In the past couple of years since I last wrote a post for this blog, the country has moved further away from democracy and become more divided. I see two factors as being at the core of these changes.
First and foremost, people are scared. Across the entire country, across all ethnic lines and wealth groups, people are scared in the present and concerned about the future. At first glance these fears stem from a number of different sources and manifest in a number of different ways. Yet I believe that the fear stems from a common source, and I will get into that later.
Second, the social constructs that have allowed people to avoid looking at themselves and accepting their own negative behaviors are breaking down. The age old scapegoats of foreign enemies and other races are being revealed as nothing more than boogey men conjured up by institutions and organizations larger than any single individual. The control mechanisms that have been created to keep Americans divided into easily conquered and manipulated groups based on race and economic class are starting to break down as we are confronted with the reality that a very small fraction of 1% of population has rigged the system heavily, perhaps irreversibly, in their favor and to the detriment and disadvantage of the rest of us.
Lying beneath all of these trends while at the same time hovering over everything is this concept of the "Deep State". The Deep State is a quasi-shadow amalgamation of government entities, public sector corporations, private institutions, and wealthy, powerful individuals who operate "behind the scenes" to keep everything running in favor of the 1%. The Deep State, along with the 1%, have emerged as the latest scapegoat to allow otherwise capable, intelligent, thoughtful and good intentioned Americans to abdicate their responsibility for what is happening in society and place it on a powerful entity that they have no control over.
And by doing that, we give ourselves an excuse to let all of the injustices in the world continue. We give ourselves the ability to tell ourselves that what is wrong with the world is not "our fault". We get to point to something external to us, something so powerful and oppressive that it either directly or indirectly affects nearly every aspect of our lives. Yet at the same time, something so nebulous and defuse that we cannot get our arms around it, and cannot do anything to affect it or change it.
The source of fear is rooted in the fact that the world is changing. Specifically, America's standing in and relationship to the rest of the world is changing. For anyone reading this, you have grown up in a country that was the preeminent superpower that dominated the global economy. As did your parents, and likely, their parents did too. At the same time that America was the world's superpower, the living conditions of the average American have remained the same, or in many instances, declined. The power of the United States of America has been used to enrich a few at the very top of society, while the rest of us have to work harder and struggle more just to get by.
At the same time, we have allowed this to happen. We have continued to buy into the age-old myths of American self-sufficiency. Of the capable individual making it for him or herself. Of the person who can do it on their own, who can achieve fortune and fame.
