As we come down the home stretch of the shitshow that is the 2024 Presidential election, it has become clear that our problem is not just Trump, or his legion of followers, or even the entire American political system, which has tipped over completely into plutocratic servitude. What is really crippling us is a dysfunctional set of ideas, a system of zombie ideas so entrenched … Continue reading Hard to Kill: Zombie Ideas That Need Slaying
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller The galloping, microscopic horseman of Covid has quickly exposed the fatal flaws in the American system, and the mixed messaging that we’re getting from our leaders cannot obscure the basic facts, which are not too complicated but profoundly terrifying nonetheless. The … Continue reading Narrowing Options
In the last couple posts (here and here), we established this general framework: our country is being artificially split into two warring factions, mainly due to our electoral machinery (winner-take-all) and the partisan media that feasts on the resulting confrontational style of politics. As economic conditions on the ground deteriorate for regular people, narrative theodicies arise to explain why things are so screwed up, and … Continue reading Setting the Table
Last time, we looked at the three-part structure of the Divided America complex: Winner-Take-All electoral machinery creating the two-party political landscape; partisan media using that duopolistic scaffolding to inflate their culture war balloons; and an economically desperate public willing to imbibe this us-versus-them story because it makes some narrative sense of why things have gone so horribly wrong. At the end of that piece, I … Continue reading Stories of Dreams
Entropolitan 