250 yrs of trysts with the future

How would the United States of America have turned out if it had declared independence not in the name of liberty and pursuit of happiness, but by harking back to some imagined golden past, say, of an Arthurian Rajya, or Knights Templar Republic? For starters, it would have been shaped less as the democracy we know, and more as a costume drama. The Founding Fathers, instead of drafting the Federalist Papers, might have commissioned projects extolling the 'purity of Anglo-European culture', and little else. POTUS No. 1 George Washington, considered 'father' of that nation, would have been the only face on banknotes.

It's likely that by becoming the custodian of a 'glorious' European ancien regime, immigration, the very engine of America's dynamism, would have been throttled at birth. Silicon Valley would today be a pasture of Anglo-European asmita, rather than a hub of globalised ingenuity. The world would have had a nation built on nostalgia rather than on innovation, where progress would have been regression trotted out in futuristic trappings.

Thankfully, America built a different, independent mythology. Its founding was not about returning to halcyon days but constantly inventing futures. The lesson is enduring: societies that model themselves on the past ossify; those that embrace fluidity thrive, turbo-powered by a forward-looking imagination. Nations that cling to - rather than revel in - myth stagnate, without even recognising stagnation for what it is. US technological ascendancy - from railroads to rockets and internet and AI - was possible precisely because it rejected the purana-puranic, and embraced consent, inclusion and invention. 250-yr-old USA, warts and all, still knows that the opposite of the future is the past.