When I moved to Chandler, Arizona, 16 years ago, I was informed that, not only would I be expected to participate in the community’s curbside recycling program, but that enforcement officers would come around at random to inspect the special blue trash barrels to make sure they were not being used to dispose of yard waste or other forbidden items.

This seemed funny to me at the time — so outrageously offensive as to be comical. I thought about updating Homer with a tale about Ulysses versus the Recyclops.

It’s not so funny to me now. For one thing, the idea of a government functionary trespassing on private property to pass judgement on one’s trash is the kind of intrusion that should drive any American to thoughts of armed rebellion. And for another, things have gotten quite a bit worse since then.

By now there is no outrage too comically absurd for some government functionary — as humorless a specimen of humanity as has ever existed — to attempt to ram down your throat.

Consider these as examples:

• The State of Michigan is attempting to forbid a mom from hosting neighborhood kids at her home before school. Why? Because she is providing day-care without a license.

• In Saratoga Springs, New York, children are forbidden to walk or to ride their bikes to school.
• To build a new home in Los Angeles, California — a place where virtually no one is building new homes just now — you will be required to add an anti-graffiti coating to the finish at your own expense.
• Worst of all, the federal government is straining mightily to pass legislation that will put the entire health-care industry under state control. Opposed to abortion? You’ll be paying for them anyway. Don’t want to participate? You’ll be fined or sent to prison.

How tough a job was it to come up with those four examples? Well, I found them all on the Drudge Report, an internet news portal. All of them today. All of them from the first column of the page.

When we hear about some humorless jackass ticketing a five-year-old at a lemonade stand for operating without a food service license, we are apt to think, “Why doesn’t someone fire that stupid son-of-a-bitch?” But the actual reality of our lives is that we are encysted at every pore with humorless jackasses, each one of them looking for more and more bizarre ways to inflict government upon us.

Think of it. There was a time in our lives when we all thought that the purpose of government was to fight crimes, which were committed by a very small number of people. But then we got the notion that government should supervise commerce, an activity engaged in by a far larger number of people. But by now the government clearly believes that its function is to police all of us, all the time, over the smallest minutiae of our lives. We are all criminals now.

The question to ask is not, “What the hell is wrong with those stupid sons-of-bitches?”

The question that we desperately need to ask is this one: “What the hell is wrong with us?”

We are Americans — or we were at one time. A proud and free people who defied the armed might of Britannia to win our independence, who conquered and tamed a wild and unforgiving continent, who created vast riches for even the poorest of the poor, who stood fast for the idea of human liberty at home and abroad, who proudly upheld an idea of freedom for the common man never before known anywhere on the earth at any time in human history.

Can you imagine what our grandfathers would have done if someone had tried to tell them how to dispose of their trash? Tried to tell them who they could or could not have as guests in their homes? Actually tried to forbid their children to stand up on their own two feet and walk to school?

If our grandfathers were alive today, they would be denounced on the six o’clock news as militia-mad gun nuts — but they would not have gone down without a fight.

But the state of human liberty in modern-day America is much worse than any of that.

• We all know that we have a permanent underclass of welfare clients, perpetually impoverished people who have become addicted to the free milk flowing from Big Mother’s teats, robbed thereby of any incentive to act in their own behalf.

• And we have a not-so-obvious permanent overclass of welfare clients — alleged businessmen who cannot seem to get by without subsidies or legislation relieving them of the burdens of competition.
• And, of course, we have vast hordes of humorless jackasses on the payroll at every level of government, each one doing his damnedest to destroy at least as much wealth as he consumes.
• And while those humorless jackasses will fawn and preen about how much they love you and want to help you, what they actually love in you is squalid — your poverty, your addictions, your diseases. And in order to express that love for the negative, they must tax and penalize everything that is positive in human life — your sense of purpose, your productivity, your pride in your accomplishments. Can you think of better exemplars of the idea that to get ahead you must work and study hard than doctors? And yet it is the doctors that the state’s functionaries are most avid to enslave.
• And to make everything worse, we have taken an entire generation of ordinary Americans — the Greatest Generation, we call them — and turned them into another huge cadre of sniveling welfare clients, wailing, like the paupers of ancient Rome, “Increase the dole!”
• And to top it all off, we have managed to spawn an elite class of humorless jackasses — extra-humorless, but almost-implausibly clueless — who by now presume to poke their noses into every aspect of your life — public, private, intimate or embarrassingly indelicate.

Face facts: If they can snoop in your trash, what’s to keep them from snooping in your bathroom? If they can confiscate your money to pay for someone else’s abortion, why can’t they confiscate one of your kidneys and give it to someone suffering renal failure? Can’t happen here? That’s what your grandfather would have said about the Recyclops.

O, my people! What have we done to America?

That’s the bad news, and it is really bad news.

Here’s the good news: I’m not the only person asking that question.

I’m writing this text on October 1, 2009, nine months into the administration of President Barrack Hussein Obama. Mr. Obama has proved himself to be so much a socialist — and so frighteningly brash a socialist — that people all over America are thinking seriously about politics, perhaps for the first time in their lives. They have come together at town halls and organized themselves into tea parties modeled on the historic Boston Tea Party. They’re buying books and watching populist demagogues on television. They know something is very wrong with America, and they want to do whatever it takes to fix it.

That much really is good news. The American people, in large measure, can too often be complacent and anti-intellectual. Work matters. Family and church matter. Sports matters. But the life of the mind? Not so much. It’s hard to fault them for regarding intellectual pursuits as being boring, since the people charged with guarding the work of the mind are so often such colossal bores. So when the sleeping giant that is the American public stirs itself to try to figure out what it is getting wrong, this is a cause for celebration.

But there is quite a lot of bad news among the good. For one thing, there is essentially only one political party in the United States right now. The Democrats are camouflaged Marxist socialists who are committed to the stealthy confiscation of all private wealth in the country. And the Republicans are camouflaged national socialists who are committed to the steady surrender of all control over all private wealth in the country. We lurch from one to the other looking for remedies, but all we get is the same socialist poison in superficially-different bottles.

By now, both parties are exponents of an oligarchic kind of cronyism: When their friends and allies win, they win. And when they lose, the taxpayer — that would be you, known in the corridors of power as John Q. Sucker — foots the bill. Each political party uses the taxing and regulatory power of the state to buy votes, to reward its friends and to penalize its enemies. When George Washington spoke to us of “a government of laws and not of men” — he was talking about the exact opposite of what we have now.

What’s worse, even though the American people are looking for intellectual guidance to explain to them what happened to the great American dream of individual human liberty, there is no one to whom they can turn for that leadership. The left proposes more socialism for the poor, the right more socialism for the rich, and the clowns at court rage on about random nonsense.

Take note: We are where we are as the unavoidable consequence of our errors — of one error, really, that we have made over and over again throughout all of human history. And yet even now, as we plan to enslave twenty percent or more of our economy, we as Americans are better off than most of the people now alive on earth. And we are far better off than most of the human beings who have preceded us in death.

We are as alarmed as we are right now — to our credit — because we can recall having it better, we ourselves and our parents and grandparents. We have never been so rich as we are now, but we have been far more free in the past, in the not-at-all-distant past. It is our awareness of our loss of personal freedom that goads us to try to figure out what we are getting wrong.

So: The bad news is really bad.

And the good news is very far from being wholly good.

But here is the best news of all: The error we are making, the error we have always made, is very simple to correct. All we have to do is come to understand humanity for what it really is…

I’ve known for more than a year that I want to write a book about what we’re getting wrong.

As a species, that is.

Through all of human history.

Surely that’s a man-sized ambition — and perhaps also a new high-water mark for the abstract concept denoted by the word “hubris.”

That’s as may be. In truth, this is an undertaking I would rather not undertake. For one thing, I’m busy and, in consequence, I’m physically tired much of the time. For another, this is less a thankless job than it is a task for which I can reasonably expect to be punished. Not officially punished, one may hope, but it seems likely that I will be derided, hectored or hounded as I proceed with this project. I don’t shun that sort of thing, not ever, but it’s not something I actively court.

But none of that matters. The ideas I want to talk about drive me wild — in the best of all possible senses. I abhor every form of the claim of unchosen duty, and yet I feel that I must go through all this, that I cannot live in peace, much less die in peace, until I have transcribed every bit of everything that races through my brain.

But I can laugh at myself, too, so much am I alike, in my incipient dotage, to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man.” Saving the world is a madman’s obsession, after all, a belfry awaiting its loyal complement of bats.

So that’s one caveat, one of plenty more to come: I might be completely mad. Or I might simply be madly wrong. Or I might be so cloyingly clever as a demagogue that I can make you think that wrong is right and right is wrong. I believe with everything I have within me that I am telling the full truth about everything I understand, but I understand, too well, that your mind is your own to maintain. I will do my best to speak the truth as best as I can, but I will also point out what I consider to be weaknesses in my arguments, as I go along, so that you can be that much better prepared to maintain your own mind.

There’s more: I have no education to speak of, and I bear my ignorance like a curse, like a bloody caul over my eyes, obscuring everything I see. I’m a clumsy oaf in Latin, and I have no Greek at all. I am a mongrel dog without pedigree, so much a child of the gutter as to make making distinctions a vanity. I argue well, I think, and I hope validly, but I want to give you every excuse I can think of to dismiss me, to turn your back and insist — at full voice — that there is nothing here of interest to you or to anyone. I don’t reject your disagreement, but I don’t intend to waste my time on people seeking to undermine my case. If you want to spurn this offering of my mind, you could not possibly want that outcome more than I do.

Even so, I want to do my best to be nice about this. I’m not a nice person, and I suffer fools very badly, but I am not doing this to whip anyone into line. Too much the contrary! It happens that much of what I have to talk about will cause just about everyone some pain, but neither pain nor pain-compliance are among my objectives.

Again: Too much the contrary! The essence of everything I have to say, the thing humanity has gotten most wrong through all of human history, is an idea I call Splendor. We’ll define that concept again and again, as we go along, but this is the shortest definition I have come up with so far:

Splendor is the interior experience of being so enthralled by the act of creating the values that contribute to and ultimately comprise your idealized perfect self that, while you are experiencing it, you are your idealized perfect self.

What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of man’s existence on Earth? The objective of questions like those two and many others is to absolve the questioner’s furtively pre-planned failures in advance. But the purpose of a properly functioning human consciousness is Splendor. Whether or not there is anything like a designer of the human mind, Splendor is what the human mind is designed to do.

And that’s what this book is about, this instead-of-a-book for now. I have a lot to talk about, and for a solid year I’ve been thinking about how to commence. But I had no idea how to begin this project until I understood that — no matter how much Squalor we might have to slog through to understand the mess we have made of the world — the proper subject and object of all truly human thought is Splendor — attaining it, sustaining it, transmitting it to and cultivating it within other human minds, spreading it to every last corner of this too-often-benighted orb.

Do you want to talk about ambition? I know how to heal the global economy. I know how to win the War on Terror. I know how best to safeguard the environment, and how, even, to rid the world of virtually all conflict. I wrote the headline above — “Save the world from home in your spare time!” — a long time ago as a parody of matchbook advertisements. But it’s really no joke: I can show you and your neighbors and everyone on the planet how to save the world — how to make this world the paradise we have so far only dared to imagine in other realms.

How much more ambition must I claim for myself? This much, at least: I am writing this now in the hope that humanity can avoid yet another Dark Age, yet another descent into centuries of tyranny and unreason. But it seems plausible to me that I might well be writing to the other side of that awful crevasse. It is hubris indeed to plant myself in the path of Socrates as he saves the human race for the third time, but the world needs saving for a third time because of the vital work the Greeks and their children of the mind have never yet been fully able to accomplish.

To the Greeks, to the Romans, to the British and to the Americans, each at the finest moments in their histories, individual human beings were suffered to be free in their bodies. But never in human history have we acknowledged the simple ontological fact that the human mind, by its nature, is free of every bond that might be imposed upon it by other people.

When we “suffer” human liberty, we imply that the natural and ongoing state of human existence is slavery, an existence confined by cages and chains, constrained by whips and guns and contained, ultimately, by a silent language of shame and fear. But every bit of this is false. The would be masters of human minds require chains and whips and fear to effect their tyranny precisely because the human mind cannot be compelled by any force whatever. You cannot be caused to believe some external doctrine, and you cannot be prevented from upholding whatever ideas you might choose. You can be pushed around like a barrel or locked up like an animal. But you cannot be controlled by anyone, ever, from the outside.

The purpose of human consciousness is Splendor, but Splendor is itself a secondary consequence of a properly-functioning human mind. And the nature of that mind, thriving in delight, aglow with wonder for itself? The inescapable ontological nature of the human mind is independence. That’s not an “ought,” not a moral ideal invented by the Greeks, cherished and improved upon by their students. This is simply the way we are made, the way all of us are made, no matter how oppressive our upbringing might have been.

I would free the Americans because I am one — and I crave freedom with an American’s outsized hunger. But there are people on this Earth who are much more terribly constrained than the Americans, and I would deliver the gifts of Splendor to them, as well. I know what I want to say, and I believe that if I can say it in the way it should be said, I can correct this awful error, this awful omission of the Greeks, for every one of us, forevermore.

That’s right. You, too, can save the world — forevermore — from home in your spare time! It’s not even hard — and that just by itself is funny to me. The errors we make, the errors we have always made, are pitiful and small. Here’s what I want for you, here’s what I want for me, here’s what I want for all of us: I want for the human race to be admirable and immense. Consciously. Conscientiously. Constantly.

I can’t say that people will do as I advise them to — although you can rest assured that my advice will never extend beyond rational persuasion. But I know that what I have to say is important, and I know that if some people elect to pursue and perfect the ideas discussed here, they will live better, happier lives. And if enough people act upon these ideas, the world around them will change for the better, too.

Can I promise you a better world? No, alas. All I can do is show you the world as I can envision it. If I am mad, to do as I do will result in disaster. And if I am wrong, willfully or not, so much the worse. But in the end I am doing this because I must, because I desperately want for my fellow human beings to do better — to be better — and so I am taking the time to explain what I know about the science of being a better human being.

What you do about it — now or later or never — is your business.