Freedom on the Frontier

Many people in the United States go into debt on a regular basis. They have an apparent need or desire for something, like a car, so they sign up for several years of payments (really work) to get it. Many people don't ever get off the hamster wheel. After a lifetime of following that behavior, which is heavily cultivated by corporations, families end up broke with a pile of useless, completely depreciated garbage consumer products. People view their "savings" as a buffer for debt service payments, rather than a net worth. I lived that way for many years.

It's noteworthy that almost all those families went through the great depression just two generations before! They completely forgot the lessons of those times. In fact, they flipped those lessons completely over.

In the depression era, the economy of the United States became very localized, more like the Amish live today. People made their own stuff in cottage industry fashion. That pattern resembled earlier eras in US history. Today, most people don't do anything themselves. They're complete retards outside their field of endeavor. In fact, when they have time for leisure activity, people usually spend it watching TV or movies, which trains their consumerism, or some people leisure travel, which is just another aspect of the consumer debt life.

"Easy" credit is one of the factors driving that tendency, but it's more behavioral and choice driven. All the people engaged in a particular behavior, like the consumer/debt/corporate life, end up playing a game that shapes their behavior and limits their apparent choices.

In the early days of United States expansion, the frontier was territorial and geographical, because there were boundaries between the settled areas and the lands of the native tribes, who lived a completely different way than the europeans. Today, the frontier is really everywhere geographically, because it's behavioral and based on people's minds and training.