Innovation and Independence

Dick Moberg
July 26, 2024

Innovation and Independence

I live six blocks from Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence was signed. Living this close, it’s easy to ignore other than when I’m showing visitors around or on the 4th of July. But every time I pass by, whether walking to Old City to a bar or restaurant or on a bike ride across the Ben Franklin Bridge, I do give it a quick nod and get a bit excited knowing this is where it all started. In this editorial I reflect how freedom in the U.S. promotes entrepreneurship and how that freedom needs to be preserved.

My entrepreneurial spirit gave me a love for the U.S. from a perspective others may not have. In earlier decades, I frequently traveled to Europe and heard the challenges my colleagues faced starting and running a company. In many cases, laws were stacked against them and the infrastructure to start and grow new businesses wasn’t there. They found it difficult to pursue their dreams. The inherent freedom in the U.S makes that easier. For me, the U.S. has been an amazing garden for ideas, with rich soil and plenty of water and sunlight. Mix that with the seed of an idea and unlimited passion and, most of the time, you had success.

Dick in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia

But I remember in 1986, I was having lunch with Vinco Dolenc, a neurosurgeon in Ljubljana, when it was still Yugoslavia. We sat in a quaint café up on a hill overlooking the river. I was there with a neurosurgeon giving lectures on brain monitoring. Dr. Dolenc was fascinated with the U.S. but as an outside observer. He told me something I never forgot. He said, “Democracy is still an experiment.” I never forgot it because I thought he was wrong. How could a government that rang so true in terms of what it provided for its citizens still be an experiment? And how many times had I recited the Pledge of Allegiance as a kid? All this for an experiment? That can’t be true.

Over the next decades my lunch conversation with Dr. Dolenc started to make sense. I saw how lies about Vietnam, and later Iraq, led to massive shifts of wealth at the expense of a lot of dead Americans. I saw corporations and paid-off-politicians lie about the effects of cigarettes, climate change, and guns. I started to develop a distrust in the government. More precisely, a distrust of individuals who saw the immense wealth in the U.S. and decided some of that should be theirs. And they did what it took to get it. It showed me how money and greed are the Achilles Heel of a Democracy.

Another picture by Independence Hall, this time more commemorative of the 1776 time period.

Another sentinel moment for me was while I was touring Dachau one afternoon while at a meeting in Munich. There is a sobering exhibit that explains how something as horrendous as the Holocaust was able to happen. I was walking through the exhibit timeline and the parallels to U.S. politics were chilling. First they attacked the press, they banned books, and then told lies to the point where there became an altered reality. This modus operandi has now reached a crescendo in the U.S. to where the country, families, and friends are divided. There is no longer a conservative and liberal party, rather one that, admittedly, wants to bring down Democracy and one that wants to save it. It’s scary for many of us but probably not unlike the early days of the U.S.

When you take a tour of Independence Hall, they show you a chair from the 1787 Constitutional Convention with a sun painted on the back. At the close of the Convention, Benjamin Franklin is claimed to have said, “I have often looked at that sun behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.” It’s concerning the direction of the sun on that chair is still an open question 237 years later. Time will tell. For me, I remain cautiously optimistic; the caution from Dr. Dolenc and the optimism from Ben Franklin. In the meantime, keep reading The Neuro Science Monitor… the CNN of the CNS.