AMERICAN GLUTTONY

The Decay of Citizenship: How Freedom Became Our Undoing

The grand experiment of American democracy was built on a simple but radical idea: that a free and educated people could govern themselves. But somewhere along the line, freedom became confused with indulgence, and citizenship was replaced by consumption. The freedoms that once demanded responsibility have instead produced ignorance, greed, and gluttony.

For nearly two and a half centuries, Americans have been told that freedom means doing what you want, when you want, and to whomever you want. We have turned the “pursuit of happiness” into the pursuit of self. We have become a nation of shoppers, not citizens, spectators, not participants, and the governed, not the governors.

The Long Game of the Authoritarians

The architects of tyranny did not need to conquer us by force. They merely had to wait. They saw what we refused to see that democracy cannot survive without disciplined, educated citizens willing to defend it. When they looked at America, they saw not a fortress of liberty, but a feast of weakness.

The campaign began as early as Reagan, when “government is the problem” became the national anthem of a people too comfortable to question it. Education was quietly defunded, civic instruction disappeared, and the public square became a marketplace.

It was a slow walk to dictatorship, step by step, decade by decade.

We deregulated truth, privatized morality, and monetized attention. We built an electorate that worships entertainment, distrusts intellect, and votes for whoever promises the easiest life. So when a fascist movement came along, disguised as patriotism and prosperity, seventy million Americans welcomed it with open arms.

The Anatomy of Decay

Gluttony breeds laziness, and laziness breeds ignorance. Once we become too lazy to think critically, we become too blind to see danger. Once we stop learning, we stop leading. Once we stop caring, we stop deserving.

This is not just a political problem; it is a moral one. Democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires constant tending, like a garden. But we have paved over that garden with greed. We have replaced community with competition, empathy with ego, and truth with tribalism.

We teach children how to make money, not how to create meaning. We glorify billionaires and mock teachers. We feed the body and starve the mind, and call it freedom.

The Reckoning Ahead

It should not surprise anyone that this national gluttony invited its own destruction. The fascists saw their opportunity in our weakness, our ignorance, our laziness, our willful blindness, and they took it.

But we are not yet dead. A few of us still remember what citizenship means: that freedom is not a birthright but a responsibility, that liberty is not a license, and that democracy is not guaranteed.

To reclaim this Republic, we must begin not with protests or slogans, but with education, moral, civic, and factual. The American mind must be nourished again, or the experiment will perish.

Freedom without knowledge is an invitation to tyranny.
Freedom without duty is surrender.
And freedom without truth, as we now see, is death by self-indulgence.

William James Spriggs