We Do Not Live In A Society

We Need To Build One

Last week a video went viral of a woman at a playground in Rochester, Minnesota calling an autistic 5-year-old boy a n*****. When she was identified, instead of expressing contrition she doubled down, launching a fundraiser on GiveSendGo (a website touted as the “Christian” alternative to Go Fund Me) to “protect her family”. She has, as of this writing, raised over $700,000. Many of the donors have usernames like “Adolf”, “The fourteen words” and “Fig R Naggot”. It appears that in the United States in 2025, calling a little kid a slur is an infinite wealth hack. While the right wing lavishing morally repugnant people with money is nothing new, it does feel like a few short years ago conservatives would’ve felt pressure to condemn this. Not anymore. Not only are random internet Nazis making this woman rich, right wing pundits are expressing support for her. Something hideous that was always under the surface in the American political body has finally been unleashed, mask off, with no fear for consequences.

Since this story aired, I have been asking myself what kind of society we live in where something like this could happen. Where racists are completely unafraid to be racist and where you can get rich by being the most despicable type of person alive. Where sitting congressmen can openly call for Gaza to starve. Where attacking vulnerable trans kids can make you famous. The tenuous social fabric that we once had doesn’t actually seem to exist at all. There is no concept of a social contract. We don’t believe we have any responsibility to each other. We do not work together. We have no shared identity. We have no common goals. Simply put, we do not live in a society.

At the absolute baseline, living in a society requires certain things of you: cooperation, organization, commitment to shared objectives, understanding that you are a part of a community. What constitutes the collection of people in the United States in 2025 has none of that. There is no possible way to “have a society” when you have a large mass of people for whom violence, hate crimes, bigotry, cruelty, genocide, are outwardly praised, celebrated, and rewarded. You cannot have a social project that allows for the types of people who think it’s ok to murder someone based on their skin color, or to throw people in a concentration camp because of their place of birth. There is no way to create a community with people for whom someone else’s humanity is negotiable based on their inherent traits. And far from this being a tiny, insignificant and therefore irrelevant minority, these types are running the government, are running billion dollar companies, and are in charge of media empires.

While my political perspective is based entirely around focusing on systems and their effect on individuals rather the individuals themselves, and while I mostly think people are powerless compared to the systems they live under, there remains a question of what is to be done when you live in a country where, conservatively, 20% of the population or 60 million people are so violently anti-human that they make any collective project impossible. A country where murdering a homeless man on the subway, or saying the n word is a first class ticket to riches. The truth is that we may have seemed to overcome a lot of our sins during the time where this country elected a black president, being gay was no longer hidden from the cameras, and racism was openly shunned, but this all turned out the be a thin patina over fundamental contradictions that this country was founded on and that were never truly reckoned with. What we see now is in many ways what this country always was.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

While it is undeniable that people have been radicalized further into unapologetically racist, violent echo chambers, the only reason that this was even possible is because we never truly confronted our ugliness at the most fundamental level. This country has ping ponged back and forth between two parties that have no desire to get to the heart of the problem. One of them openly and actively using fear and division as a tactic to grow their support, the other relying on the optics of progress to give them some sort of identity while maintaining the same systems of inequality we were founded on. Neither representing an improvement in people’s material realities. While these two parties rotate in and out of power, our quality of life continues to erode. People get angrier and more divided and therefore easier to exploit. We get taught that rugged individualism is the American way. We get shamed for asking for help. It’s every man for himself. Is it any wonder that we ended up here?

We do not live in a society, if we ever did. There is simply no collective vision or mutual cooperation. The body populace has been outright neglected and left to fend for ourselves and we have reverted almost entirely to primitive tribalism. A plurality of the country thinks that they can only exist if it is at the expense of someone else, which is no mystery when the entire ruling class exists at the expense of us. There is no electoral outcome that can put this country back together and cure the 60 million or so who believe that they have some divine right to brutalize those who do not conform to their narrow definition of who is fully human.

The last time I remember us behaving anything like a society was during the aftermath of 9/11 when there seemed to be some sort of shared identity and people worked together and helped one another (although of course Muslims and Arabs were left out of this). Contrast that to the response to Covid-19. The brokenness of society was laid bare during this crisis. Instead of coming together to stamp out a deadly pandemic, there were armed invasions of state capitols for the right to get a haircut, there were people refusing to vaccinate or mask, there were whole industries that appeared overnight to exploit people’s paranoia around public health. It is clear that any upcoming crises we will face will only serve to entrench our division and make us easier to exploit and abuse.

The question then becomes, if you cannot expect to resolve this through elections, and if you have some 60 million or so people who make society impossible, what must we do? While I don’t believe people to be fundamentally irredeemable, my beliefs get tested daily under this system. The sheer number of people who are a danger to others in this country is overwhelming. The only way out, however, is through. We cannot just hope to put a Democrat in charge and suddenly all the vitriol and anger and festering rot at the heart of this country will disappear. There is no coming together with people who are anti-human at their core.

The only option we have left is to burn it down and salt the earth and bring something else into existence. We must radically reimagine what a free society looks like and if your right to incite hate is making the rest of us less free as a result. We must create systems and structures that reward cooperation and acceptance and exact a large social cost for the opposite. We must reeducate people out of their tribalistic hate, and be resolutely intolerant of intolerance. But this is only possible under a system that doesn’t benefit from our division. We live in a broken world, the broken people we are living amongst are a mere reflection of that. If we don’t have the courage to come together and create something else, we will ensure our own destruction at their hands. We must go to war for a future where this barbarism is not only unacceptable, but rare. Where there is no reward for inhumanity. If we want to live in a society, building one from scratch is our only hope.

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