As I read Briskettexan's posts and others who have either given up hope for our political institutions or way of life or are almost there and I read a statement by Biden yesterday in Buffalo with the families of the tragic hate crime, and I've been considering the language used.
Biden said, and I'll quote him here, "“American experiment in democracy is in danger like it hasn’t been in my lifetime.”
We are implicitly acknowledging that what America is trying to do, in breadth and scope and sheer complexity, is an experiment. How many times have we used or heard that word in relation to the unique American motion of integrating politics, rights, people, business, freedoms, etc.?
Experiments have a reasonable expectation of failure. That is why we engage with them, to see if things work because we don't know the answer beforehand.
I guess what I'm saying is, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that our experiment might have worked when easier managed with a lower complexity of a smaller population size, a more homogenous group of people with more homogenous north star values. When opening up the aperture, our experiment might be too overloaded and fail at scale.
And failure in experimentation is okay. Trial and error are necessary. After all that is why we experiment. The risk and the problem is if we fail and we don't have any Plan B's or other hypothesis to test that could be better, which I think is where the doomscrollers should focus the conversation.