https://eand.co/why-were-underestimating-american-collapse-be04d9e55235
Click on the above link to Eudaimonia’s site for this – perceptive, insightful and scarily accurate from where we are looking – piece by Umair Haque, on the cultural pathologies of the current US situation, and what this means for the rest of us…. The writer knows many Americans who would get or share the perspectives Umair offers, and who do what they can. And we need something more connected and cohesive at this point, not only in the U.S. but in our wider human picture.
“Seen accurately, American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel. And because the mess that America has made of itself, then, is so especially unique, so singular, so perversely special — the treatment will have to be novel, too. The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics. It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes. That is why our narratives, frames, and theories cannot really capture it — much less explain it. We need a whole new language — and a new way of seeing — to even begin to make sense of it.
But that is America’s task, not the world’s. The world’s task is this. Should the world follow the American model — extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue — then these new social pathologies will follow, too. They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.”
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