population control and manipulation.

Looking about for positive things to think about and say in regard to my own country, beyond the obvious contradictions of the OJ Simpson trial, the World Trade Center and a failed and irresponsible INS, is the question of whether the American system, as a democracy and as a constitutional form of representative government, will be able to fully withstand or overcome its own contradictions and resolve the current dilemmas of over population and ethnocultural competition that it has inherited. In a sense, this contradiction was there from the very founding of the American government in the form of institutionalized slavery, and it threatened to undermine the unanimous signing of the declaration of Independence in 1776, and it remains today, albeit in a very different and globalized form. How much will the fundamental rights and freedoms of the American people, as well as their and our posterity's future opportunities, continue to be jeopardized by their own governments policies in support of narrow and short-sighted capitalist interests. How much will they survive intact and unaltered in the manner that they were originally intended by our founding fathers?

This has been the only remaining thing in the US, beyond its unbridled wealth, that is still worthy of sacrifice and some sense of genuine allegiance. It is the only thing that allows me to safely write this work without fear of persecution or retribution (although I do not know how realistic this sense of political security under the law really is today, especially in our post 9-11 world). I only hope that I will be able to continue to write in such a manner into the indefinite future unimpeded and without interference or obstruction, especially by the American government, which is supposed to protect my rights to freedom of speech and freedom of press. Most Americans today would not realize, much less agree with, the notion that the promotion of our democratic way of life has always depended upon the vigorous exercise of our freedoms. Most would be inclined to equate the concept of liberty with the pursuit of happiness, which would mean the material happiness that can be only bought by the all-mighty American dollar. I for one have taken exception to this unfortunate trend, though my family and I have paid dearly for the consequences of this course of action. What mainland China accomplishes through coercive persecution, American society achieves as effectively through socially reinforced ostracism and discrimination.

I have long wanted to write this book. I attempted upon several occassions in the past to do so, but the results were always foreshortened and less than satisfying. The timing was never right. Now, in the long-term view behind 9-11 and the subsequent exposure of the structural and social ineptitudes of the American government, the recent concatenation of historical events has fostered conditions that make the writing of this book more timely and relevant than ever before. History has a way of creeping up on people and institutions, exposing the hidden realities that were kept from public view. History brings the social realities and inequities of an era into a fuller public accounting. Of course, hindsight is always 20-20, and the trick remains not to go on repeating the hard-learned lessons of the past.

Americans have lived for a long time with a kind of cultural denial of either the reality's of the larger world in which they are situated nor of the realities of their own world. This sense of denial takes many forms, but largely plays out in everyday forums and contexts in the articulation of class prerogatives and in the implementation and delegation of power and opportunity in the world. A sense of cultural denial is fostered by government agencies and by a sponsored media that has come to have a profound shaping influence upon the collective symbolisms, shared culture and worldview of Americans. If Americans are victims of misinformation, or just a surfeit of relevant information, it is not only their fault. This denial has become experienced everyday in terms of numerous contradictions that most Americans must contend with--the intrusions at supper-time by aggressive telephone solicitors, the lack of a family at suppertime, the rising costs of living and increasing credit-card debt.

As an American, an authentic American, I feel I have not just the privilege of birth, cultural heritage, and experience of American history, but the obligation to tell this story, especially to other Americans. I want Americans to understand and appreciate their own cultural heritage, which has itself been precious and unique in the history of humankind. I want them to understand their own predicament, as a people and a society, whose cultural institutions and heritage have been under steady assault by the forces and winds of change, modernization and globalization. I want Americans to wake up to the fact that they have become in the world their own worst enemies, to themselves, one another, and almost everyone else in the world, while at the same time they remain the world's best friend. As with any kind of contradiction, to which human beings are always prone, the only means of resolution is through the confrontation of reality and the awakening from the sense of collective symbolic denial about our shared reality.

As an anthropologist, my training and fieldwork experience has predisposed me to take a critical and objective position vis a vis my own society. If we are to accept recent claims of anthropology in terms of the authentic native anthropologist, then I will make a claim that, as a native of America, I have a privileged position to study and critically examine my own cultural heritage and people. As a cross-cultural and comparative anthropologist, I have also the capacity to systematically compare American culture and people with other cultures in the world that I have studied and peoples with whom I have dealt. I have by dent of existential outcomes and ethnographic research become a professional stranger to my own way of life. This has put me upon the margins of my own society, to perhaps better examine some aspects of our society. At the same time it has left me outside of the information loops and class-systems by which this, as any society, becomes articulated, and I can only surmise the mechanics of class articulation by the biased results that are evident in all social institutions.

The only challenge to the credibility of this work would come from my almost complete lack of any class position or status within our great society, and therein is the rub and the first clue about what makes our society really tick. We are a society that has become hung up upon class and the complicated kinds of stratification and social convolutions that our class system entails. This system has become both more closed and more complicated, largely as the result of processes of "redevelopment" and globalization that have been in gear since the 1970's. These processes are driven by the basic dialectical structure of the American political and economic system. This dialectic is always a kind of waltz between institutions and values leading to greater democracy, both domestically and internationally, and largely ultra-capitalistic institutions and values that lead to greater political-economic power and development, via the private corporation and greater government administration. This dialectic does not divide evenly between the Republican and the Democratic party. These are really social-symbolic demonstrations of the dialectic. That this is the case is evident by witness to recent political events at elections that show that there is ultimately little difference between the two parties in terms of the structural outcomes for the society as a whole.

Globalization has led domestically in America, and in most of the developed world, to increasing ethnization, or ethnic fragmentation, of society. Government policies of "affirmative or positive action" intended to integrate minority newcomers have actually tended to raise interethnic consciousness and increase competition along ethnic lines. Reification of race based categories of classification, that thinly disguise ethnocultural differentials, tend to perpetuate cleavages and promote ethnoschismogenesis between groups of people, even often in cases where no real natural basis for such differentiation existed previously. Ethnization and affirmative action therefore can be seen as a kind of social-ideological smoke screen for the conduct of politics as usual within a global economic framework. Increasing group competition for restricted resources at the bottom tends to undercut the ability of any one group or individuals of a group to achieve ascendancy and the required socio-economic mobility that enables such groups to prosper.

The consequence has been an improper shift of structural standards of the American government alongside a structural embedding of double standards (actually, multiple standards) that serve to disguise the articulation of closed-door administrative policies and class articulation. In other words, the American government has shifted emphasis away from a social contract model toward a social competition model, and away from an emphasis in the service of public good toward service of private interest. This shift as been nowhere very subtle, except perhaps in the rhetorical manner in which such motives are glossed and disguised in public forums. The result has been the growth of a top-heavy government administrative structure which is clearly, unequivocally class-tied, and that demonstrates class-solidarity at all levels and in all ways. American social life has become increasingly bureaucratically encapsulated, even if Americans are uncognizant of this encapsulization.

Government administration, at city, county, state and federal levels, does not normally act within the boundaries of the constitutional charters existing at these levels. They are considered therefore a "fourth" branch of the American government, and their primary loyalties are to the preservation of the status quo of assymmetrical structural relations, and even to the promotion of increasing assymmetry of such relations.

Globalization has supported race-based policies in the United States that have lead to selective patterns of structural discrimination that have tended to mitigate consistently against the advancement of most "average" Americans. Because such patterns are more than 30 years old now and are entering a second and even third generation, they are seen as embedded and implicit to the American way of life. That the bias occurs and exists is really not in question. It is the stilted and falsely ideological justification for such bias and "reverse discrimination" that is called time and again into question in court battles over admissions to good schools and in hiring and promotions.

Americans have found themselve systematically disenfrancished from participation within a larger social system. Brain drain and wetback hiring, in some regions almost exclusive, have gone hand in hand in dramatically altering the profile and cultural character of American life. We bear witness now to a new form of radical pluralism that was based upon a sociologically deterministic but anthropologically naive philosophy about the nature and culture of human differences in the world. The result has been one of increasing ethnic-stratification of American society and a shift of political basis and emphasis in American culture from one of individualism and social contract theory to one of ethnocentrism, ethnicity and interethnic social competition. From a social structural standpoint, this outcome serves and is a systematic by-product of increasingly vertical stratification and closure of the class structure at the top, especially around an elite of Americans who remain primarily and almost exclusively white.

There has been a growing sense of failure of the American government to effective serve the needs and interests of the American people on almost any level. American society, which once prided itself on a lack of nepotistic corruption, is falling increasingly prey to the same kinds of double standards and socio-structural contradictions that affect most of the rest of the world. Values promoting social authoritarianism, often disguised within the fourth branch of American government in terms of administration, are increasingly leading to control structures that have entailed the loss of both freedom and value for Americans.

Population growth in American society has grown at rates equivalent to some third-world countries, and has been basically out of control. The last census conducted was largely ineffective because it could not effectively count or realistically estimate the number of illegal aliens residing now within the country. This growth has resulted in the United States becoming the third most populous nation in the world, trailing only after India and China. This growth has been unique in the world, as it has been due exclusively to the primary effects of immigration and the secondary effects of high birth rates among resident alien populations. The United States had achieved population equilibrium and even negative growth rate around 1972, which paradoxically corresponds with the period of peak agricultural productivity of the country. By comparison, Mexican population growth has largely been stabilized largely as a result of this intimate relationship with the United States, and there are now almost as many Mexicans residing in the US as there are in Mexico. Paradoxically, for this reason, Mexico per se does not have a problem yet of overpopulation--it has a problem of chronic poverty and unequal distribution of resources. As long as the United States remains the siphon and funnel for all excess Mexican population, Mexico will maintain a certain kind of equilibrium of population while the United States will growth in increasing disequilibrium.

How do federal census takers respond to this dilemma and their own failure to realistically monitor or report the true scale and magnitude of the American problem of overpopulation? Official party line is to disguise the lack of accurate statistics with the pontification about the unprecedented cultural heterogeneity of contemporary American society and statements about the almost boundless "lebens" room in the American hinterlands and rural areas.

Of course all this was before September 11th, 2001 and its aftermath which clearly exposed the ineptitude of the immigration services in the US and our government's chronic failure to deal realistically or effectively with rising social issues in the United States. Anthropological lessons in cross-cultural studies, particularly from places like Central Africa, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, demonstrate unequivocally the dangers of radical pluralism in the world that leads to heavy-handed internecine violence and to even heavier-handed iron-glove control measures that represent a fundamental loss of freedom. No country in an internationally stratified world can afford an idealistically naive policy courting radical pluralism and extreme cultural heterogeneity without flirting with long-term disaster. Any such country in the long run must pay the piper by increasing levels of violence, cultural dissonance and social disintegration that is the anti-climactic result of super-complex systems.

It has been argued recently by some that the nature and scale of warfare has changed in the modern world. We have witnessed a prolonged period without a world war. Some argue that the costs of modern warfare are so great that they serve as an effective deterent, especially and primarily for the most powerful developed societies. And yet, all the evidence has not been rung in. Lessons of history demontrate the human proclivity towards organized violence. Increasing horizontal proliferation of military technology and especially of weapons of mass destruction almost guarantees the likelihood of a major holocaust occurring within the next half century. How unlimited and wide-scale this holocaust might become is largely a matter of happenstance and chaotic outcomes. We cannot predict when, where, or how it will happen. We can only realistically expect, that, given conditions and trendlines of current globalization patterns that it will eventually come to pass.

It is unfortunate that the American government at almost every level of its articulation has played into the hands of nearly unbridled private interest. The structure of American government has always been divided between the service of public interest and the service of private interest. Because certain private interests have become so powerful, so demanding and so influential, often interests that are foreign based and do not reflect even the interests of Americans in any manner. The trend of the last half-century has been to see the American government to become increasingly compromised in terms of its own standards of service to publich interest.

Certain classical capitalist economic theories tend to legitimize this curious interrelationship between American government and private interest. There is a naive and untested belief that money, from whatever questionable sources, and economic integration will lead to greater democratization in the world and greater symmetry of development. Evidence in China for instance does not support this claim. However economically interdependent the US and China may become in certain areas of manufacturing, it is clear that internal pressures of Chinese society that arise from acculturation and globalization of its economy are driving its political leadership towards greater authoritarianism and a tendency towards increasing mass mobilization of its population. Increasing economic interdependence between China and the US does not necessarily guarantee a safer future between these two super-powers.

Globalization has largely been a process that has been driven by a nearly exclusive dependence upon fossil fuels and the by-products and accessories of fossil fuels (heavy industry, automobiles, fertilizers, drugs, plastics, etc.). This fundamental formula has not changed in spite of an emerging global information economy and in spite of new scientific and technological developments. Many of the richest oil-producing nations are in fact exclusively Moslem countries and are relatively underdeveloped and the richest oil-consuming nations are in essence non-moslem countries of the West and an emerging East. This entails that there is a fundamental rift in the global political economy between producer and consumer. This rift is one marked by more cleavages than those of economic or political disparities between nations and their peoples. They are marked by cultural disparities of worldview, values and behavior, as well as by religious and other social disparities that separate people into different camps, even in a common marketplace.

If war is economics by other means, then economics can be construed as a form of warfare by other means, and in any kind of warfare, we must look to see who is winning and who is losing. The calculus that can drive modern nation states to the brink of war, or to a shift from an economic to a "economics by other means" strategy, is hardly ever a "rational" calculus in a manner at least that will cross cultural and other social boundaries. There is a substantive and social side of any political-economy that virtually guarantees that reasoning that guides one government will be misunderstood and different from the reasoning guiding some other government.

But if we were to boil it all down, we would find that money, as filthy lucre, is the root of all evil. We would find anthropologically at the bottom of the well the heart of human darkness, the operant self-interest of human nature and its arbitrary and often perverse proclivity to violence "by other means." Philosophically I am not a pesimist about the human condition or about human nature. In this, Americans are no different than Arabs, Chinese or Mexicans. They share with all humanity common strengths and weaknesses, common needs and interests. Americans are no less prone to forms of corruption than any third-world country, nor would they be any less prone to some form of Nazi-movement as were the German people during the Weimar period, except that certain cultural and social factors predispose and condition them one way or another. It is the complex sets of circumstances that always prevail to condition different people to adopt one path or another. The entropy and potential for instability represented by a complex society as the United States is probably much greater than the entropy possible in a country like Saudi Arabia or Iraq, but no country is immune to factors of destabilization.

One undeniable fact about entropy of any kind is that all systems in the long run tend toward random states. It is always easier to destroy than it is to create. Mohatma Gandhi, a devote pacifist, wanted to create a permanent union between Pakistan and India, a union that would have entailed both countries setting aside their religious and cultural differences for the sake of a secular democratic government. Now, the two countries stand poised on the brink of nuclear holocaust, in a new form of cold war that is reminiscent of the days between the US and the Soviet Union. Similarly, I would ask now that the entire world learn to put aside its cultural and religious differences for the sake of forging a common political and economic foundation for a lasting world peace. Failure to do so at this period of our shared history could be disastrous, and the means to do so is available.