Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
I think a good name for this is 'discontention'. Discontent + contention. People are now dissatisfied with their view of reality being challenged by people they know and talking heads, and because of that there is major contention (in the computer science sense) over what people want the narrative to be, and what decisions they want the people in power to make.<p>For a long time I have thought Trump being elected was the greatest psy-op of all time. Do you have any idea how much time people spent talking about him, thinking about him, etc? I mean his presidency could have slowed down progress because of that by a <i>percentage point</i> even if you ignore every policy decision he made or opinion he shared. Now people are even more emotional, thus more irrational, and now you are looked down on for not having a strong bias.<p>There are people who want to centralize power with the unitary executive theory, and make the president even more powerful, because then the president can bypass any level of 'discontention' by the public or other officials. So, basically, my theory is that by creating 'discontention', with either a left or right wing policies or presidents, will always lead to more centralization of power.<p>Most people define power as the ability to control and influence others. Personally, I define it as resource allocation.