A Veteran Teacher’s Audacious Plan for Staving Off American Decline
The following essay is adapted from the recently released book LESSONS IN LIBERTY: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans (HarperCollins) by Jeremy S. Adams
Decades and centuries in the future, historians will look back at our peculiar era and note a vexing duality within the American soul.
At the apparent apex of our successes and triumphs, at the peak of individual freedom and bountiful opportunity, Americans from all walks of life seemed to have suddenly lost faith in themselves and in the animating institutions of their civilization.
A slew of dyspeptic statistics about young Americans populates the headlines—a truculent dislike of their own nation and its history, paralyzing private doubts about their ability to find meaning and purpose in their own lives, a haunting fear of the future buttressed by various pillars of strife: personal loneliness, political cynicism, moral and intellectual vacuity.
But the kids are not alone in their dread. A whopping 30% of American adults are broadly dissatisfied with their lives, faith in democracy is at an all-time low, confidence in civil institutions is lower than in any other G7 nation, and a bare majority would choose to defend the country if it was invaded by another nation.
It is tempting to ask—or scream—the following question: what in the world is happening to us?
As a high school teacher for over a quarter of a century, there is only one certainty I proclaim which is that young people absorb the values and behaviors of the adults who surround them. They are improved—or depraved—by the quality and quantity of these examples. If all we consume is digital dystopia. If all we hear is the echo of American naysayers who revel in despair and glory in gloom, then it should come as no surprise that broad swathes of the body politic believes they are victims of circumstance or pawns of power structures.
It is time to listen to and learn from different voices. And not just any voices, mind you.
It is time to listen to the words and wisdom of the greatest Americans to have ever lived. They will not shout their wisdom to us. We must attune our civic ears to what these patriots have to say. For their words can save us.
There is something all ten American heroes in this book have in common. They possess voices that never flag or fail, waver or waffle. They possess an inner whisper that cannot be taught or acquired by superficial means. It is a voice that often occupies the visionary, the driven, and the inspired. It is the voice within us that sometimes whispers “I matter” in moments of agonizing doubt, the voice that sometimes cries out “By God I will not give up!” in moments of audacious resolve. It is the voice that can be colored by Muses and lifted by memory.
This book was written to demonstrate and explain what successful Americans of the past told themselves about their own lives to inspire Americans living today. We all have stories we tell ourselves about our inner angels and haunting demons—narratives of the self we believe to be true. The difficult, dreary reality is that Americans from all backgrounds increasingly find it difficult to walk past their own open gates, to find the poetry and magic in their lives.
One of the unifying threads of the ten men and women we will get to know so well in this book is a steadfast refusal to fetishize catastrophe. From the harrowing childhood of poverty for Abraham Lincoln and Ben Nighthorse Campbell, to the barriers of potent prejudice encountered by Arthur Ashe, Daniel Inouye, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or the failed personal relationships endured by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, none of our heroes saw themselves as calamitous victims of forces larger than themselves.
So much of our modern misery can be traced to a fashionable catastrophism that convinces people they are utterly powerless to command the wheels of their own lives. It is why the New York Times features articles with titles such as “Hospitals Are Increasingly Crowded with Kids Who Tried to Harm Themselves.” It is why the newspaper of record publishes opinion pieces from conservative commentators earnestly asking, “What if Kids Are Sad and Stressed Because Their Parents Are?” It is why there are long articles in USA Today detailing the fact that “Students Are Increasingly Refusing to Go to School. It’s Becoming a Mental Health Crisis.”
The execrable propensity to preach and believe the gospel of everlasting catastrophe is not a quirk of a particular ideological camp. These days the politics of misery has its iterations on both the right and the left. It is fueled by fear, anger, and the constant drumbeat of outrage.
There is a habit in progressive corners to view the world as an unrelenting merry-go-round of injustice and doomsday scenarios. Impending cataclysms of the climate are constant topics of conversation, as is the argument that income inequality is the sadistic by-product of malevolent corporate actors hell-bent on bringing back the industrial horrors of late eighteenth-century capitalism. Activists suggest that racism is both ubiquitous in its power but also somehow sinister in its opaqueness. In this view of the world, new incarnations of American fascism and sexism are always lurking.
Fetishizing doom and valorizing gloom are not just actions based on factually incorrect premises; they are a stain on the human spirit that yearns to be productive and free. To believe the world is so utterly barren of beauty and hope that it exists in a perpetual vise of bleakness and despair, not only robs modern Americans of their God-given agency but, worse, saps any desire to use what agency they do possess in a way that might be constructive and life-affirming.
Catastrophism, however, is not the exclusive domain of the political left. There is a conservative variety that can be equally debilitating, usually rooted in a potent fear that the traditional American way of life is under constant assault by sinister forces. As a result, deep suspicion abounds. Conspiracy takes root. Conservatives assert that different American institutions are deliberately trying to subvert civil society— the American media with its biases, distortions, and sometimes outright lies; the deep state and its law enforcement apparatus targeting conservatives and right-wing activists; left-wing politicians deliberately facilitating a porous border; young American educators who seem to mirror many of the people posted on the popular X account Libs of TikTok who see themselves less as instructors and more as pedagogic activists.
Consequently, a deep well of unease resides in many of us today in light of a modern culture in which there are no more North Stars. We look around and see a world lacking any transcendent gyroscope of absolutes—morality, nationhood, relationships, even human biology has no orienting device. A world where truth can be known, virtue can be practiced, and beauty can be perceived seems increasingly out of reach, a relic from a bygone era where right was right and wrong was wrong.
Social media sophisticates scoff at outdated notions of decency, standards, and moral consequence, deeming them bourgeoise or Boomer values. Young Americans have learned to decouple duty from honor and have thus detached commitment from fulfillment. Yet the truly transcendent moments available in the human walk of life—experiencing love, knowing truth, recognizing beauty—are anchored to a well-ordered soul.
Peddlers of catastrophism forget that the world’s imperfection has nothing to do with the individual soul’s fulfillment. The world has always been broken. It will always be broken. The insights of poets, philosophers, and prophets stretching across multiple millennia are not wrong. The words of Hamlet’s soliloquy ring as true today as when Shakespeare wrote them more than four hundred years ago: “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, / Seem to me all the uses of this world!”
A serious argument could be made that the material and political conditions of modern Westerners are the best they have ever been in the history of our species. And yet, if we are to believe modern research about happiness and well-being, we are more miserable than we have ever been. We are miserable because we have forgotten that the world’s imperfections should never prevent its occupants from experiencing profound waves of gratitude. We have forgotten that the United States’ imperfections are not grave enough to take passionate patriotism off the table. We have forgotten that the imperfections of our family and friends does not mean we should not love them beyond measure.
The world inhabited by the ten men and women of this book was just as broken and just as flawed as the world we are living in today. Perhaps more so. Despite this they found a way to live lives of deep and passionate meaning. This talent for human flourishing imbues them with a form of authority we should welcome in the modern age. It should command our attention and pique our interest. They exude authority in the best possible spirit of the word. Their authority is not a restriction of liberty but a guide on how to use it well. Their authority scaffolds the moral and aspirational framework for a life of achievement by way of sacrifice.
For as much as Americans love to say they are naturally born free, we have forgotten that the knowledge of how to use our freedom for purposeful and benevolent ends is not natural at all. We are not born with it. It is not innate. We all must be tutored and trained in the different lessons of liberty, becoming pupils of human freedom in the process, ultimately accepting that we are responsible for our own lives.
The alternative is what we are witnessing today—a variety of liberty that is licentious and a form of freedom that often tilts toward moral chaos and political tribalism.
Such wisdom must be acquired from others. It must be taught and received. It must be passed down from those who have experienced the rich spectrum of human possibilities, from the deepest pangs of sorrow to the sweetest jubilations of joy, and everything in between. The arrows and agonies of life do not spare any of us. Waiting for politicians to be honest or for global temperatures to drop before we embark on the enterprise of cultivating our truest and best selves is a strategy laden with disappointment. Instead, we should embrace what the ten American titans of this book always understood: Meaning, purpose, and joy don’t simply happen to us, but must be discovered and cultivated within us.
Jeremy S. Adams has taught history and politics at Bakersfield High School for twenty-six years. You can follow him on X @JeremyAdams6.
