From Pioneers to Pawns

The Wright brothers belonged to the age of the pioneers, a time of tinkerers and original thinkers, in the twilight of the Western frontier. With the likes of Ford, Edison, and Bell among them, they are men remembered for their revolutionary successes but men, nonetheless, whose innumerable failures and the challenges they overcame no doubt substantiate their standing among America’s celebrated pioneers.

In their own ways, these men carried on the pioneers’ legacies of personal risk-taking, exploration, ingenuity, curiosity, and adventure; the same qualities which initially built the very first American settlements and later its cities and skyscrapers, which made migrants hardy and successful along the Oregon Trail, which kept the destitute persevering along the Mother Road en route to greener pastures, and which together represent the very spirit of America — the pioneer standing alone on the prairie as the free-willed possessor of his own destiny, the architect of his own future and the possessor of his own purpose.

As for Orville Wright, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell, and so many of their contemporaries, they lived long enough to see the birth of Boeing and the age of the corporation, central banking, bigger government, and even bigger wars. They weren’t just some of the last of the pioneer-inventors and pioneer-entrepreneurs; they were, in their lives and upon their deaths, among the last of a generation who truly carried that spirit at a time when it was not just fresh in the minds of Americans but still present in the freedoms and opportunities of an America just on the verge of so much paralyzing bureaucracy and red tape — the kinds of developments (following the Industrial Revolution) contradicting the very pioneering spirit which had driven so much progress and initiative, and which had developed such a strong sense of purpose and satisfaction with each accomplishment.

It is in this arc, from the frontier to the front office, that we witness the beginnings of the larger cultural shift in America, away from that satisfaction in one’s labors, that self-reliant resourcefulness in the face of danger and in the assumption of risk, to the kinds of sheer money matters and bureaucratic sensibilities which stifle ambition and creativity, stress sheer profit over human purpose, and forge men into pawns in a political game or cogs in a mechanical machine.

In our failure to acknowledge just how much has been sacrificed and just what extremes of human excellence are achievable only as pioneers, we lose much of our freedom and ingenuity, much of our humanity and moral values, and thus much of that which makes us uniquely American. Is it in this way — through bureaucracy combined with government, central banking, and an onerous tax system and financialization stratagem begetting an obsession with sheer money matters — that a soft despotism has come to envelop Americans in the flesh and in spirit; and it is in just this way that Americans have gone from pioneers on the prairie to pawns in a game (with an arcane set of rules) that they don’t even understand.

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