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The Great Divide
How humanity could split into two distinct groups
Most readers, familiar with the endless sensationalism of the mass media and the inevitable political polarization that democracy engenders, may assume the title of this article refers to the far-right/far-left divisions that plague us today. As the USA descends into civil chaos and the UK eagerly follows; as France gets not one but two neofascist candidates for the next Presidential election; as the world in general becomes more far-right authoritarian; and as neurotic lefty-trendy darlings virtue-signal ever more stridently over pronouns and extreme edge-cases, it’s pretty clear that we’re at the end of our accidental experiment with representative democracy.
But what if the really important trend isn’t infantile squabbling over how best to harvest votes from the millions of ignorant credulous citizens who can be duped by a three-word soundbite? What if the really significant trend is going unnoticed in front of our very eyes?
This is the hypothesis to be explored within this article. It’s not a prediction of the future, for I rather suspect we’ll undermine our societies to the point where today’s conditions no longer pertain and we shall be thrust back into a semi-reprise of the Medieval period. Instead, it’s a thought experiment intended to help us consider the near-term social…
