The expression, “you learn more from your failures than from your successes” is largely true on the individual level, with some obvious exceptions. If you are a bomb disposal man or you pack your own parachute, the lesson you learn from your failure is short lived, but for most other things the expression holds. What we think of as wisdom is mostly just experience, which is a nice way of saying mistakes. Moreover, success often leads to future error due to learning the wrong lesson.

This holds for groups of people. Sports teams that have a run of luck often fall into bad habits and then experience a collapse. They confused luck for talent. On the other hand, the young team that struggled through losses, learning hard lessons along the way, often comes out the other side as a good team. They made all the mistakes necessary to be terrible, and therefore learned the lessons required to win, so they emerged from the experience equipped to win.

What we think of Judaism is the product of failure. Jews are currently celebrating Passover, commemorating a foundational event for their people, but the Jews who experienced the flight from Egypt were nothing like modern Jews. The Roman conquest of the Levant and the destruction of the Temple changed Judaism. The great failure of the old religion ways gave birth to a new form of Judaism, which allowed Jews to be Jews no matter where they found themselves.

It is not that failure, especially catastrophic failure, is a good thing. No one should strive to fail. It is that failure strips old habits of their legitimacy. “We have always done it this way” is powerful magic when things are going well. When things are going poorly, everything gets questioned. The process of reexamination of old habits and old beliefs is what often leads to reform and even revolution. That new form of Judaism was revolutionary and remains so to this day.

Something similar happened, although far less catastrophic, when the founding generation was crafting a new political order. The slave-holding states won the hard fights over the new constitution. These practical compromises contradicted the covenantalism at the core of Yankee New England. The initial failures led to a revolution in their outlook, which eventually led to abolitionism and the war on the southern states to end the institution of slavery.

One can never know, but you can make the case that the worst thing to happen to the South was their success in preserving slavery at the founding. If the slave owning states had been forced to slowly phase out the practice, the revolutionary fever to their north could not have so easily spread. Maybe the fanatics would have found a new cause, but if they did not have slavery as a rallying point, it would have been much harder for them to instigate a crusade against the South.

Of course, the corollary here is that winning is often a curse. The great triumph over their old enemies in the Civil War gave the fanatics confirmation. This fueled the spread west, turning America into a continental empire. Then they turned their eyes south to become the hegemon in the Western hemisphere. Finally, in the 20th century, they conquered the known world in the Second World War. The saviors of the world had literally saved the world from fascism.

There is where our present crisis started. Decades of economic immigration left the ruling class with a population of strangers. Organizing this mass of strangers into a unified force to conquer the world required something new and what they landed on was creedalism, the idea that American is a set of ideas, rather than a people defined by blood and history. All those strangers could be American and fight for what it means to be American, if they just accepted the words on the paper.

It was more complicated than that, but it was a useful expedient. It gave everyone a reason to support the cause, especially the newcomers. It also promised upward mobility to those newcomers. After all, if being an American simply meant espousing and supporting the creed, there is no reason why anyone could not rise as high as their talents will take them. Creedalism made the concept of the American dream accessible to anyone and everyone, as long as they believed it.

The trouble, of course, is it seemed to work. The great victory over fascism in the Second World War was a transformative event for America. It not only made America a global empire, it confirmed that America was a different sort of country. It was not just a place where people lived, but the city on the hill. The people committed to ideas conquered the people committed to blood and soil. This was proof that the American creed was a righteous faith open to all people.

This useful expedient was quickly transformed into a social poison by the subversives and profiteers that follow them from catastrophe to catastrophe. Every effort to defend the nation from the caustic effects of creedalism was met with lectures by the high priests of the faith, often undisguisable from the profiteers, accusing the defenders of the nation of being un-American. The result is the atomized, deracinated society of strangers we see today.

It is tempting to focus on the present outrages and ignore the soil in which they have grown, but the seeds were planted by the success in the war. Walter Cook, founding director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, famously said, “Hitler is my best friend; he shakes the tree and I collect the apples.” Sibyl Moholy-Nagy famously replied, “In the best of Satanic traditions some of this fruit was poisoned, although it looked at first sight as pure and wholesome as a newborn concept.”¹

The present insanity is only possible in a society in which it is easy to focus the hatred of one group of people on a different group of people in close proximity. It turns out that diversity plus proximity is wokeness. This was made possible by inviting the world and their ideas into the country. This was only possible when being an American was reduced to being nothing more than repeating some words on a paper. America’s great success came with a suicide pact called creedalism.

That is the hidden truth of that expression at the start. You learn more from your failures than from your successes because the pain of failure endures, while the euphoria of success fades. The present failure normal people are experiencing will stick around long after this generation is gone. The great failure of the American experiment with creedalism will inform those who build whatever comes next. Today’s agony will be tomorrow’s lesson for the next generation.

¹https://placesjournal.org/article/future-archive-hitlers-revenge/

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