Fractured Reality

America is badly divided. Trust in our basic institutions — government, business, the schools, the media, even religion — has seriously eroded.

The Founders of our country wanted the various colonies to be united (hence the name, United States). They adopted the motto “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of Many, One) for the new country.

After the Revolution, there was a new sense of freedom and possibility in the land. It was generally believed that there was nothing that Americans, working together, could not accomplish.

Our fractured politics

The idea of a representative democracy is that elected representatives will create policy that serves those who elected them. If not, then the voters are supposed to turn them out of office and select someone else.

When multiple elected representatives come together, representing differing interests who want differing policies, they are supposed to debate rationally and eventually come to a compromise that balances the needs and desires of everyone.

Neither of these things are happening now. Politicians have been creating policies that only serve the very wealthy, and yet they continue to be re-elected. The Congress has become so heavily partisan that on many of the most critical issues there can be no compromise. It has become difficult to even have a discussion on some issues because the Republicans won’t agree on basic facts.

Until voters punish politicians for creating these divides, right now there is no incentive for them to lead by example.

Chuck Todd, Meet the Press, NBC

Our fractured economy

The United States has the largest wealth gap in the world. The United States is first (ahead of Switzerland, Netherlands, and Singapore) in wealth per person, but it comes in last in the list of wealth equality. (Interestingly, the most equal economies in the world are Slovakia, Belgium, and Japan).

The middle-class is shrinking worldwide. The richest 10% own 84% of the world’s total wealth, and the richest 1% own more than half of that.

The very wealthy do not live in the same world as the rest of us. During a 2011 Republican Presidential Primary debate, Mitt Romney casually offered Rick Perry (whose childhood family farm had no indoor plumbing) a bet for $10,000.

Mitt Romney’s reported net worth of $250 million is 500 times larger than that of a middle-class person worth $500 thousand. To such a person, Mitt’s $10,000 bet would be equivalent to $20. And Mitt is just a multimillionaire. There are 614 billionaires in the United States.

Our fractured media landscape

Instead of using the marvelous new communication tool of the internet to better unite people, we have turned it into a morass of lies, self-promotion, and animosity.

The ease of using the internet, especially social media tools, causes people to think they are better informed than they are. Online algorithms continually feed people information that reinforces what they want to believe. This causes people to live in increasingly opaque information silos.

Lies spread faster and more widely online than truth because they are more dramatic and demand more attention. Attempts to debunk online lies often fail and result in simply spreading the lie farther.

A very large segment of the American population has deliberately locked themselves away from moderate, edited, fact-checked, mainstream news sources in favor of slickly-produced lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. These people now live in a different social/political “reality” than everyone else.

The loss of a common reality

When I was young, there were four major television networks (CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS). Each had their own national nightly news shows. The anchors of these shows were journalists of integrity. They were committed to fairness and accuracy in their reporting.

Walter Cronkite of CBS was even cited in a poll as “the most trusted man in America.” He typically signed off his newscast by saying “And THAT’s the way it is on (day, date).” CBS turned his sign-off into a promotional tag line. “When Walter tells you — that’s the way it is!”

We had no reason to doubt that the news we had just watched was real and true. It was fact-based, not sensationalized, and not politicized. Everyone in America shared a basic, common view of reality and what was happening in the world.

Now there are so many loud, and often conflicting, voices demanding our attention it can be difficult to decide who to believe. The easiest (and most dangerous) solution is to simply believe those voices who tell you what you want to hear.

We made this mess

In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. If the government is corrupt, it is because the people are corrupt. If our politicians are arrogant, lazy, and ill-informed, it is a reflection of the voters who are arrogant, lazy, and ill-informed.

The responsibility, and the blame, for the current fractured condition of the United States comes back to the people themselves. If we want to save our country, Americans need wake up, clean up our media diet, and vote out all the lying, gaslighting, conspiracy-spouting, divisive, Republicans (while we still can).

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Sources

Thomas A. Foster, ““In God We Trust” or “E Pluribus Unum”? The American Founders Preferred the Latter Motto,” Origins, Ohio State University, November 9, 2011.
Dante Chinni and Sally Bronston, “Americans are divided over everything except division,” NBC News, October 21, 2018.
Chuck Todd, “Divided States of America,” Meet The Press, October 21, 2018.
Jack Ewing, “United States is the richest country in the world, and it has the biggest wealth gap,” The New York Times, September 23, 2020.
— “Allianz Global Wealth Report 2020: Wealth immunity,” September, 23, 2020.
Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Ruth Igielnik and Rakesh Kochhar, “Most Americans Say There Is Too Much Economic Inequality in the U.S., but Fewer Than Half Call it a Top Priority,” Part 1, “Trends in income and wealth inequality,” Pew Research Center, January 9, 2020.
Reid J. Epstein, “Romney’s $10k gamble,” Politico, December, 11, 2011.
William D. Cohan, “Mitt Romney is worth $250 million. Why so little?,” The Washington Post, October 5, 2012.
— “List of Americans by net worth,” Wikipedia, May 4, 2021.
Brian Ferguson, “Tribalism vs. Truth,” Insight, December 16, 2019.
Brian Ferguson, “The attack on our basic institutions,” Insight, December 9, 2019.
Brian Ferguson, “The death of expertise spells doom for democracy,” Insight, January 20, 2020.