We're balkanized & still ripe for fascism; How space projects can help

I voted for Biden, but one thing Trump did was postpone the disintigration of the United States via media balkanization. He was the only show in town, in every town, every week for the last five years. Only someone like Barack Obama had a need and ability to command that kind of national attention. It just occured to many of us that family gatherings we all looked forward to will not happen in the numbers or crowd sizes we anticipated, because, oh yeah, covid virus. This leaves us with elephant-sized vaccuum in our country.

While reporting a music story two years ago I happened upon this really humorous 2014 HuffPo article on the balkanization of popular music today. Its title, "Remember When the Music Didn’t Suck", is deceptive because it winds into something more profound than gripes about autotune and quantized drum beats. "Back in the 1980s, you may not have liked Thriller, but at least you knew Thriller," the author Galanty Miller said. He continued: "Today, the same can’t be said for Disclosure’s Latch, featuring Sam Smith with guest appearances by Ludacris and Kesha..."

I don't know if I can say Trump was a fascist. We can all agree that our technology growth spurt upended social rituals that left many exposed. Change is exciting, but more on that later.

Miller, the humorist who wrote in HuffPo, analyzed popular music to introduce a late 19th-century philosophy PLEASE DON'T CLICK AWAY THIS IS LESS BORING THAN YOU EXPECT called "anomie".

In 1893, famous French sociologist Emile Durkheim- who, coincidentally, later changed his name to Right Said Fred and had a smash hit in 1991 with I’m Too Sexy- wrote about a dangerous social condition that he referred to as anomie. Anomie is a breakdown of social institutions, or the foundations which guide society and provide a “collective conscience” for individuals. In other words, even though we’re all different, we’re socialized to understand bigger concepts, like Family and Education and Culture. These concepts are necessary in maintaining a nation’s orderly flow. A collective conscience means, in the bigger picture, we all think more or less the same, which is good because life would be too confusing if we all spoke a different language and we don’t want kids bringing guns to school. Our collective conscience combats the social chaos that leads to violence, political anarchy, and cronuts.

Today, America is experiencing a musical anomie.

Climate change, the virus, we're positioned to handle those problems because the blueprints to solve them exist. What we lack is a social cohesion. Which isn't fatal in the short-term. But it would be great if we could all look together towards the sky to distract us from our differences. It can be dangerous when ambition has no outlet. Which brings us back to anomie. The Wikipedia entry on anomie says its original philosopher, Emile Durkheim "never used the term normlessness;[5] rather, he described anomie as 'derangement,' and 'an insatiable will.'"

As for fights about inequality in the costs of higher education and healthcare, there apparently exists a concept that informed democracies founded after America's; the concept envelops "negative rights and positive rights". And negative rights/positive rights needs more exploration, really more oxygen, because I'm pretty well informed and the first I heard of it was last week's March Maron podcast where he interviews playright Heidi Shreck*.

And there is so much to do right now, because I've never read Carl Sagan or watched his PBS special but he said something in "Cosmos" that convinced my coworker John S. so totally that John S. shifted me from anti-NASA to exremely pro-NASA in one conversation during 1999, a time I was a partisan Democrat.




This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.