Societies make progress through invention and discovery.

Societies make progress through invention and discovery.

For a society's standard of living to increase, invention and discovery must be ongoing. There must be a continuous stream of new inventors and discoverers to enhance and build upon the inventions and discoveries of their predecessors.

The following lists identify some of the greatest. These people invented and discovered pieces that, when combined with other great inventors' and discoverers' pieces, came to be known as Western Civilization.

There is something missing in the following lists. There is also a conspicuously outstanding aspect.

Science & Mathematics:

Newton, Leibniz, Ampere, Ohm, Volt, Fermi, Archimedes, Edison, Bell, Tesla, Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein, Pascal, Galileo, Hippocrates, Pasteur, Salk, Niels Bohr, Celsius, Lavoisier, Linnaeus, James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, Descartes, Euclid, Kettering, Kepler, Faraday, Da Vinci, Marconi, Lister, Fleming, Jenner, Bernoulli, Tycho Brahe, Goethe, Hertz, Gregor Mendel, Oppenheimer, Priestley, Glenn T. Seaborg, Benjamin Franklin, Roentgen, Venturi, Marie Curie, and more and more.

Philosophy & Economics:

Plato, Locke, Aquinas, Hume, Burke, Cicero, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Bastiat, Confucius, Hobbes, Descartes, Adam Smith, von Mises, John Stuart Mill, Locke, Hegel, Aristotle, Hayek, Kant, Rousseau, Luther, Keynes, Say, Aristotle, Ricardo, Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Irving Fisher, Ayn Rand, and more.

History & Literature:

Euripides, Tolstoy, Chaucer, Guy de Maupassant, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Aristophanes, C. S. Lewis, Herodotus, Wordsworth, Hemingway, Henry David Thoreau, Cervantes, Edgar Allen Poe, Ovid, Voltaire, Aesop, Sinclair Lewis, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Dante, Jonathon Swift, Keats, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, Homer, Samuel Johnson, Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, Sir Thomas More, Plutarch, Hans Christian Andersen, Goethe, H. L. Mencken, Sartre, Oscar Wilde, Thucydides, Mark Twain, Ayn Rand, and more.

Government:

America's Founding Fathers, Winston Churchill, and some few others.

Consider other areas of invention and discovery that pave the way for humanity's development. Use your educated mind, reference the Internet, research any library to identify more inventors and discoverers. You will find many more to add to those above.

Benevolent:

Over many centuries, as inventors and discoverers invented and discovered and often failed to reap rewards commensurate with their achievements, they usually made the fruits of their mind and labor available to the less-capable, the unthinking masses.

Creative inventors and discoverers worked against a genuine adversity: The ignorance and unwillingness of most people to accept invention and discovery without stealing or abusing it. Those inventors and discoverers who succeeded made their inventions and discoveries available for mass consumption. That provided for development and evolution of Western Civilization and its engine, capitalism.

How much denigration over how many decades should the most-capable accept? How long can the most capable allow themselves to be batted down and yet willingly provide additional substance for the less capable to abuse? It is now that the most capable should stand, defend, and cease providing freely to the less capable.

If the most capable have any self respect, if they have any worthiness remaining, they must claim credit for, and defend their achievements.

If the most capable fail to stand up for themselves after more than four decades of denigration, they have, by definition, fallen beneath the less-capable.

A Note To The Less-capable:

You less capable can only consume. You cannot replenish. You rarely invent or discover. You may take over America, her schools, and take away other people's enjoyment of everything from foods, smoking, cool and fun fast cars, and more. But in doing so, they decrease your own pleasure and satisfaction. Your own lives become even less worthy. Your enjoyment is diminished in your rage to usurp from the more capable.

So it will be with the United States of America that you acquired control over. The USA will decline, be diminished, and rot from within. It will rot over the next years even more than it has since the 1960s.

You less capable people shout and demand. The most capable are confident, successful, and have invented and discovered nearly everything. The less capable shout and demand and have been handed and allowed to abuse, covet, and steal American institutions and means of production.

You less-capable cannot accomplish. You often cannot maintain institutions and production after you acquire them. Once you have stolen others' invention and discoveries, you abuse, change them into less-efficient entities, and end up with a dirty pile of junk. You will do this because that is what comes naturally.

You less capable now in control can place your bigoted, intellectual midgets on the Supreme Court. They will make emotionalized decisions based upon race, gender, and other irrelevant aspects. These decisions will expedite the erosion of Western Civilization and the magnificent institutions of the United States of America.

You less capable fail to understand that America was built and became the best only through fair -- although rough and tumble -- equal opportunity in open, freely competitive society. Forced ascension of you less capable will lead to the decline of America... further decline, that is. But you less capable are incapable of noticing decline since you know not of top quality.

The Capable Venerate Inventors & Discovers:

To all you inventors and discoverers of past centuries the capable say Thank You for sharing. Yes, that is an effeminate term but it is accepted usage today.

That usage should correlate for you past inventors and discoverers how society has decayed after you stopped inventing and discovering. Situations are different since you bequeathed your expertise to the far, far less capable.