LA is where we were always headed. The US was never the country you thought you knew. Even the people who hate America misunderstand it. We are just catching up to the fact that we're an impossibly decadent country with the wrong priorities everywhere at home and abroad, a late civilization exhausted of fulfilling the responsibilities it takes to be functional, long overdue for a crash landing that makes the Civil War look civil, and all of us complicit in our various ways, exhibiting an astonishing lack of humility before processes of history and human nature so much bigger than us all. I could elucidate the ways I think that's true, but you don't want to read them. It'll just get you mad and longtime readers will know them exactly already. Will the worst happen? Well, the US has been so lucky so far that I suppose there's still a chance we'll pull it out but it will take very different ways of thinking than we're currently prepared to do.
Europe underwent all of this and far worse than what we've endured yet. Look up it's great 20th century antitotalitarian thinkers who thought through these problems as they lived them, and when you have time, read them: Orwell, Arendt, Camus, Berlin, Aron, Koestler, Hoffer, Canetti, Havel, Milosz, Dangerfield, Croce, Kraus, Havel, Michnik, Kovaly, Solzhenitsyn, P. Levi, Sperber, Spence, Shire, Hilberg, Wilson, N Mandelstam, Yoshimi, Tansman, Czapski, Serge, Tsvetaeva, Bialoszewski, Psychoundakis, Fondane, Ledig, ... Fiction writers like the Mann family, Kafka, V. Grossman, Pasternak, NaWeight, J. Roth, Kundera, Stoppard, Musil, Broch, Bradbury, Borges, Nemirovsky, Remarque, Zweig, Capek, Huxley, Grass,Kadare, Lem, Mahfouz, Oe, Achebe, Tisma,Dismantle, Rezzori, Valle-Inclan, GGM, MVL, Pavese, Sciascia, Krzhizhanovsky, Bastos, Bellow, Szabo, Teffi, Baum, Pekic, Shalamov, Malaparte, Kempowski, Doblin, the Singer family. Read them now, or at least read the wikipedia summaries. Finding their books may be harder in the future.
But the problem is that this will not even be the future's biggest issue. Global warming and AI can cause an unprecedented level of chaos. The planet itself may betray us because we've betrayed it. AI will speed up the collapse of our reliance on knowledge that the internet and 24 hour news already began, and from that can arise an unprecedented level of totalitarianism. The thinkers and leaders who can show us the path through all that will only reveal themselves when the challenges reveal themselves.
The basic state of the world is neither war nor peace. It's conflict: tension between different people who can't help but want different things. That doesn't mean both sides are equally right, that doesn't mean that one side is right at all about certain things, and it certainly doesnt mean you should assume everybody's operating in good faith. But the world is a process where conflicts eventually do battle, then resolve, and then the resolution creates new conflicts.
The world is worth saving. Life is worth living. Our loved ones are worth loving. But the fact that survival is never guaranteed is the reason for all that. Were there no conflict, all this would be meaningless. It's through conflict that we perceive the value of those moments holding conflict's absence, But if conflict is absent for too long, the human mind creates conflicts. Search your life stories, we're programmed that way.
Many of us will make it to the other side, likely more than most of us, but the more ready we are, the more knowledge we have, the more of us can be saved.
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