We are at a serious transition in America. There is legitimate fear that our democracy will give way to autocracy.
Let me tell you a couple of stories to start working through this concern.
I was at a family gathering the other night, and the subject turned to the work my dentist was doing on my teeth. Half the room believed the dentist was making up stuff about the work that needed to be done. When I challenged them on not possibly knowing more than the dentist, they automatically went to their iPhones to come up with articles and viewpoints on why they did know at least as much as my dentist. It kind of felt like an intervention on my teeth.
Then the subject turned to COVID vaccinations. Again part of the room was deeply suspicious about the reasons a public pandemic was being solved by private companies. Government agencies were interested in helping the individual, but private companies were interested in creating a profit. That, according to some members of my family, was the reason not to get the vaccinations. I said I have my vaccinations plus a booster. Silence fell over the room. “What?” I said. Again everyone went to their iPhones and started looking up information about Covid (I guess). Then all at once as many opinions as people in the room started spouting studies about why I should not have gotten the vaccination. The general consensus was I was making it possible for the virus to mutate and infect the unvaccinated. At least half, if not more, refuse to be vaccinated.
. . . and so the intervention continued, but this time it was why I should not have gotten the vaccination.
However, somewhere during the evening it dawned on me I was witnessing at a micro family level what was going on at a macro national level. It’s the deconstruction of the common norms that make up everyday life in America.
I will be honest, I’m not sure I understand the reasons for pulling out the shibboleths that hold our present society together. But it’s happening.
I’m going to take a wild guess why this might be happening. I’m going to try and get underneath the cacophony of flying words to see if there is a common engine driving all this.
I’m going to start out with the following hypothesis:
Digital communication has produced platforms that speed up the distribution of information, which makes it impossible for traditional intermediaries to filter what individuals receive.
Thus individuals are left to interpret what information means. Information is captured and interpreted by each individual first, before it can go through an editing process by traditional media sources.
Newspapers, television, schools, churches, etc. cannot keep up with the rate at which each individual receives and translates information.
All is now atomized. It is subject to the personal interpretation each of us places on the information that flows directly to our brains. This results in an infinite number of personal reactions to the infinite number of 1’s and 0’s (i.e. digitized information) bombarding the infinite number of synapses in our individual brains.
This cannot help but cause thousands of micro revolutions we are now experiencing in America.
How does this differ from past revolutions like the Reformation, The Enlightenment, and The Sixties? Information comes to each individual unvarnished with ever increasing speed and immediacy, which will continue to increase in velocity for the foreseeable future.
What then unites America where each person is acting as their own personal democracy? Logically, one might conclude that democracy should be replaced with autocracy so that order can replace what seems to be growing chaos. But this apparent logic falls short in the face of more sound logic. If each person’s private democracy is built on information, information will yield to paths of newer and better democracy. Increased information in a democracy merely leads to more information which leads to more democracy, not less.