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If safety is the most important issue in life, let's get the speed limit down to 45 and keep the ships in the harbor.

So writes Edwin Friedman in his landmark book, A Failure of Nerve.

America, he said, is stuck in imaginative gridlock. We are a land consumed by

anxiety, fear, and an obsession with safety. As a result, we are also a civilization in regression.

Great institutions lay in disrepair. We seem to produce no great men and no great works.

Once illustrious denominations collapse with empty pews and

elderly congregants, societal trust is at an all-time low. A sense of national greatness has

been replaced with self-loathing and hatred of our forefathers. Instead of funding great exploits

like the space race and Apollo missions, we now fund civil rights welfare

programs. Largely, this is because we lack the kind of bold, masculine leadership that

inspires society's builders, entrepreneurs, statesmen, and artists to unleash their most creative

potential. Instead of pouring our best strength into our best and most

productive people, we allow the fussers and malcontents to dominate the discourse and steer

organizations. What can get a society like ours unstuck? To answer this question, Friedman

draws an interesting parallel between our era of bureaucratic stagnation and the age of exploration,

which sparked the Renaissance and one of the most monumental explosions of human invention,

commerce, art, political theory, and theology.

It wasn't that people suddenly got more data or increased in learning.

Instead, it was because certain men arose,

brave men willing to face the unknown, uncharted oceans, bands of blunt thirsty savages,

and scores of unknown dangers. Chief among them were the Portuguese, a small country at the

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