Is everything falling apart?
Yesterday I made the comment &quot;everything is collapsing underneath&quot; though there&#x27;s context etc. I think the better way to say it. &quot;Is everything falling apart for the USA?&quot; Yes indeed. Most other countries have problems.<p>Sure Sri Lanka has the same problems. Sure the middle east just went through the same problems and some states are still enduring civil war. Though from what I can tell it&#x27;s mostly the USA in this &#x27;falling apart&#x27; situation. Canada is certainly not far behind.<p>&gt;“The story of Babel,” Haidt writes, “is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”<p>Damn that&#x27;s a good analogy!<p>Elon tweeted this yesterday: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;1519735033950470144" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;1519735033950470144</a><p>The political polarization starting pre-existed social media. This started late 90s or for sure early 2000s with GWBush. Bush knew something from his father&#x27;s reign. He could play identity as a victim. So he would pretend to be a yokel and when the elites would make fun... it told every yokel that Bush was the only option. Obviously he never passed laws or tried to &#x27;fix&#x27; something for yokels. It was shallow identity politics but identity politics breeds more identity politics.<p>The democrats then needed identity politics of obama. It&#x27;s an inevitable scenario, &#x27;first black president&#x27; will eventually happen in history and inevitably it would be toxic with identity politics. The rest is history, Trump is a symptom. Biden is a symptom.<p>&gt;By “here” I mean a time when a big change in information technology has implications for social structure too dramatic to play out without turbulence. In Nonzero I discussed a number of such thresholds, including the invention of writing and the invention of the printing press.<p>Blaming social media is not legitimate in my opinion; social media will be what fixes this. The fix to the USA falling apart is free and open discussions between the camps. This is what Elon is planning to do with twitter.<p>He&#x27;s a billionaire and will be the world&#x27;s first trillionaire, ONLY if the USA doesn&#x27;t fall apart. He has a vested incentive&#x2F;interest to help make this not happen.<p>&gt;One grievance that drove support for Donald Trump in 2016 was that American coastal elites felt more connected to elites in other countries than to their fellow Americans in the heartland.<p>Which is for sure true. The reality is that they are still the same team. You can enjoy F1 over Nascar. You have to still realize you&#x27;re on the same team. When the left-wing attacks the right-wing. You can&#x27;t take actions that harms your own team. Eventually that team breaks and here we are.