I for one, though not against the philosophy of Tao as such, is of the opinion one should first look into the cultural heritage by which America was founded, and of which most American idealists claimed. Most American idealists of the founding times and quite a long time after, until the 20th century, referred either to some form Jewish-friendly, Old-Testament-based Christianity, either to the Greek-Roman philosophical humanist tradition as it was called (that is to say the study of one’s own human nature as the measure of all to start with, not the extolling of human being as the supreme good). By both cultural references, the American experiment is a failed one for good, and the more alert among the earlier visionaries who witnessed the beginnings saw it was bound to fail. First of all you don’t found whole countries, cultures and peoples as experiments without calling in entities who achieve their fortune and power considering most human beings as rats. Good scientists make experiments only as a way of verification, not of discovery. Discovery happens through serendipity, never by ready-made schemes of computable observation. This present-day heavy reference to Oriental philosophies of various sorts among the American thinking elite appears to have been intellectual desertion first and foremost, deliberate abandonment of former hopes of the advent of a juster society these thinking elites first justified their own existence by, by referring to a purely cyclical view of things putting such hopes to dust, and of the scales of values and measurements that were establishing with greater and greater detail not only the fall from Grace of America but most probably its initial and eternal predestination to incarnate purer and purer evil before being thrown out by nature itself out of the physical plane. These cycle-based philosophies, hopeless though they are in the absolute for the vile bulk of humanity abandoned to its sad fate, give to those thinking elites a sense of false relative hope and comfort for themselves as for the certainty of the return of the good season their forbears enjoyed and their descendants shall again. Nope. It is not about the return of seasons, it is about abrupt and irreversible climate change of the kind all previous environmental modification intensive civilizations have endured in the past each one in their own way just before being terminated.
By both classical references I named America is not bound towards a hard season after an all too long and comfortable one but that shall pass too. America is bound by its own initial momentum to fall in a clear and straight one-sided way, oriental philosophies especially old Japanese, Chinese and Indian (which have been abandoned by the peoples who gave birth to them for the most part since long) intervened right at that moment, as a way to cushion a too sobering perspective, when a sane study of Jewish and Christian references was proving America not only to have no positive manifest destiny by the sacred books but to have resembled more and more probably the eternal recurrent evil powers to be destroyed at last as described by those books, as a self-styled Messianic enterprises is actually the one and only root of evil in history, as it was more vulgarly assessed that the so-called Christian values promoted by American exceptionalism had nothing Christian about them. Even the Jewish Messianic entreprise proved to be a withering tree bound to wildfire and to survive somewhat only in the form of sprouts from the stub, how about a dead tree right from the start pretending to be pillar? More vulgarly said hadn’t America been very little else right from the start than the enterprise to destroy the native civilisation of a whole continent so as to make room for negro slave plantations? Hasn’t the American revolution and war of independence itself been but primordially a juridical contraption to escape European justice as the European peoples started being informed about the American horror unfolding and considered legal measures to counteract it, wasn’t the beautiful principles expounded in the Constitution a marketing operation aiming first and foremost at dazzling the European intelligentsia that was the number one threatening factor of the American fraud, into forgetting about Indians, Irishmen, Negroes and indentured labourers for abstract human rights of the kind everybody actually scoffed about in young America? (Stalin later on repeated the same process of foreign useful idiot seduction by devising the most democratic constitution of the world on paper). The response is not to flee into some kind of Oriental detachment as if that process didn’t concern you but to repent, because you are part of it, because by believing in the American Dream and by still lamenting its shattering you underwrote even far more horrors than those who believed in the Third Reich. You were born in Sauron, your whole heritage is the purest evil ever to have happened in human history. Now look out for the place in the world that not only inveighs most against American imperialism, but first and foremost against all the ideals having once justified its existence right before the empire was actually conquered and built.
There is the other cultural reference, Greek-Roman classical culture : many Americans console themselves saying they are undergoing some Roman-style decadence like experienced by Romans under Nero and Caligula. The unsaid consolation they indulged in was that the forces of that decadence, awful though it was, would prove victorious at last only four centuries later as Alaric would take over, and were to be kept in check meanwhile by so many and admirable Flavian, Antonine and early Christian emperors who would periodically drain the swamp, and that only in the Western part of the Empire as the Eastern one thanks to Christian moral regeneracy would last one thousand years more. Nope. America is no Rome of any kind, because it has no civilization, and no inheritance of a nobler civilization like Greece : quite the contrary it indulges in the contempt for all pursuits other than greed under the name of a warped religious spirit, Calvinism. America, as a thalassocratic empire without an agora, without a forum but with a Byrsa (World Stock Exchange) for sure, is Carthage. It is bound not to a long, tranquil, placid plain river-like decadence but to a swift, unexpected and terminal defeat leading to obliteration of all it built and all it stood for, with its former gods being remembered as demons in the new pantheon to triumph thereafter. The Rome you care about the decadence of is not decadent at all yet, it is emergent, and it is the power shouting loudest and most persistently for your destruction as a national and world humanitarian priority.
