LYING AS A WAY OF LIFE: Corruption and Collectivism Come of Age in America

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Why has lying become a way of life in America? How are amorality and corruption raging not only in politics but also seeping into every strand of the overall cultural fabric of a country founded on principles of individualism and integrity?
In this short but revelatory monograph, Alexandra York probes beneath politics into the deeper illnesses infecting the very soul of America’s identity as an exceptional nation. Defining a “culture” as the sum of a country’s core values, encompassing education, fine and popular arts and entertainment, science, physical and mental health, leisure activities, ambitions, and relationships, she claims that a whole-culture affliction is causing the United States to weaken its pride within and its power abroad. She traces this cultural decline from the dawn of the twentieth century when the first proposals for the “transformation”—destruction—of Western civilization’s traditional values of honesty, reason, responsibility, productivity, independence, and individual worth to today’s resultant social, business and political maladies. America is more than a place, she insists, it is a state of mind that is now suffering from the deleterious ideas that have been injected purposefully into the country’s individualistic social-economic system in order to drain it from its glowing achievements and global supremacy.
The scope of this exploration is broad, but its often shocking details are accessible and verifiable. By providing little known or generally misunderstood information, the fundamental philosophical-cultural dots causing America’s present-day crises are exposed and connected for historical overview. Subjects include moral values, business/government-domestic/foreign policies, social-economic systems, political correctness, and the spread of personal, corporate, and political corruption.
Highlighting early collectivist intellectuals who outlined scenarios to “transform” America such as H. G. Wells and Herbert Croly, York’s narrative moves on through the direct cultural damages inflicted by The Frankfurt School group and the Father of Community Organizing, Saul Alinsky, to the 1960s Hippies Movement and present-day tribal primitivism. Her cast of characters includes minor players involved in major events that have accelerated America’s interior demise and features Alinsky’s well-known heirs Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who together are taking his playbook for community control to the national level. Beyond that, the current behind-the-scenes director, Hungarian-born George Soros, is introduced as extending Alinsky’s programming into a global setting that, if successful, will terminate America’s great experiment in individualism, capitalism, and freedom for all.
Recalling Mr. Obama’s campaign statement at the University of Missouri campus in Columbia, Missouri on October 30, 2008--"We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America"--York demonstrates that what began as intellectual proposals for “transformation” are now concrete plans. Nevertheless, although many players today strut on the political stage, she maintains that America’s malaise is essentially cultural, politics being only one of many symptoms.
Despite urgent warnings, her essay ends optimistically by offering a practical list of can-do activities that individuals, neighbors, and communities may initiate to thwart the alarming processes now gaining momentum to complete the total cultural collapse of Western values. Encouraging fellow Americans to remember that times of crisis are also times of opportunity, she declares that “if we are informed, wise, and act prudently but decisively, we can redirect America’s path from destruction and darkness toward rebirth and light.