
The Unraveling of America - nouveaux
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-american-era-wade-davis-1038206/
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agustamir
> The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very
> idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone.

This crisis has really made me ponder the extent to which individualism has
taken its toll on the American society. Really, large parts of the country
don't seem to care about the collective good and are just turning a blind eye
toward their fellow citizens in this moment of crisis.

~~~
badrabbit
Let me ask you and the HN crowd this: Would it honestly be incorrect to blame
secularism for this? If it inconveniences me, why should I care at all if my
actions negatively affect absolutley anyone given my belief is that my
existence has no purpose outside of what I conveniently define, life is
meaningless outside of my self-defined meaning and there is no authority that
can define what is a correct or incorrect way of living.

In other words, like you observed I also think the moral foundations are
failing. Why should groups of people accept each other as equally created and
endowed with equal rights? Why should young people be inconvenienced to maybe
save lives of older people by wearing masks? Empathy? Life has no meaning,
they're gonna die anyway. Why emphatize with others at all? Why not focus on
whatever leads to the best experience in this life for each individual, where
there are conflicts let the strongest win. Nature has no mercy on the weak.

Of course I don't believe any of that but am I wrong to think secularism plays
a big role in the lack of empathy?

Now before anyone reaches for their pitchforks, I am not saying religion is
the solution or somehow all those religious people supporting terrible people
to advance their agenda don't exist. I am saying, what a society finds correct
and acceptable sets the tone. Even religious people act secular when it is
convenient because society is secular and the ones that want popularity over
authenticity will always be mallable enough to adopt to what society thinks is
normal (consider how the nazis claimed to be Christians and killed jews, their
actions override their claims).

Let me rephrase a bit, foudnationally the social majority in america,despite
all the terrible things that went on believed there is a purpose to life and
you have to seek it. They also believed people have an origin and destination
and that correct behavior in this life is critical, living incorrectly means
failure in realizing the purpose of your existence or worse , regardless of
popularity humans have limited and finite authority over other humans, that
morality was not a suggestion but an implicit realization of the creator's
will (or of the "universe" or whatever intelligent origin people believed in)
,a human's life is precious because it has meaning and purpose, and others'
experience of pain morally bounds all other humans to apply emphatetic
reasoning in their reaction.

I am not neccesarily saying lack of religion is the cause. I am asking, given
the facts, is it far fetched to consider embracing of secular individualism as
the root cause? And I don't mean by any end of the political
spectrum(left/right). I mean across the board,anyone that effectively beliefs
they define their own morality as they see it fit to benefit themselves. And
as the saying goes "a thief thinks everyone else is also a thief", they have
all these conspiracies that the media or the deepstate is out to get them
because that's exactly what they would do to advance their self-centered
ideology.

I am emploring you to critically consider that perhaps effective secualrim
(even among those that don't claim to be secular) that puts individuals at the
center of their own universe might be the cause.

Humans are interesting creatures, weirdly with the exception of the vocal
minority, people that are secular by default have in my experience been very
emphatetic, I am not sure if they will remain the same but I think initially
most mentally healthy people want to stop the pain of others because they
experienced pain themselves and they wanted someone to help them, therefore
doing to others what you would want done to you is implicitly a correct way of
living. I suspect secular-individualism contradicts that reasoning when
helping others entails inconvenience or having to pay a sacrifice.

This is an important question because much of democracy and america assume the
majority will have empathy for the minority (which is how slavery ended and
civil rights laws that benefited the minority were passed).

Another contributor might be how rapid advance of technology might be the
driver of self-centered ideologies that lack empathy. But I hope people
continue to appreciate peace and be open to any truth.

~~~
michaelchisari
_> am I wrong to think secularism plays a big role in the lack of empathy_

America is by far the most religious country in the first world.

~~~
pg_1234
More specifically, if you compare America to every other western country (all
of which seem to be doing better in this regard - i.e. citizens looking out
for each other), what stands out is that American is far more religious.

It seems more likely that America's current level of religiousness is toxic,
allowing people to be ass-holes as long as they pay lip service to a professed
religious ideal.

You only have to look at western Europe to see that it is the secularists, who
judge themselves by their actions rather than their words, who are the more
decent people.

~~~
Aeronwen
>It seems more likely that America's current level of religiousness is toxic,
allowing people to be ass-holes as long as they pay lip service to a professed
religious ideal.

It's literally the religious freedom people colonized America to practice.
People who considered being told to stop being assholes and imposing their
religious ideal onto everyone else was religious oppression.

The level of toxicity hasn't increased, they just have internet access now.

------
joe_the_user
America has entered into a strange category of it's own. It's looking similar
to Brazil in some measures (inequality) and similar to Europe in other
measures (average wealth, some levels of development) and it's somewhat to
Turkey or India in yet other ways (dominated by ruthless religious parties
that haven't, yet, eliminated Democratic processes entirely).

I suspect that in every third world nation, and now here, people ask
themselves "how does a nation so filled with competent, intelligent people
allow itself to be dominated by corrupt, delusional people." Especially here
in the nation that once and maybe still does have more competent people than
anywhere else in the world. The answer is that the corruptly delusional
ideologues and the competent technocrats are mixed together with no way of
unraveling them. Look at Dr. Ben Carson, brilliant surgeon.

------
emerged
I can't honestly make it through an article where every sentence is so
optimized for maximum pessimism, fear mongering and politicality.

I actually love the United States and would like to see articles like this
stop trying to "unravel" it.

~~~
yls
For me, it looks rather realistic. If you love the US, shouldn’t you embrace
such articles in order to have some intellectual food to reflect on? If you
don’t think so, the current admin provides more than enough good news anyway.

~~~
JoshuaDavid
If you love the US, you should embrace thoughtful articles that bring up
neglected but valid points in insightful ways. This article is not that. This
article is yet another "orange man bad" lamenting that America now isn't as
great as it was from WWII through 1970.

The problem with articles like this is that the people who already agree with
the author will think the article is insightful and focus on the parts that
are obviously correct (social cohesion genuinely has decreased), and the
people who disagree will focus on the parts that are obviously wrong (oh look
it's that misleading statistic again about the top X Americans having more
wealth than the combined wealth of the bottom 50% because the bottom 50% have
a combined wealth of about $0 because debt exists).

The article gets shared by people who agree, who think everyone should read it
for the author's "deep insight", and shared by people who disagree who say
"look what the brainwashed people believe", and the article gets lots of
clicks and ad impressions and everyone hates each other a little bit more.

~~~
michaelchisari
_> because the bottom 50% have a combined wealth of about $0 because debt
exists)._

I find that to be a relevant metric.

~~~
JoshuaDavid
It absolutely is. My problem is that that is the maximally controversy-
inducing framing for that particular statistic. A breakdown of net worth by
quintile will show the same effect in a clearer way. "The top 3 people have
the same combined wealth as the bottom 140M" _sounds like_ "the typical member
of the top 3 people has almost 50 million times as much wealth as the typical
member of the bottom 140M" when in practice the bottom 140M is mostly composed
of people with substantial-ish negative net worth (e.g. a car loan) or
substantial-ish positive net worth (e.g. a paid off car or a small retirement
account).

The disparity exists and is large, but a misleading representation of it
doesn't help anyone except those who profit off controversy.

------
eric4smith
While there is some significant loss of "value" of holdings, the main thing is
to understand where the jobs and money are going, not where they were.

Take a water balloon, and squeeze one end of it. It does not lose water,
instead, the water goes to the other end of the balloon. That illustrates
where the "money" is going.

I've said elsewhere there is a sea-change in education happening right under
our noses. I believe that a lot of the education money may very well flow to
more vocational training, distance learning, tech and lessons for home school
and smaller classes. Old-school group classes were inefficient anyway -- and
people are just beginning to realize that.

Doctors will do more old-timey house calls. Even to just survive!

The restaurants and businesses that you frequent during your commute, like
diners, etc, will also adapt. More deliveries instead.

It will be easier to schedule a haircut from your barber for your home or
office. I don't really want to go to a salon and sit in a chair there.

Store owners will have to start doing more list building and email marketing,
you can no longer just watch a customer walk-in and walk-out without trying to
build your email or contact list.

Yes, America is unravelling, but we are humans and we always adapt. It's just
the stubborn ones or the hard to change industries that will suffer the
longest and the slowest.

I do not believe that things are just going to go back to "normal" as they
were. There will be some significant change in the way how we conduct
business, education, entertainment and living.

The people who adapt to that change will be the winners.

------
throwaway_pdp09
I'm a brit, so speaking from the outside.

I'm getting sick of this downtalking of everything. People have various fuels,
and optimism is one (cautious, realistic, measured optimism, together with
appropriate self-belief). This is not reflection, it's putting a hole in that
tank to drain it out.

It was incompetence that got the US into the mess it is, but if the US is
sick, I have full confidence it will get well again. USA'ians putting down the
US unrealistically will hurt your country as much as any other factor,
draining your confidence - and to be clear, there are sate actors out there
who are happy to chip in.

This is bad and it's going to get worse. Consider yourself in a war and now
try to see how to survive it and contribute to it instead of wallowing in
apathy and fear. Of course the faults in the US are there and they are deep
and must be acknowledged before they can be fixed, but they will be fixed and
the US will be stronger (and just maybe smarter) for it afterwards.

Destroy a person's hope is the most effective way of destroying them, and
you're doing it to yourselves (with, I'm sure, a little help from others who
want the US shrunken).

(I'm normally on the negative side of things but watching people sink
themselves into blackness over it all isn't realistic, as much as believing
that 'hope is enough' or 'god will fix it' isn't realistic).

------
8bitsrule
Never have I seen a post go from page 2 to page 7 so quickly. Particularly one
so insightful.

Edit: But maybe it'll get back to where it belongs, so I'll add this. Davis'
insights only go skin deep. I've been around long enough to see a slow but
steady movement in the US toward more positive values and appreciation and
respect for individual differences. While our leadership has become more
addled and directionless, real and affirming values have been on the rise,
displacing those created by institutions.

I could spend an hour disputing much of what Davis says, but I just hope this
page isn't buried even further. We _really_ need to have this discussion.

~~~
spanhandler
This kind of column's a venerable cliché in left-leaning political writing in
the US. Very good instances of it are still valuable, but this isn't really
one of those and doesn't add much that anyone who pays attention to political
writing hasn't already seen many times over. Better-argued and better-framed
versions of the more historical and contextual bits of this are essentially
the air that much of the left breathes. I've (repeatedly) seen forum posts
cover the recent-events portions of this better, over the last few months, let
alone professional writing.

(for the record, I'm writing this _from_ a pretty damn "left" perspective,
having read just... so many of these sorts of columns, or whole books, over
the years. This ain't a notable or particularly good one.)

------
dmje
Nodding Brit nods

------
zepto
Oh for god’s sake. “Failed state”? Seriously?

Rolling stone has done great reporting on serious problems, but this is just
insane. If the US is a ‘failed state’ then so is every other state.

~~~
IntelMiner
What points in the article do you specifically disagree with?

~~~
spanhandler
I agree things are fairly bad in a lot of ways, and very bad in some ways, but
"failed state" does have a specific meaning and applying it to the US is
pretty hyperbolic. It's fuzzy like anything that describes human stuff, but
the US is definitely on the not-failed side of that fuzzy line. _Heading_
toward it? I dunno. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe. There now? Certainly not.

Our Federal government might be doing a piss-poor job but it has not stopped
being able to assert sovereignty in meaningful ways, domestically and
internationally, or to continue to deliver government services to a
significant extent. If those things had happened we'd know it. "Governing very
poorly"—even somewhat maliciously—is not what it means for a state to have
failed. Maybe it's being used... I dunno, poetically? But that doesn't seem to
be the case, in context.

Some of the stuff in the article's interesting but a lot of the rest is
similarly overblown. Declaring China's ascendance (it sometimes explicitly
says China but then other times seems to use Asia to mean "Asia, but mostly
China") is fashionable and _might_ end up being true but is far from settled
history, to pick on another part, and I'm guessing the "D-Day versus gun
deaths in 2019" stat is mostly suicides, which seems disingenuous to me, in
this context—while of course it is interesting and meaningful in others, I
think they're trying to mislead with it here.

I'm left-wing as hell and probably agree with most policy positions and
general opinions the writer holds, so this should be right up my alley, but
the piece isn't great. A better-written version of this with exactly the
thesis and overall journey might even be something I'd really like!

It's a mix of a pretty good cataloguing of disparate bad-sounding stats and
figures about the US, many bad/misleading instances of same (any time there's
a bad-sounding—or good-sounding, for that matter—stat missing any frame of
reference, I get twitchy, and this has plenty), some dull and overstated
predictions about the future, and some lazy narrative-building. I hate these
kinds of articles when the right does them, but I almost hate them more when
"my" side does them. I know that's bad politics because people respond to this
sort of thing, but I just can't stand writing this transparently manipulative,
at great cost to honesty and accuracy.

The best parts are when the writer's focusing directly on the COVID response.
Those are alright. A few other bits are OK for a few sentences in a row and
could form the seed of good, if thoroughly unoriginal, articles on their own.

~~~
nouveaux
"It's a mix of a pretty good cataloguing of disparate bad-sounding stats and
figures about the US, many bad/misleading instances of same (any time there's
a bad-sounding—or good-sounding, for that matter—stat missing any frame of
reference, I get twitchy, and this has plenty), some dull and overstated
predictions about the future, and some lazy narrative-building."

I see what you're saying. To me, this article is not about building a case for
America's failed state. It's an argument for the perceived loss of American
leadership around the world. Given that conclusion, the stats he chooses are
exactly the ones on people's minds around the world.

Talking to my friends in China and Singapore, the George Floyd protests often
come up as the US descending into chaos. There are comparisons to Hong Kong.
Regardless of the faulty perception outside of the US, that perception shapes
our leadership abilities. This article perfectly reflects what I've been
hearing from overseas.

~~~
zepto
That’s fair, but I personally lived for more than 30 years overseas before
moving to the US, and am in contact with plenty of people outside the US.

My experience has been that people’s perceptions are mostly reflective of what
they read in the press.

They were grossly inaccurate and misleading when the US was perceived as a
magnificent success - most of the problems we have now were already apparent
then.

But they are also grossly misleading when representing the US relative to
other states now.

There are ‘failed states’ inside the European Union for example, and pretty
much every one of the problems the US has are reflected elsewhere too.

It is obvious that things are a lot worse, and that serious problems have gone
unresolved, etc.

I live in the East Bay and stores were looted only a few blocks from here.
Similar things happened during the riots over Oscar grant at when I lived in
another part of the East Bay.

There is no descent into chaos. It’s not surprising that it seems like that if
you live in China or Singapore, where the penalties for rioting are draconian.
You can make argument either way as to whether the riots represent something
healthy or unhealthy.

But it is simply not true that US is descending into chaos. It’s not even true
that this is some new thing.

But of course if the media present it that way, then people will think that.

