From Brad Littlejohn, Clare Morell, Emma Waters in The New Atlantis (I’m not sure about how much “Americans once understood,” but the either-ors listed are worth including):
Americans once understood that, for all its blessings, any free-market system must account for the unfreedoms we are apt to run headlong into without due deliberation. They understood the essential role of law and society in preserving and protecting the human person against pimps and peddlers who sought to profit from our preference for ease. They understood that technology could either aid the human person in our labors and heal our hurts, or be deployed as a cheap substitute, degrading us. They understood that many technologies that look promising at the outset turn out to have unforeseen consequences and side effects, dealing out damage that then demands new technologies to repair or reverse. They understood the perverse incentives thus created, as innovators could make money first off the problem and then also off the solution. A society of people shelling out billions on junk food and also on gym memberships, diabetes treatments, and Ozempic is one that may well maximize its GDP, but not its human flourishing or happiness.
Human beings have a nature: distinctive forms and pathways of flourishing that cannot easily be bypassed without causing harm. While many people still believe this, we have also been allowing technology to tell us a different story, a fairytale in which any craving can and should be met and any negative side effects are temporary — just new needs waiting for a new solution from the technological cornucopia.
Rightly wary of the threats from big government, we have too often allowed ourselves to be lulled to sleep by lobbyists spinning this fairytale, and are now awakening to find ourselves in an inhumane dystopia in which technology has increasingly been turned, from conception to death, against the human person and against the family, in which we flourish. Today, with an unlikely coalition of pro-family conservatives and techno-optimists propelling a second Trump administration into the White House, we stand at a point of decision. Will we accelerate our regime of hacking — or begin to reckon with its costs?