Entrepreneur and author James Altucher on the “Ten Commandments of The American Religion“:
If I stood in the center of Times Square and said something like “Moses didn’t really part the Red Sea,” or “Jesus never existed,” people would probably keep walking around me, ignoring what I said.
But if I stood there and said, “Going to college is the worst sin you can force your kids to commit,” or “You should never vote again,” or “Never own a home,” people would probably stop, and maybe I‘d lynched. But I would’ve at least gotten their attention. How? By knocking down a few of the basic tenets of what I call the American Religion.
It’s a fickle and false religion, used to replace the ideologies we (a country of immigrants) escaped. Random high priests lurk all over the Internet, ready to pounce. Below are the Ten Commandments of the American Religion, as I see them.
The first commandment is “Thou Shalt Own a Home”:
The American Religion wants you to have a home with a white picket fence. Why would the high priests of the American religion want that? A couple reasons:
So that you owe the banks money for 30 years or more (after second, third, or fourth mortgages). The banks need to borrow from your checking account at 0.5% to be able to lend right back to you at 8%. That’s how they make money and it’s one of the largest industries in the world.
Also, owning a home makes you less flexible in terms of where you can move. The job market is ruled by supply and demand. Supply of jobs in an area is finite. So they want to make sure you can’t move so quickly so that demand only goes up.
The other nine on Altucher’s list are:
#2 Thou Shalt Go to College.
#3 Thou Shalt Recognize that Some Wars Are Holy.
#5 Thou Shalt Give to Charity.
#6 Thou Shalt Obey the Food & Drug Administration.
#7 Thou Shalt Always Vote.
#8 Thou Shalt Choose Between Two Political Parties.
#9 Thou Shalt Recognize the Media as the “Fourth Estate.”
#10 Thou Shalt Forever Progress Toward the Frontier.
Although it’s an interesting concept, and I agree with many of them (1,2, 7, 9, and 10), I’d probably have a different set of unquestionable edicts. What would you list as the 10 commandments of the “American Religion”?
September 30th, 2011 | 9:42 am
[...] AMERICANISM: “The Ten Commandments of The American Religion.” [...]
September 30th, 2011 | 9:53 am
Let’s step away from the cynicism for a second and take in the larger picture.
Every society has a social code that operates in the background, tied to standards of honor. If you have a society, you have a honor code of some type. You can’t have one without the other. What the author seems to note is the shabby state of our society’s honor code, but instead of seeing the larger problem, he sneers at individual points, like “Thou Shalt Go to College.” Besides thinking of Jefferson’s admonition for the need of having an educated citizenry, I also remember this quote from John Adams:
“I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce, and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine.”
Now, at the back of this “Thou Shalt Go to College” commandment, a corruption in itself, is likely preserved a perfectly sound bit cultural memory or what we might call folk wisdom with those sentiments at the center. He’s not asking why these things are doctrines of the “American Religion” or what kernel of truth may be hidden in them. Instead, we get a vague whiff of conspiracy talk and a lot of generalities, with some historical ignorance thrown in.
September 30th, 2011 | 10:13 am
You left out his #4, which if included would show this guy to be a nutter–”Thou Shalt Obey the Constitution”? Um, ok, dude. Not that #5 doesn’t give away the game, of course.
His list is quite a strange mishmash, though isn’t it? Some things he dislikes are old America (charity, constitution) and some are quite new (college, gov’t leviathan). One hundred years ago America was a nation of individuals, now we’re a nation of employees. Not a change for the better.
September 30th, 2011 | 10:53 am
I’d hold, with Philip Rieff, that any culture worthy of the name is defined by its thou shalt not’s.
September 30th, 2011 | 11:31 am
Yeah, “thou shalt own a home” is about a big conspiracy, it isn’t the result of a long-standing and deep yearning for people to own a piece of things for themselves, and goodness knows “job market mobility” is the highest aspiration of mankind when not clouded by the machinations of the evil ones.
It’s certainly true that owning a home has been oversold (no pun intended) to the point where people are (or at least were, prior to 2008) buying into the idea that it’s worth unreasonable risks to do so — and that goes back a lot farther than countrywide, Barney Frank, and “the bubble.” But while I can agree that our culture imposes tacit commandments that aren’t always a reflection of godly living, Altucher seems to be seriously misidentifying the reasons for them. And I do agree with David Marcoe and arty that every culture has idiosyncratic mores that aren’t necessarily wrong in themselves, just because they go beyond biblical commands.
September 30th, 2011 | 2:07 pm
I can think of far worse norms that have developed here other than going to college, owning a home, having medicine tested by rigorous standards, voting, and receiving news through many outlets. Many countries are working very hard to have some of the benefits we have. If Americans turn our many blessings into greed and family dysfunction, and otherwise fail to observe the REAL Ten Commandments, that is another matter.
September 30th, 2011 | 3:57 pm
James Altucher is astonishingly, astoundingly, breathtakingly (truly superlatives fail me) stupid. “We didn’t save a single Jew by winning WWII.” How can anyone take anything else the guy says seriously after he says something like that.
September 30th, 2011 | 10:33 pm
[...] Joe Carter, who asks his readers to come up with their own list of Unquestionable Edicts of American Life (That [...]
October 1st, 2011 | 5:56 am
[...] Source: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/09/30/the-ten-commandments-of-the-american-relig… [...]
October 1st, 2011 | 8:38 am
Barry Arrington is absolutely right. Altucher combines remarkable ignorance with an amazing arrogance.
But that’s usually the way it is with iconoclasts.
October 1st, 2011 | 6:08 pm
He’s actually repeating the conventional wisdom of the knowledge class, the part that trends libertarian. It’s sort of a fake iconoclasm, stating commonplaces but making them seem controversial.
Here’s one american commandment though that really is iconoclastic:
Suppose there were a city the whole world loved so much that people constantly wrote books and songs about it and printed millions of corny t-shirts proclaiming their obsequiousness. Now suppose you were stuck there for three years. What would you do? Would you shut yourself away and never leave your apartment? Would you go exploring and try to love this as so much of the world, who have actually never been to this city, seems so ready to do? Or would you take it as your personal mission in life to debunk the myth, lampoon the façade, and disillusion the thronging masses who can yet be saved from hanging their hats on a disproportionately aggrandized hat stand? What city, you ask, could foster such disdain? Why Gotham, the Big Apple, the City that Never Lets Me Sleep: New York.
from http://ihatenewyorkcity.com/
That’s iconoclasm.
October 3rd, 2011 | 8:37 am
[...] Joe Carter @ First Thoughts [...]
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