The latest Bloomberg Businessweek features a cover story that explores “Why Bin Laden Lost.” You could quit reading after the first two paragraphs:
The United States has no purpose. That is perhaps its greatest achievement. America’s founding document, its Declaration of Independence, allows that a state exists only to secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That’s it. There’s a curious lack of ambition in those words. The United States was not founded for the greater glory of anything, or as the necessary outcome of history, but for the freedom to collect figurines, to join a clogging troupe, to take a road trip. Yet these words, which carry no ideology whatsoever, are the ones that keep winning. This is the lesson of the past 10 years, and one Osama bin Laden, a man animated by a grandiose vision of restoring a 7th century Muslim empire, never grasped. The most successful organizing principle the world has ever known is a simple guarantee that we can buy and do things that have no point greater than the satisfaction of our own happiness.
America was not founded with a mission to rewrite human nature, redistribute wealth, or nudge people into doing things that are “good for them.” The nation was founded on the ideal of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (or property, if you prefer John Locke’s formulation).
