Moorings Loosened and Adrift

The American founding fathers, leaders of a successful military campaign against the mightiest empire of their time and intellectual giants, wrote a brief document, the American Constitution. Appropriating the best constitutional wisdom of the age, they built an order, the most exemplary, and created a template for the world to use. They were creators of a new era based on democracy, republicanism, and constitutionalism, all engineered to protect the dignity and liberty of human beings, each and every one of them.

Now, conversations such as What if the President does not comply with a court order? Or what if the President orders the execution of rivals? expose the fragility of the system. What has happened to the United States at a time when humanity has reached such a phenomenal level of technological advancement, and the country itself stands at the forefront of that progress?

As ageing affects organic beings, is the same true of human organisations? A system to remain alive needs continuous renewal. Did Americanism become too fixated on older frameworks? Or did their knowledge reproduction turn esoteric, impractically normative, insanely utopian, or simply go to Disneyland, as the unable-to-develop countries remain muddled in abstruse ideas and busy creating structures of useless grandeur?

There are too many unanswered questions. A world unsettled by the American random moves now needs to know how to set its moorings afresh.

Niraj Kumar Jha