State of American Culture 2020
Published in
1 min readJan 14, 2021
- Today a fragmented society has locked itself structurally into a nihilistic cycle of social tribal threat, hate, or revenge when trying to pursue happiness.
- We’re reduced to finding the larger meaning in our lives by dehumanizing social tribes different from ourselves; either playing the role of aggrieved victims seeking justice and revenge, or as righteous soldiers threatened by them as enemies.
- Our social group identities and their electoral representation no longer represent society (if they ever did) because they are partisan and disenfranchising, corrupted by monetization and self-servingly reweighted by polarized interests. They have no unifying authority anymore (religion, race, government, nationality).
- The Old World of common enemies that used to unite us at the national or world level have largely faded away (Religion, Imperialism, Communism, Poverty). New common enemies such as pandemics are used by those in power to divide us, not unite us.
- Reason and facts have lost their persuasiveness and ability to stand out from noise, and the discourse that fuels the monetization and thus the distribution of information is anything that inflames Us vs Them.
