America is living in an era of fragmentation, and something has gone terribly wrong in our society on our way to that era. We celebrate vulgarity, lies, and anger, and more often than not prop up the people who perpetuate it.
How did this happen? Why are more and more of our elected officials behaving as though they just emerged from a fight scene between Kim and Kourtney Kardashian? In truth, a lot of us aren’t OK with it.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt said it all started in 2012 when Mark Zuckerberg was preparing for Facebook to go public. He wrote to his investors that that moment marked a tipping point in society that he hoped would “rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”
Haidt wrote in an essay that “Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected.”
We used to cling to positive forces that bind us together, such as fraternal organizations that build social capital and strong and trustworthy institutions that used to be run from our hometowns, not from thousands of miles away by elites who know little about the communities they were supposed to serve.
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