Two articles touch on many aspects of strategy that I have been writing about recently, specifically how morality affects the power curve that drives you (and society) toward success and failure and how you can no longer depend upon society to promote the best courses of action.

When I read stories films about beastiality at Sundance or about university professors engaging in public masterbation or about this, my first thought is how this type of decadency strategically weakens Western society. While the founder of Sundance, Redford, attacks Bush for the war in Iraq, Dinesh D'Souza is more correct in his analysis in this article, that America's decaying morality is used by Islamicist to justify the War on Terror though his conclusions in his recent book that that moral decay is a "cause" for Islamist extremism is nothing but a publicity grab. Our immorality helps extremists, but certainly doesn't justify them. Those such as the ACLU, who defend such "unpopular," that is, immoral acts as the finest flowers of liberty and free speech, are truly the enemies of freedom, not its champions. They corrupt the entire idea of freedom and free speech into something that no one is willing to die to defend. Once people are unwilling to die to defend the values of a given society, that society is doomed. People often equate good strategy with a Machiavellian, pragmatic, and even immoral mindset. Nothing is further from the truth. The fact is that good strategy is very closely connected to and dependent on traditional ideas of morality. This is why Sun Tzu made a philosophy of unifying ideals the core of his strategic system. We live in a society that disparages the idea that moral decadence leads inevitably to the decline of a civilization, but in this post we examine why traditional morality is not a matter of religious superstition but strategic necessity. This is not a matter of government legislating morality but of what individuals are willing to accept. People simply are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary for the success of organizations whose values make them uncomfortable. If the people who frequent your favorite restuarant start shooting up drugs and masterbating at the surrounding tables, you will find somewhere else to go no matter how good the food is. Actually, seeing this behavior accepted makes you wonder how good the food is, really.