The path of human progress is random, chaotic, and often maddening. Taming humanity—organizing ourselves for the common good—has been a fool’s errand since antiquity; cajoling and coping with humanity are perhaps the best we can do. Yet there is also a spirit in each of us that never surrenders. That in the face of what seems insane and insurmountable in the moment, we find a sliver of light through which we squeeze ourselves and dare to meet the challenge; through which we emerge again to restore ourselves and renew hope. Most Americans rise each day with the expectation that the day is theirs; that they will be left to their own desires and devices, as long as they treat others as they wish to be treated.

This fundamental right of self-determination governed by the norm of reciprocity has been with us since our nation’s inception that we are, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, “endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Life, liberty, and happiness. Throughout our history, we Americans have respected and protected—often with our lives—these freedoms fostered within the norm of reciprocity. At its essence, this is the magic of America—of an experiment that has (thus far) prevailed regardless of the enemy (external or internal) who might wish to shatter the persistent dreams and aspirations of Americans who are inherently in charge of their destiny. Today, we are facing one of those daunting moments when those we have chosen to represent our interests have, at best, a dubious commitment to our interests over their own.

The last seventy-five-or-so years have produced incredible gains in human welfare as The United States ascended to its throne as the world’s lone superpower. Compared to our parents and grandparents, our lives are a cakewalk. The affluence we enjoy is unprecedented in human history. The question today is are better-off humans better humans? Moreover, is what it means to be human due for a major overhaul? The late French philosopher, Michel Foucault argued humans are a curated composition of intellectual and moral architecture that if revised or discarded “would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” Foucault was suggesting we humans are a constellation of cognitive illusions which durability relies on our collective subscription—of our willingness to play along. That what it means to be human is dynamic and impermanent, which is as the Buddha further argued, the nature of everything.

On the last day of March, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. during which he sought to assure us that justice was always on the horizon, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” For those who remember 1968, or have studied that period in American history, our society was as fraught with division (if not more so) than it is today. The Viet Nam War, racial conflict, generational animus, severe air and water pollution, and a stagnant inflationary economy made us feel as if we had entered a dark tunnel that was sure to collapse before we ever got to any light at the other end. And, like today, there was plenty of violence in our streets, more often waged with bombs than with guns.

Our victorious euphoria that ended the long period of crisis that began with the stock market crash in 1929 and ran through Word War II, and which subsequently gave rise to large American families living in tidy idyllic suburban neighborhoods in the 1950s, would reach its climax in 1969 when we landed a man on the moon. During this period, “America is good” was our moral mantra. Four days after King’s assurance of justice at the National Cathedral, he was gunned down on the balcony of The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. As the tumultuous decade of the 1960s ended, the future suddenly looked bleak. The paint was peeling off the post-World War II America. Unbeknownst to any of us at the time, King’s “arc of the moral universe” had achieved its apex. It would prove to be a bridge to moral peril more than an arc—maybe even a bridge to moral collapse.

We then entered what became the malaise decade of the 1970s with double-digit inflation, a dishonest law-breaking president in Richard Nixon, and an ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation posed by the Soviet Union. With the Viet Nam War winding down in the shame of defeat, and the mess of Nixon’s Watergate scandal destroying what had been a stellar run for our federal government through the 1950s and much of the 1960s, the best President Carter could do was offer us redemption; if we would only turn down the thermostat, put on a cardigan sweater, and sacrifice more, Carter’s evangelical sensibilities believed we would be born again into greatness. He came to epitomize the decade with what presidential historians still refer to as the “malaise presidency.”

Then, a sunny smiling actor-turned-politician from California, Ronald Reagan, arrived on the scene to offer Americans absolution. We weren’t the problem; government was the problem. Our civil religion flipped from Carter’s jeremiads to a re-inspired version of the late 19^th century prosperity gospel. Reagan was here to liberate us—to lift the cloud of malaise. In 1980, Reagan beat Carter in a landslide with 489 electoral college votes to Carter’s 49; a 10X drubbing. Then, suddenly, we embraced an ethos of entrepreneurial zealotry in pursuit of prosperity. Among other shifts, the best and brightest no longer sought a role in our federal government as they had after World War II. They became lawyers, investment bankers, and technologists who embraced investor Carl Icahn’s new ‘morality’ conveyed by the character, Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 movie Wall Street that “Greed is good!” The nouveau riche were back in style for the first time since the Roaring Twenties. Heavily starched shirts, suspenders, and mousse-laden hair for men, and leg warmers for women who swarmed the new Jane Fonda-fueled craze of aerobics became uniform staples of the 1980s. (I still have my suspenders by Hermes and my hair eventually recovered.)

In the period’s cultural observer, George Gilder’s, 1984 book The Spirit of Enterprise, he romanticized this new spirit of America in the 1980s as reflected in its newly-minted entrepreneurs.

Some are scientists, some are artists, some are craftsmen; most are in business. Although they act as individual men and women, they are nearly always driven by familial roles and obligations. They are not always temperate. Rarely elegant or tall, only occasionally glib or manifestly leaders of men. By fleeing their homes and families to go to far-off lands, may inflict and suffer a trauma of loss—and fight to justify and overcome it. As immigrants, many seek an orphan’s fate, and toil to launch a dynasty. Ugly, they wreak beauty; rude and ruthless they redeem the good and true. Mostly outcasts, exiles, mother’s boys, rejects, warriors, they early learn the lessons of life, the knowledge of pain, the ecstasy of struggle.

This spirit of enterprise, as Gilder called it, was accompanied by a new spirit of victory with the collapse of the Soviet Union during the Christmas holiday in 1991. The subsequent peace dividend was characterized by a sudden increase in both political and economic power for America. The United States was now the world’s lone superpower. The thesis of American exceptionalism that began with John Winthrop’s (1630) “A Model of Christian Charity” in which he suggested “we shall be as a city upon a hill [and] the eyes of the world are upon us” to settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and later invoked by many politicians including Kennedy and Reagan, made its transition from setting the humble example for the world to the neocon dream of reshaping the world in the image of America. We had won the Cold War and quickly dispensed with humility in favor of hubris. Winning is its own intoxicant.

An era of politics as blood sport was ushered in by the congressman and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich from Georgia in 1994 whose “Contract with America” began our precipitous descent into the dysfunction we see in Washington D.C., today. Gekko’s “greed is good” became Gingrich’s “gridlock is good.” Destroying the institutions of our democracy was picked up by the Tea Party in the early 2000s and is the core of the MAGA movement thirty years after Gingrich’s so-called contract. The late 1990s caught another huge tailwind after the end of the Cold War with the coming of the Digital Age. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs completely transformed the economy from bricks and mortar to 1s and 0s. We survived the fearful doomsday transition we imagined in “Y2K” as we rang in the new millennium and our moral orientation shifted again. “Digital is good” as the next moral mantra was born.

Americans were entranced with digital technologies in all aspects of their lives: work, play, and love. Meanwhile, in a cultural fit of delusions of grandeur, we lost sight of the virtues and values that created the greatest empire in the history of the world. Initially and dramatically, following the attacks of 9/11, with the lies of weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda in Iraq to justify the Bush/Cheney aspirations of an American exceptionalism on steroids. We had been poked with a painful stick and it was time America showed the world what it meant to be a superpower, or at least how we could spend trillions of dollars, kill tens of thousands of people, and destabilize an entire region of the world.

However, our greatest delusion may have been believing that linking human beings on a filter-free platform through Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook would somehow propel humanity forward. Social media promised to be an elixir for everything from the proliferation of democracy (remember the Arab Spring of 2010?) to solving all our issues related to human connection by friending and liking at the click of a button rather than a handshake or a hug. But like a toxic solvent, the ether of the Internet dissolved America’s social fabric. Within ten years, sharing cute pictures of grandma’s cats morphed into a laboratory of disinformation including an incubator of suicide for our youth. Contrary to what initially seemed to improve our lives, social media made us vulnerable, narrow-minded, depressed, and dangerous.

The Age of Deceit that began with Bush/Cheney has subsequently achieved its pinnacle of expression with the second election of Donald Trump. We experienced a moment of potential moral reset during the period of Barack Obama’s “hope and change,” but alas, a black man in our White House was more than too many Americans could tolerate. “Deceit is good” is today’s perverted moral mantra. If nothing else, Trump has demonstrated that lies have no consequences, at least no negative consequences for him. It is hard to find King’s “moral universe” anywhere in American life, today.

Many believe that the institutions we have built over two-and-one-half centuries will survive the wrecking ball of Trump and the MAGAs. As one scholar recently suggested to me in a retort to my concern that we now have a virtue-free president, while our founders believed wholeheartedly in the importance of virtues, our institutions are strong enough to survive regardless of who might occupy the Oval. In other words, virtues-in-leadership no longer matters. This seems like a specious—plausible but wrong—argument to me. I suspect it may even prove to be the ultimate expression of American exceptionalist hubris. At the very least, it is an extremely risky proposition. Alas, such is the life and inevitable death of empires; on this point history speaks with great clarity. Our city upon a hill may be reduced to rubble sooner, rather than later.

Recently, I attended the new Broadway show, McNeal, at Lincoln Center in New York City. It stars Robert Downey, Jr. as an aging Nobel prize winning writer faced with the many dilemmas of artificial intelligence (AI). Downey’s natural irascible nature was a perfect fit for his character, Jacob McNeal, who is a near-perfect writ-large reflection of the American character in 2024. Often intoxicated, but never wrong, never apologetic, and never in doubt. “AI is good” as our next moral mantra appears to be a certainty. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is our new Gekko, Gingrich, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Trump.

To be clear, I am not advocating for the end of the development of new technologies. Technology has been essential to advancing human welfare. I am simply asking that we heed our mistakes—like those we have experienced with social media—and consider carefully how we apply technology in our lives. To pick our moral compass up off the floor and put it back on the table. Today, the arc King idealized in 1968 is a nearly unfathomable, random, chaotic, and maddening black hole into which algorithmic equations and quantum computing are sucking humanity into the abyss at astonishing speed. Notwithstanding the promise of improving human welfare, we risk allowing AI to extinguish the human spirit; to suppress volition and homogenize our lives. To prove Foucault’s thesis.

As creativity advocate, Kirby Ferguson has illustrated, we are experiencing a crisis of sameness produced by technology. AI doesn’t create thought; it flattens it into an average of everything. It wrenches the spirit out of the human. It turns both poor writers and great ones into mediocre writers. But, as Ferguson points out, conformity and repression often lead to rebellion and rebirth. Anyone up for the next Renaissance? Are you, or your child, the next Leonardo da Vinci?

Unfortunately, the endgame of AI may be to replace American exceptionalism-on-steroids with nihilism-on-steroids.  From humility to hubris to nihilism may be the signposts which tomorrow’s historians use to define America’s final descent. Taming humanity—let alone assuring justice—is becoming a quaint notion, indeed. Humanity itself may be an irrelevant locus of focus. But, no, it doesn’t have to be that way.

What comes next in the cycles of American history is anyone’s guess. Rebirth, or a descent into an entropic collapse are both possibilities, as are other variations between the two. Our task remains, however, the same: look for that sliver of light to squeeze through to fortify and restore our humanity—to bring hope back into our lives. We made our history what it was: a messy and inelegant march into the future. But, march we did and we remain (mostly) upright today. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt argued during another period of great uncertainty in America, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

For many, Trump is a blessing: a savior who will restore them to what they view as their historic and rightful place in social, political, and economic order. To produce a sort of retrotopia. Others view him as a curse whose deceitful, cruel, and sleazy manner is not just an existential threat to American democracy, but also to their own lives. Either way, our best hope—however perversely accomplished—is to get Americans back on track to moral goodness where truth, self-determination, and reciprocity snap America back to its potential as that city upon a hill. At our essence is something no technology or demagogue can defeat: a flame of resilience and ingenuity that resides deep within our souls. Not even a Blackwell chip from Nvidia can generate this spirit.

Our founder Thomas Paine wrote at the time of our nation’s birth, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” He also acknowledged, however, that

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

In other words, we need look no further than into a mirror to point the finger of blame for the government we endure.

In my lifetime, the four most inspirational leaders were Kennedy, King, Reagan, and Obama. Theirs are the faces that should be on our Mt. Rushmore of today. They each had very different political perspectives and extraordinarily different personal backgrounds. However, they had one thing absolutely in common: they all made Americans feel good about being Americans. They believed in the American experiment that began in 1776. They lifted us up and made us reach for what Abraham Lincoln called our “better angels.” Like Lincoln, the first two were assassinated; the third nearly assassinated; and the fourth, spared. (The optimism of unity is threatening to those who seek power through animus.) Their courage resided deeply in the core of their being and their belief in the unlimited capacity of the human spirit. They personified hope. In their honor, it is our duty to stand in opposition to divisive forces and to avert America’s moral collapse.

We are better off today, but are we better humans? The Latin-based word nihilism in its literal translation means nothing-ism: the rejection of moral principles where cynicism reigns and life is meaningless. Based on America’s current trajectory, we need to face the possibility that nihilism may become the defining character of the next America. Although our institutions may hold, they remain the object of human leadership. As columnist David Brooks observed, MAGA is perhaps most accurately considered as an inversion of morality made up of “performative arsonists.”

Destroying things is easy, building things is hard. I think we all believe (and expect) that soon-to-be empowered MAGA loyalists can destroy, but can they build? As we learned with our attempt at regime change in Iraq, being able to do the first and not the second can result in long term instability and expanded regional conflicts with no end in sight. Is that really what we want for America?

For the moment, as Americans we still enjoy most of our rights of self-determination. Being human still matters. All of these developments over the last seven-plus decades have been, as they always have been: up to us. Individually and collectively, we need to act to direct the future of our lives, our communities, country, and world. Notwithstanding the headwinds of Trump’s authoritarian nationalism devoid of any subscription to virtues, in America the people still decide. We have the power.

It is an evident truth that without darkness there can be no light. The spiritual parallel is that without suffering there can be no enlightenment; without despair transcendence is unachievable. That the only way out is through. Therein lies the path forward. It is time to stand again; to honor our voices; to move on from this moment with humility and determination. To make our presence known and, moreover, felt. To open, to release, and to rise.