"Only God Can Save Us"

That sentiment is typically expressed by priests and preachers, but there's a philosophical case for it that goes back to Socrates (who was speaking of another god, or at least thought that he was). This time the speaker is Elijah del Medigo, who may or may not be a priest since the name is a pen name, but begins with a poem excerpt by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. — Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

...Our decades of overconfident liberalization and globalization have come back to bite us, Wilks argues, and we have now hollowed out American society to the point that the smallest tasks are too much for us: “We now find ourselves unable to stick ear straps onto face-sized pieces of non-woven medical fabric at industrial scale.

Decades of stagnation, offshoring, and complacency have caught up with us, and all of our institutions have failed to prevent the coronavirus from crippling the nation. Our physical decay can no longer be ignored.” He is right: decades of complacent management have not so much left a chink in our armor as fully stripped it off. Decline is a choice, as Charles Krauthammer said, and American bureaucracy has been choosing it for decades.

This is exactly the same thing that 9/11 revealed, which caused me to write the following motif into my own poem, which was written on the very day:

At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.

In the poem, the red-rust mail was well-forged though ill-tended, and proves adequate to the task. Our institutions responded to 9/11 well in the first charge, rapidly deposing the Taliban and sending al Qaeda into hiding. Special Forces learned to ride horses in Afghanistan; Rangers took the peaks at Tora Bora; Marines deployed by helicopter into a land very far from any sea. The world learned that we were capable of a great deal of force, rapidly and unexpectedly.

Yet the institutions failed as soon as they shifted from finding new ways to respond to an emergency back to the more comfortable operation of the bureaucracies. The Afghan mission adopted a bureaucratic Big Army approach to a mission that had no possibility of success, and which has been pursued without success for nigh-on twenty years. The Iraq War was won by the invasion force, lost by the poorly-handed occupation, won again by the Surge force adopting a new model of counterinsurgency that forgave and adopted the Sunni Awakening, and then lost by the State Department that failed to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement and forced a rapid and too-early withdrawal.

Innovation is possible when the emergency grows dire enough that the bureaucrats loosen their grip, but doom returns as they reassert it. The American state has succeeded, where it has, by voiding its rules: truckers can drive further and faster, the FDA can let people make tests who know how without months of regulatory grind, and our food supply can be secured in a similar manner. If we simply void the rules and let people find solutions, solutions can be found. The enemy is the state; the ossified institutions themselves are causing the harm.