How Does a Nation Lose Its Soul?

It doesn't and can't. I'll let Butler explain...

The received wisdom informs us that the American public has tired of George Bush and his use of lies and other deceptions to fashion a war-crazed police-state. According to this view, voters will go to the polls this November and exchange a sufficient number of Republican scoundrels for Democratic ones to deprive Bush of a GOP-controlled Congress. Then, we are further led to believe, the sociopathic madness that has metastasized from inside the “beltway” will have come to an end, and – like members of any lynch mob who later reflect on their deed – most Americans will rediscover their lost sense of sanity and decency.

I accept none of this foolish thinking...

Neither do I. Not for one minute.

To inject moral or philosophic considerations into the political process totally misconceives of the basic nature of the state. To confront a collectivized mind with normative principles is as much a waste of time as trying to educate a person in differential calculus whose understanding of mathematics has been confined to using an abacus; or to explain the communicative powers of the Internet to a medieval man accustomed to sending fire signals from towers.

Mr. Bush, his Machiavellian supporters, and the Democrats understand this essential fact of politics quite well. If the Republicans suffer at the polls this November, it will not be due to any moral hostility to the wholesale lying or the slaughter of innocents directed from the White House, but only from a substantial deviation from the political forms, practices, and litanies upon which collective minds insist.

We begin to lose our souls when we allow ourselves to become part of a collective, a truth the statists understand as providing the foundation for their vicious systems. If individuals do not maintain their constant awareness, the “dark side” is very easy to mobilize into a collective mass of destructive energy. Crowds and mobs are made up of people who allow their judgment and responsibility to be taken over by such collective forces that speak in one simple, uncomplicated voice.
...
A nation – any nation – does not lose its “soul” for, being an abstraction, it has none to lose. Only individuals can suffer such a loss, which they do whenever they allow their sense of being to get submerged in any collective.

That covers the problem. He has found the root.

Now how many do you suppose can see it, really
understand it and the implications?

Do you?

Full essay.