The Unhinged Society

I know I have written before on America's lost grip on reality, but there is, in my judgment, new evidence of this phenomenon and that it is becoming very dangerous. I have previously remarked the flight to fantasy evident in substituting creationism for evolution and the concomitant use of politics to replace science in the pursuit of that goal. I have also remarked that celebrities have replaced heroes in the minds of children; that the passion to be noticed, Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame, has produced multimillion dollar industries such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter; that millions of people avidly adopt avatars and endlessly play global fantasy games, etc. But, as I said in my last column on this subject, it is dangerous. Witness the recent rash of death “jokes” about Obama by Republicans, e.g. hunting tags for Obama and as I write this column Fox News' Glenn Beck broadcast his hope that poison is added to Nancy Pelosi's wine. The Republicans believe these tactics, including the psychotic but effective assertion that Obama intends, through his healthcare plan, to kill your grandmother, have turned the political tide that ran so strongly against them in the 2008 election—and this in 6 months. If they are right and some liberal writers seem to agree, then the American people are obviously and dangerously unhinged. People now feel free to brandish firearms at political meetings.

Democracy cannot withstand this indifference to reality. It will give way to the chaos generated by emotion-driven conflicts over myths of race, religion, gender and age difference. In the latter case there is a developing effort to pit the young against the old as the movement of wealth to fewer and fewer people deprives society of the resources needed to insure the broad economic base a democracy requires.

Another indicator that this society has lost its bearings can be found in a recently published book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement in which the authors, two professors of social psychology, are mainly concerned with cultural as distinct from individual narcissism. Their judgment, with an abundance of evidence, is that there has been something like a sea change in American culture and it is not for the good. They list a number of social ills that are attributable to this social narcissism to a greater or lesser extent. These ills range from the mortgage debacle to plastic surgery and the whole makeover industry to the plague of “reality” shows. The major result is, of course, social disintegration and all that can flow from that. Under the best of circumstances there is an inherent conflict in democracy between the individual's liberty and the requirements of the democratic society necessary to assure that liberty. Jefferson sought to bridge this bifurcation by making the aim of the state to assist individuals in realizing their full potential. It was assumed, perhaps naively, that such self realization would be consistent with a democratic society.

In trying to understand why society appears to be falling apart I have begun to wonder if, along with the pressures of over population and the fragmenting effect of technology, a new awareness of human fragility is contributing to this disintegration. Never before in human history have humans known so clearly that their world can be destroyed and perhaps is in that process already and that tey are the cause. Aware of the willingness of humans to destroy each other, mankind now fears that it could, and perhaps will, destroy itself.

I remember a final scene in the movie version of Neville Shute's novel On the Beach, in which a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States has unleashed an enormous radioactive cloud that was progressively killing all life as it circulated around the planet. Australia would complete the cloud's globe-girdling trip. People knew it was coming. They fragment into those who pray and passionately declare that Jesus is returning, by which method they supposedly escape the impending doom, and those who accept their fate and have an enormous beach party. Mankind is increasingly aware of its destiny. Is it starting to fragment into the religious deniers and the entertainment addicted accepters? I personally think Shute should have had a third group indulging in violence as they displayed their anger at such a fate. Somebody had to be responsible! We keep telling ourselves that there is still time, if we act quickly, to avoid the various catastrophes awaiting us. Can we really expect the bulk of mankind to act quickly? At its best, will not such an effort create massive conflict as humans fight for diminishing resources and this in the context of nuclear destructiveness? If some external intelligence were to observe humanity playing out this scenario, would it not think the efforts of those who seek to avoid the cascading convergence of such species-ending forces pitiful in their irrelevance? We must, in my judgment, be brutally honest before we can be productively progressive, else we too live in a fantasy.

Bob Newhad