Why America and Britain Are Disintegrating

What It Means for a Society To Disintegrate, and Why It Matters

Image Credit: ABS-CBN News

Q: How do you resolve conflict in a society in which there is no way to produce agreement on facts or values, when fantasies of forcing people to accept facts or values are popular but won’t work?

This is a good question. An apt one. About very many societies today. I think in this case, it’s about America, which is of course a prime example. So let’s talk about it.

This is a question about social disintegration. I mean that in a formal, technical sense — not just a casual one. Let’s come back to exactly what that means, and first let me rephrase the question so that it’s much easier to answer.

Can you have a democracy in a society where people have given up on the values of truth, justice, freedom, and equality?

The answer to that is as simple, and sinister, as you probably think. No, you can’t. You have have a lot of things, but not democracy, which of course is primarily based on consent. To the value of truth, justice, freedom, and equality. You can have flavors of autocracy. What’s en vogue these days for autocrats? Sham democracies — like say Russia’s, for example. There, the illusion of democracy is preserved, primarily to keep access to financial markets and trade agreements and movement. In sham democracies, the rule of law has ceased to matter, elections are charades, there’s basically one party rule, and inalienable rights are a distant, laughable memory. That’s what’s fashionable for autocrats these days.

You can also have of course more overt form of autocracy, poisonous cocktails of theocracy, authoritarianism, and fascism, mixed in different proportions, yielding the same ruin in the end, the hangover lasting decades, maybe centuries.

So. Why do I rephrase the question like I did? Because asking it the other way is inaccurate. That’s the way we’re often told to think about our societies, but…it’s not quite true. It’s true in a sense that we can’t agree on facts or values. But it’s truer to put the asymmetry in a much more realistic way.

Let me give you a simple example, which is going to be a provocative one, deliberately so, that’ll rankle many people. Being called by your name. Sounds pretty trivial, right? So maybe here I am saying, just call me by name. And there are a lot of people who won’t do it. Now if I called those people “boy,” for example, they’d lash out at me in rage. They want to be called by their names. They ask us to do it all the time. Ted Cruz’s given name is Rafael, lol. 

Simple enough example. But see the asymmetry. Rights for me, but none for thee. That’s one side. On the other side, the stance is very, very different. Rights for thee and me. It’s true that these “sides” don’t “agree,” but that’s an inaccurate way of thinking about this. What is happening here is two different categories of political philosophy, in fact, of ontology. You don’t deserve rights, because you’re not really a person, or as much of a person as me, and those like me, and because we’re more than you, more real, we deserve more inherent respect, resources, power, than you.

It’s easy enough to say that these “sides” don’t “agree,” but they aren’t really sides, at least the way we think of them. Sides are two opposed poles within a category of thought. What does that mean? When it comes to democracy and modernity, we can speak of different sides within it, and that’s perfectly legitimate. So we could have people who say, yes, the electoral college in America should be reformed, and those who say that it’s that way for a reason. We could even have people who say the Constitution is a thing that evolves and shouldn’t be read literally, and those who say it should.

But when we come to the level of “sides” at this scale, we are talking about something completely different. Those who are on the side of democracy and modernity, and those who aren’t.

On the one side, we have those who don’t just “believe in” the fundamental democratic-modern values of truth, equality, liberty, and justice, but those who enact them, even in something as simple as a name or greeting, and then expand outwards from there. On the other, we have people who won’t enact truth, liberty, equality, and justice — even on levels as simple as names or greetings, which become death threats, book bans, and hate campaigns. In America, all this is plain enough to see, and it’s spreading like wildfire, even if Americans don’t really want to admit it enough.