New World, Old Institutions: Why We’re Trapped In A Systemic Cycle

How and why tribalism distracts us from the institutional failures of education, media, and government

As we move into 2026, it’s hard to imagine where we were just six years ago, at the start of the decade. Since then, an internationally life-changing pandemic, tumultuous political chaos and effects that feel impossible to reverse, and the quick and controversial rise of AI that will apparently change the world forever have easily become the defining markers of the increasingly unpredictable 2020s.

In this relatively short time, we’ve entered what feels like a completely new world. And yet, our institutions for educating ourselves, understanding our reality, and governing our society are still the same — unchanging and refusing reform.

We’re officially closer to 2030 than to 2020, and over a quarter way through the century. It feels like we’re already late to the game, and there are some massive societal shifts on the horizon we haven’t caught up to. But whether that’s for the better or worse is entirely up to us.

2025 Word of the Year: Scapegoat

If 2025 had a word of the year, it might be scapegoat. But the current trends in our world aren’t necessarily new.

Tribalism has existed for more centuries than most people can imagine. Whether it’s racism, which was created to justify imperialism, or religious warfare, also created to justify imperialism, or even ethnic/regional/tribal division utilized to justify conquest, power, and yes, imperialism, humans have been choosing their tribes before thought and scapegoating each other forever.¹

But how does this manifest in today’s terms? Before we dive into our institutions, let’s first take a look at three ways in which we’re trapped in the cycle of tribalism.

Generational Divides

Repeated Boomerization

Over the course of 2025, I saw a myriad of incendiary headlines meant to generate engagement above all else, and one of the most common threads was the generational divide headline.

Apart from your typical blame-game headlines about how “Gen Z Doesn’t Want To Work,” a lot of these headlines were geared at creating a gap specifically between Gen Z and millennials, such as:

“Gen Z thinks Millennials Should Stop Using Lol” — which successfully triggered masses of millennials in the comments claiming their right to say whatever they want, thus taking the bait set by the “journalist” that found a single random twitter user with 3 likes who was actually responding to a millennial on twitter attacking Gen Z;

And “Why Gen Z thinks Millennials are Cringe” — which was a video of millennials going up to their Gen Z coworkers and asking this for social media views.

Now, before I get into why this is actually important, I should preface this by saying I don’t like generational terms at all. This isn’t some defense of Gen Z from someone in that generation. In fact, I resent such an identification. When I think Gen Z, I think my high school age brother who grew up on screens. We are NOT the same.

But nor am I a millennial because of my birth year, and also because there really is some weird sort of boomerization going on with this group that I couldn’t possibly identify with (despite also growing up with VHS).

That’s because the cycle of the old system has begun again as millennials are currently falling for the age old “blame the wains” trope that they were once victims of themselves. And just as Gen Z criticizes millennials in return for having it easier than them, the same is said by and about every generation all the way back to the boomers.

This is because a tribal response is easy. Through social conditioning, people are used to these generational labels as definitive standards. We think of a boomer as someone in their 50s or 60s who had it easy, a millennial as a young and rebellious 20- or 30-something, Gen Z as the dumb kids still in school, and Gen X as their 40-something parents?

Even though the point of generations is to identify who went through what major societal trends, shifts, and events growing up, all they really manage to do is pinpoint some type of personality association (i.e. Boomers = old and out of touch, Millennials = young and cringe, Gen Z = younger and entitled).²

If anything, we should be going by what decade influenced us as kids, teens, young adults, and older. It’s much easier to conceptualize that a 90s kid lived in an analog world while a 2000s kid lived the transition from analog to digital.

It’s much more valuable to think about how different a 2010s high schooler and a 2020s high schooler might be experiencing education. And it’s undeniably more effective to note that a 2020s college grad is dealing with a completely unprecedented job market and economic shift that they were not prepared for.

Only when we organize it like this can we see the patterns and trends that collectively effect multiple groups all at once.

The Shared Economic Reality

The truth is, both millennials and their Gen Z coworkers are dealing with the same problems right now that the generations before them didn’t have because the world has completely changed since the 70s and 80s, before either generation was born.

This includes extreme difficulty getting and keeping jobs, finding affordable housing or even attempting to save up to buy a home, and in general building the life we were promised if we just committed to a strong K-12 showing and college education.

Meanwhile, Gen X did the thing — they got the jobs, they raised the kids, put them through college and held onto their houses. But no one talks about how they’re dealing with problems of their own that stem from the same place. They may not have to worry about saving up for a home, but job loss, retirement funds, and supporting kids who are getting screwed out in the world are all part of the typical Gen X day.

Yet somehow society is trying to convince everyone that the problem is how young people don’t want to work or they complain too much or they spend money on useless things, instead of the fact that society has changed rapidly before our eyes, exposing structural issues that the most affected groups are speaking up about.

In other words, young people don’t like ridiculously low pay and workplace abuse normalized by previous generations.

But wait — it actually wasn’t normalized by previous generations.

American workers used to have much better collective bargaining power, much better unionizing, and much better political support against corporate lobbying and insurmountable CEO pay packages. That all changed in the 80s with the Reagan administration.

While the standards for work and workplace standards have undoubtedly continued to change as we defined new protections and expectations for the treatment of workers and human beings in general (this includes discrimination policies and workplace harassment, for instance), what has also changed is the power these workplaces and their CEOs have compared to the average worker to enforce or ignore these new expectations.

For one, it’s so difficult to get a job at all now that it doesn’t even make sense to speak out against a toxic work environment when you finally manage to secure one. When you don’t want to be unemployed, it’s too big a risk to ask your boss to stop making you constantly put in extra hours when you physically and mentally can’t handle it. At some point, even low pay is better than no pay.

For the current generation, many are tired of a highly imbalanced work-life day-to-day but can’t always do anything about it. One popular option is that many young people elect to move back home to save money from not having to pay ridiculous sums in rent while they work, look for jobs, attend grad school, and more.

But for older generations, they’re the parents with the homes their kids are moving back into, and as they themselves struggle to hang onto their jobs or are forced to embark on job hunts of their own while their finances deplete, what can they do but hope their kids will find stability and be set for life as soon as possible?

After all, they put these kids through college for that very reason.

Only, that Bachelor’s degree and the years of experience has become the standard because the rest of their generation did the same with their kids, so now everyone going out for such jobs has similar resumes.

And thus, they all remain unemployed.

It’s not the fault of young people for doing what they were told — studying hard in school and getting their degree only to come face to face with a world that looks wildly different than their parents’ world. They’re just unluckily in the hot seat as unprecedented change sweeps through society.

This inability to thrive the way previous generations did at their age reveals several extremely flawed and broken institutions that need a serious overhaul. The complaints about “kids these days” isn’t new, but somehow we’re still trapped in this cycle instead of finding a way to break it and actually move forward from what is just a distraction from having to reform old institutions that actually affect us all, regardless of age.

Politics

The Goal of Partisan Politics

As much as I don’t care for the generational divides, I care significantly less for political divides. Make no mistake — this is not a “both sides equally bad” sort of argument. (I think it’s pretty obvious one side is infinitely worse than the other.)

But why do we even have sides?

That’s a whole article unto itself, but when the founding fathers warned about political parties, even they couldn’t imagine the clown show it would eventually become.

Parties are the ultimate signals of identity and therefore scapegoats. If we specifically look at the right, it becomes very obvious why there’s comfort in such identification. Right-wing politics has a long history of scapegoating, particularly since the Nixon campaign’s 1960s Southern Strategy aimed at winning voters by turning lower class white Americans against their POC counterparts.

And we’re seeing it at new heights today, most likely because it’s seriously working. Currently, immigrants are to blame for economic issues, even though the truth is immigrants actually benefit this country and have done so for quite some time.³

But who among the target voting demographic of the right has done the research to see that this is the case?

When politicians offer such easy solutions by scapegoating either the other party or certain demographics to easily prejudiced individuals; when citizens of poor red states with a lack of education and a hard day’s work for little pay are offered a quick promise without having to dedicate time and energy they don’t have to studying history and economics; when corporations have the money to fund certain campaigns that can focus on hitting their opponents hard while hiding who’s in their pocket — then suddenly it’s not difficult to understand why the Republican party is so successful.

Keep in mind, however, that not too long ago, the parties were actually completely opposite to how they are now.

A Quick History of the Two Parties

In a post Civil War era, the newly minted Republican party behind Lincoln’s efforts not only kept the union together, but also grew richer as the winners of the war, and this led the party down a more conservative path with more pro big business politicians. Teddy Roosevelt was an exception, but even he had to eventually create his own party when successor Taft was too conservative for his liking.⁴

This famously split Republican votes, giving the win to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a deeply racist man who hated civil rights. And yet, while Roosevelt, both a proponent of civil rights and extremely anti-trust, was actually pro-imperialism, Wilson was staunchly anti-imperialist in a way that most people today would actually appreciate. He believed in the self-determination of peoples abroad rather than US intervention to directly shape other nations.

The Democrats actually long held an anti-imperialist platform, most prominently exercised around the turn of the century, when the US colonized the Philippines.

While Republicans believed that imperialism would be good for the economy and Roosevelt himself convinced Americans that the war was justified because they were civilizing savages, Democrats didn’t want American dollars going abroad and wanted to prevent immigration and citizenship that would disrupt labor and corrupt the American identity, in their xenophobic eyes.

If you think about the origins of the Democratic party, this isn’t surprising. Founder Andrew Jackson wanted to champion the common man. As president, he cracked down on the Second Bank of the US because it would benefit the rich at the expense of everyone else.

Quite famously, however, Jackson is also responsible for mandating the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans after narrowly beating out the opposing party’s John Quincy Adams, who deeply criticized these actions as sinful. Yet even Adams wanted to move natives to a different land — he just wanted to do it “legally.”

As you can see, partisan politics have constantly shifted because parties are only defined as being in opposition to each other.

When Democrat FDR created the New Deal following the Depression, the pro-big business Republican party that had caused the crash to begin with pushed against his actions, leading many Americans to come scarily close to embracing fascism — ironically prevented by America’s entry into the second World War.

Yet, the Democratic party was still divided on the issue of civil rights, and despite FDR and Truman’s efforts, it was extremely difficult to get legislation past the their party full of segregationists. It was only when Republican Eisenhower came into office and appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice did we finally start to see landmark cases such as Brown v. Board of Education.

Eisenhower wasn’t some massive proponent of civil rights or anything, and it certainly wasn’t a major platform for the party, especially after Truman and the DNC’s choice of civil rights as a major party platform led to a walkout by southern Democrats. But Eisenhower was caught between a war where many POC fought under the American banner as he did, and the threat of communism against democracy.

So once again, on an international scale, partisan politics didn’t really mean much. In fact, we eventually came up on the complete flip with the work of LBJ that angered white Americans, which then gave a platform to Richard Nixon, as he employed a campaign strategy known formally as the “Southern Strategy” and more colloquially as “racism” to win over such voters.

Additionally, through his heavy criticism of LBJ’s inability to resolve the Vietnam problem, he offered himself up as the new solution to Americans who were fed up with the situation, and when public pressure eventually contributed to LBJ choosing not to run again at the last second in order to preserve public peace and find a solution outside the political game, Nixon had damaged the reputation of the Democratic party enough to swoop in and take the win.

Of course, no one remembered that Nixon himself served as VP to Eisenhower, who was largely responsible for getting the US involved in Vietnam anyway, in an attempt to follow Truman’s doctrine of preventing the domino effect of communism (which Truman initialized with Korea), and to support their World War ally France, who had formerly colonized the region as French Indochina. Eisenhower himself had also planned the famous rescue operation of Normandy, France.

All presidents from Truman through LBJ followed the doctrine set down by Truman, and no president wanted to be the one to lose to communism until Nixon lucked out, when his (not first) campaign for the presidency lined up perfectly with the dissent of the American public.

This era really cemented the Democratic party as pro civil rights and the Republican party as…anti-war? Well, not exactly, but that’s why they call it political theater.

In fact, remember when we started digging through all this, we talked about Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s belief that America should promote democracy without directly interfering abroad while resenting civil rights, and yet external factors such as the depression, the second World War, and the rise of the Soviet Union would lead his Democrat successors to flip the two completely.

However, Wilson himself had not lived to see any of this, so who knows if his beliefs might have changed? And this is the point. Why are we still relying on parties to define our politics, when not only do they not represent us, but they also constantly change based on the world and each other?

This same partisan narrative is baked into every racial, ethnic, regional, and nationalist tribalism, because it’s much easier to invent opposition than address the root problems that affect us all.

Art and Culture Discourse

After all that heavy political history discourse, you might wonder why the arts have any relevance or significance here. But I’d argue that this field is one of the most visible and important areas of tribal division we’re seeing right now.

The Value of Art and Culture

Culture is literally the social representation of humanity at a particular time in history. It is the vehicle through which humanity functions. Who are we without our culture? The arts — including literature, film, music, and beyond — have the power to inform, build empathy, and tell stories, which are fundamental to human beings. Telling a story is how humans communicate who we are, what we stand for, and what matters.

And yet, instead of being the foundation and representation of our humanity, culture has become another arena for tribal battle.

Remember in the first Hunger Games film when the districts were too preoccupied with rooting for their own tributes to win against the other districts’ tributes to notice that no matter how fancy their tributes looked on screen, they were still gonna die and the cycle would repeat again next year?

This is why it’s important to engage critically with art/entertainment/culture. In the context of that film, the actual Hunger Games was supposed to be entertainment and penance. No one took it beyond face value — it was simply accepted as the norm until our main characters came along and changed the game (literally).

In the context of our society, engaging critically with this film beyond simply the spectacle of this dystopian world and the survival games allows us to see how it represents our own world.

Unfortunately, people don’t understand that what they see on screen actually matters, or means something, or represents the state of our society at large. The same goes for any art or media they consume. We currently live in a society where the only purpose of art is to mark our identity with which tribe we associate with.

This influences how people engage with culture as a whole. Rather than taking the time and energy to think deeply about something, most people judge a piece of art based on their chosen tribe. They don’t even have to think about fitting in — it becomes second nature, a learned habit to think this way.

For some people, that means liking the popular thing their neighbors and colleagues are talking about. For others, that means only liking niche things, or “serious” things.

There are film fans and TV fans who care only about awards contenders, and music fans who only value the aesthetic of their chosen celebrity.

People are watching TV, reading books, and consuming art in a way where anyone who challenges their status quo must have “TikTok brain” or, conversely, “hates fun.”

And these are just two instances of rhetoric used in typical intertribal discourse.

Maybe the reverse is thinking that people only want “fun” and not “serious” art, or that anything “serious” must inherently be pretentious.

Such back and forth narratives on art really reveal a serious lack of media literacy across the board. Our relationship with culture is not about actually engaging with the material, and conversations about media are generally not more than defending your team, and therefore your status quo.

The False Meritocracy

This tribalism is reinforced by a false meritocracy that exists beyond just art. If a work wins an award, it must be good because experts said so. If a song tops the charts, it must be good enough to reach so many people. If this book is more popular than that book, then it must be better — or, conversely, it must be worse depending on which tribe you ask.

In fact, when our tribe isn’t winning, suddenly we become aware of reality — the campaigning that goes into awards, the marketing and other more questionable tactics that get songs onto the charts, and the social conditioning of readers that elevates certain books over others.

However, as the pendulum always swings from one extreme to the other, this can then convince people that something with merit actually has none, when really, it’s because that thing with merit isn’t part of their tribe.

There are also many social structures in place that support the meritocratic illusion, such as patriarchy and white supremacy, and when we can’t recognize the role these structures play in art and culture, we can’t recognize it in society either. Because art reflects society and society reflects art, there’s a responsibility to engage thoughtfully with media — and to create thoughtful media in return.

We can really see this in representation discourse. Often people can’t understand why representation in media, entertainment, and any other such field is important. They can’t understand why visibility matters because they don’t understand why art and culture matters.

If I were to mention, for instance, that Asian people are very rarely seen in Hollywood, the typical response is generally something like, “Well, there aren’t white people in Asian movies” or “just go watch foreign movies” or “there aren’t as many Asian people in America so representation doesn’t matter.”

Such arguments stem from an inability to see the stories of Asian people, in this example, and any other group of people unlike themselves as not relevant to them. When you choose not to engage in the stories of what you perceive as an entire tribe, that is inherently an act of dehumanization.

This is why representation matters, and this is why art and storytelling and media all matter. When people are simply exposed to other people who look different from them but are just as human as they are, when they recognize emotions in situations they’ve never lived, when they get accustomed to the existence of those outside their immediate circles — then their understanding of humanity can grow.

Art and culture are bridges that can build empathy, expand knowledge, and bring people closer together. They can also do the complete opposite. Most people don’t recognize either power because we are not taught to value art. More than anything, we’re actively taught not to value it.

We’re told it’s just entertainment, or aesthetic, not a vehicle for understanding and engaging with our world. And thus, our ability to engage critically with and navigate our own realities weaken entirely. When we can’t think about art and culture, how can we think about the narratives that shape our society when these are all intertwined?

This is an article for another day, but if there was ever a tribal discourse that changed the world for the worse, it’s the STEM vs humanities/arts divide. The push for STEM has led our society to internalize the idea of hard sciences, math, tech, engineering, etc. as the only valuable subjects (because they can get you jobs) while humanities and arts are considered useless.

That mindset has led us to a society that doesn’t value human beings beyond their productivity, one where critical thinking and empathy are no longer required.

Art and culture should help us expand our understanding of our own lives as well as the lives of others, but because these aspects of human society are so undervalued, they become yet another area for people to perform an identity rather than think.

Tribalism is a Symptom

What do tribal narratives such as generational blame games, modern politics, and the state of cultural engagement reveal about how our systems have been failing us for a long time? Across all areas of tribal discourse, it becomes clear that humans right now are not built to function in society, and we never have been. We’re only built to survive.

The Failing Institutions

The main institutions causing these issues today are education, media, and political economy. But these structures and all the problems that come with them didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. There have been some major changes in the world that not only exposed these failures, but also exacerbated them to unprecedented heights.

What Changed

The most glaring of these is obviously technology. Just twenty years ago, social media was barely a thing. Even the internet wasn’t that widespread. Sure, everyone used it, but now you can access the entire planet from your pocket.

Never before have humans been able to see so much of the world, and in such a disorganized, overwhelming way. There are so many circles and so much content, and I think it’s safe to say none of us is really equipped to handle and process this constant flood of information.

This reveals a lot about the communication and critical thinking skills we’re taught (or not) in school. We’re conditioned to crave the simplicity of mindless scrolling over thoughtful action, or as I mentioned before, tribal narratives over any thought, period.

Our problems really became clear at the turn of the decade when the mere political, economic, and social response to the pandemic exposed that the world, and especially the U.S., was not prepared to handle a problem of this scale.

It exposed our government’s inefficacy, a broken international supply chain, and downright ignorance and defiance from the public. It elevated the importance of social media in our lives to new heights. And it undeniably changed our relationship to work, revealing a world where we can actually better manage a work-life balance when uninhibited by commutes and office confinement.

We realized how our lives would be so much better and more productive if we could all get up from our home office to go to the doctor, make fresh lunch, pick up the kids, and even have the comfort of our own bathrooms in the middle of a work day.

Of course, not everyone had that luxury. I know that I was clocking in as a pharmacy tech at CVS for 30-40 hours a week, often running COVID tests. But now the advent of AI has also opened up our minds to the question of what kind of jobs and tasks we actually do and don’t want to be doing and how we want to be spending our time.

Unfortunately, because of how our society is structured, business models in the tech industry are geared towards jumping on trends and constantly innovating to win some race instead of thinking carefully about how new tech like AI can be genuinely helpful so that humans can progress further as individuals, and what skills humans need to hold onto or build for themselves.

But as we can see, our world is not built to handle new changes with effectiveness and thought. Right now, our economy is worse than it’s been in a long time. Everything is SO expensive — food, rent, gas, and everything else we can’t live without. Our lives revolve around work and saving money, and it feels like we’re going backwards.

However, none of this is surprising when you consider that this is exactly how our education system was designed in the first place.

Education

Education is at the root of it all. For decades, society has pushed a direct correlation between schooling and employment. At one point, certain kinds of jobs for the average person started requiring a high school diploma. As graduating high school became the norm, the bachelor’s degree became the new baseline, supposedly ensuring that jobs would come knocking.

But now, even specializing in one field since tenth grade, doing several internships, and getting your degree isn’t enough to qualify for a decent paying full-time job anymore. The struggle to find or keep work today, even for those in their 40s and 50s, reveals that our education system has always been flawed.

The American K–12 education system is structured first and foremost to funnel students into college or work. Current American schooling is not structured to help students learn and understand more about themselves, their society, and the world around them. People are only learning to pass the class, get the grade, and move onto the next level.

But once they reach that final level and they have that job, suddenly the real world starts to catch up. The education system requires over-specialization in particular fields, which only leads to a surplus of workers, not citizens.

Most importantly, students are not being encouraged to even want to think. This past year, I’ve seen a lot of headlines about students using AI, and after complaining about it online, many teachers and college professors are implementing tools like AI detectors, in-class hand-written essays, and oral exams.

This kind of solution, unfortunately, is just putting a Band-Aid on a burst pipe. Back in my day, I remember drowning in homework and extracurriculars with no time left to figure out who I was because I had to get the grades and get into college and eventually get the job.

I would use tools like SparkNotes in place of actually reading an assigned book if it didn’t seem interesting to me — which was certainly more work and more accurate than plugging a prompt into a chatbot — but the problem was the exact same. I didn’t want to do it, and usually, I didn’t have the time.

Only on the rarest of occasions did I actually feel engaged in an assignment, and that includes college. While most of college, again, was about meeting the requirements and moving on, the classes that ultimately had the most impact were those where the relevance of the material was clear.

These were the courses that actually make me want to show up because the professors actually knew how to make the topics engaging and designed lectures, discussions, and assignments in a way that made me want to participate and feel like I was actually getting something out of them.

That is what education is supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be engaging, not a requirement to get employed. If people aren’t growing up wanting to learn, they won’t want to think either.

Forcing students to give an oral history about the American presidents so they’re not using AI is about as useful of an assignment as my 10th grade presidents’ assignment, where we had to list 4 things each president did in each term by looking it up online. It left absolutely no impact on any of us, and everything I know now about American history is either basics from previous years (like the Articles of Confederacy) or my own studies.

That’s not to say all schooling is useless. Strangely enough, some of the most useful things I remember were from elementary school: the concept of sample size; independent, dependent, and constant variables; and the three branches of government. Some classes are able to at least teach students to participate in discussion and maybe the basics of analyzing a text.

But if we ask ourselves why students are using AI, it’s because society puts major pressure on getting grades and passing in schools over actually wanting to think and learn. An inability to think critically leads to a lack of media literacy, which leads to people holding tightly to tribes so they don’t have to think at all — the same way students use AI to do their work for them. This is all because society teaches us not to value thought, but to value motion.

Disinformation, echo chambers, and bloated 9-to-5 schedules keep people from engaging thoughtfully with society as adults, and no one cares or has the time to re-educate. How many people are even thinking about what they learned in school if it doesn’t have any connection with their college major and current job?

Not only is it important for everyone to have a base level understanding of reading comprehension, history, human biology, and so on — in addition to fostering creativity and critical thinking — but it’s also important for people to recognize why they need to learn any of these things, and how they apply in the real world.

This is probably where we lack the most. Education should never have been about job prep, but always about how to function as a human being in the current world. That includes thought, interdisciplinary knowledge, and empathy, but above all, the ability to put all of that into daily practice.

Without good education, everything else falls apart. If we don’t have the skills needed to navigate modern reality, then we are not fully functional human beings that can engage with media, with society and other individuals, and with the world at large in a meaningful and thoughtful way.

Media

The next failing system is media, which includes news media, social media, books, TV shows, music, movies — literally anything that allows us to communicate with each other and the world or perceive each other and the world is part of this group.

Media is the primary lens through which we understand reality and experience the world around us beyond direct human-to-human interactions. But when that lens is warped, exacerbated by a lack of media literacy, we end up with a society trapped in narratives, propaganda, and performance. And therefore, we lose the ability to really understand each other.

This creates the perfect breeding ground for tribalism.

Again, the issues with our media landscape didn’t just become a problem in the modern age. If you remember the days of “yellow journalism,” for instance, sensationalism has always been the priority for media. But the overwhelming access to information in the age of the internet and social media reveals that humans were never prepared to digest this and that our media systems don’t work to help society.

They’re only designed to grab attention, just like newspapers and headlines. Attention is the most important currency right now, and it has trained people to be reactive and quick instead of deep thinkers.

Just as education is not about learning, media manufacturing and consumption is not about the media. It’s about fast output and high engagement. Beyond simply getting someone to click your article or buy your music, the goal is also to generate discourse that makes you stay in people’s heads longer than they can scroll past.

Books are written to satisfy the TikTok trends celebrated by anti-intellectual readers or cater to the pseudo-intellectuals who build their brand through the seriousness of what they read. Movies and TV shows are crafted to appeal to social media users who will spread the content and to awards show fanatics who will debate merit into the dust. And music is made as part of an artist’s branding to garner a fandom that buys products and tickets.

Media works by catering to or dividing tribes, and if you understand how fandom works, then you understand how media is made. In fact, most people will rely on other people to tell them how and what to think.

Influencers, reviewers, news platforms, popular posts on social media, and even their own friends and family — who themselves are subject to external influence — are now in charge of how people interact with the world.

Media consumption has essentially become identity-based, and it leads to people genuinely living in completely different realities from each other. Exacerbated by social media, everyone is constantly overstimulated with all sorts of content, and at that point, what is easier than sticking with what you already know?

Beliefs, opinions, and thoughts are all learned from tribal status quos and not developed through actual contemplation. People perform deep thought, often very publicly to prove their point, but there’s really nothing underneath the surface.

And because of the way media works, it’s a never-ending cycle of the blind leading the blind.

When education prioritizes climbing ladders, people can’t read the news, understand a TV show, or evaluate the content of a YouTube video — and they certainly can’t explain why any of this is actually important. They can’t see how news travels or that TV shows represent society at the time or that YouTube content is made for clicks.

All media should help us better understand and engage with the world, connect with others, and navigate reality, but instead they contribute to confusion, outrage, and exhaustion because people haven’t learned how to engage with these things and what to do once they have.

The only way to force all kinds of media to be better, to fix a system that rewards terrible content or attention-seeking behavior and drives the production and consumption of incendiary content, is to be aware of it in the first place.

If we can’t spend even three seconds thinking about whether that headline is misleading, whether that show missed the mark (and why it’s important), and whether that video is literally wrong, then the modern institutions of media and education have failed the public.

And nowhere is that failure more visible, or more dangerous, than in our government.

Government

If education isn’t teaching us how to think, and media is telling us what to think, then politics is about making sure we don’t think.

The whole point of our political system is to make sure that we can elect trusted government servants that will properly represent us, their constituents, across a variety of issues that affect us because we don’t have the time, power, or expertise to solve every single issue ourselves. This then translates into the laws that conduct our labor and living and manage our economy.

Unfortunately, politics is called political theater for a reason.

Because of the failures of education and media, politicians have the power to shape public opinion. They have to campaign for votes to convince people they’re right, and the easiest way to do that is by simply choosing a tribe. Who will best represent the Democrats and who will best represent the Republicans? It’s the candidates who best suit the status quo of their constituents, which their own predecessors shaped.

Then most people vote red or blue — red voters generally vote based on lifelong ties and blue voters generally vote blue because they’re thinking it’s better than red. No one is really voting in their own interests because they either don’t know what that looks like or their interests aren’t up for consideration in either camp.

This system is made worse by the way our media structures work. Clicks, outrage, constant discourse — these are the priorities. Everything becomes content, and those actually trying to come up with solutions are ignored in favor of blatant satire for entertainment, reaction-based social media responses, and incendiary news cycles.

With all this noise, people end up consuming politics the same way they consume everything else: through performance of an identity for their tribe. And I don’t just mean parties.

This includes performative activism on social media for followers because validation from unknown strangers that you’re a good person is more important than actually doing anything useful. This includes the development of subconscious thoughts against another ethnic group because enough people on social media complained about them taking your jobs.

More than anything, this cycle of political scandal and subsequent media outrage has desensitized people. Now violence from our own government is simply the norm, and welp, there’s nothing we can really do about that.

Every day it’s the same: something crazy or horrible happens related to government and politics, people on social media go crazy, and nothing further happens. Even those of our citizens or reps who are trying to do something are often trapped by systems like blacklisting and outright physical harm, and a political system that is married to the electoral college, gerrymandering, and Wall Street.

And this last one is the most crippling of them all.

Wall Street and Washington

For a long time in American history, politicians have been able to hold the rich accountable and prevent them from gaining too much power. From Jackson targeting the Second Bank to Teddy Roosevelt’s heavy anti-trust action, the government has generally been able to keep corporations and the financial sector in check.

That all changed in the 1980s during the Reagan administration. After significant government actions that left the populace divided and wary (like civil rights, Vietnam, and Watergate), Reagan was able to come in on a platform of less government that appealed to many. This led to mass deregulation that gave unprecedented power to corporations and left workers, consumers, and the public with less.⁵

This paved the way for a deep partnership between Washington and Wall Street, and corporations in general.

With millions spent on political campaigns, corporate lobbying, and positions in one sector guaranteed to members of the other, the American government became entangled with corporations in a way that couldn’t be better exemplified than by the 2008 crash, when the government used taxpayers’ dollars to bail out the banks.

But most Americans don’t understand this. All they know is what their tribe thinks about “capitalism” and “socialism,” and discourse has skewed this vocabulary beyond all original meaning and contexts. This turns into a discussion of taxes and whether or not the government should be involved in the private sector, but such a question is irrelevant.

If we can’t trust our government enough to both regulate large corporations while also not exercising so much control and influence over these sectors that they become propaganda machines, then we have a big problem.

When political campaigns funded by corporations keep voters focused on arguing over surface level details of issues instead of laying out problems and solutions in depth, people don’t notice how corporations are in the pockets of both parties, and therefore many of our reps.

Again, this is not a “both sides bad” argument, but if both parties meant to represent its citizens are actually representing external interests before us, then that means that our ability to participate in government is broken, and it always has been.

Only now, because of everything that has happened since the 80s’, things have gotten worse to where the vast majority of us are faced with the same socioeconomic realities and concerns about rising costs, the job market, and getting harassed over our identities. Yet we still can’t find solutions because our political system is about keeping us divided to support political careers and concentrate power.

Gone are the days when politicians could lay down the law against anti-trust and union busting because of the tight Washington-Wall Street coil. Our own system of government does not serve us, and thanks to failures in education and media, we don’t have the tools to fix it.

This isn’t the first time in history we’ve seen such economic crisis, but the last time it was not only bad, but actually worse than this, our country came so close to fascism that it, ironically, took Pearl Harbor to snap us out of it.

Just over 96 years ago, with only a couple months left in the year 1929, America’s stock market collapsed so catastrophically it sent the 1930s into a crippling depression, caused by greedy businessmen. FDR tried to fix it with his New Deal, but this made those businessmen and their politician friends encourage the exact same type of blame games that were going on across the Atlantic so they could regain power and control.

Sound familiar? Obviously, we don’t want to wait until something drastic happens before we start trying to fix our issues. So what can we do to break the systemic cycles and move forward without having to go to war?

Learning to Think

Thinking about how large and deeply embedded our institutions are can feel overwhelming, like we’re never be able to fix everything. And like we’ve talked about so far, the 2020s have brought unprecedented changes. We’re going on centuries of institutional failure and social conditioning, and there are billions of people on the planet. How can we ever hope to change anything?

It all comes back down thought; personal education, general awareness, and practicing critical thinking on the day to day. When there’s so much to do like paying bills and taking care of family, the easiest way to make change is to just start thinking. Ask questions, examine the status quo, build empathy. It sounds both simple and also like it won’t do anything, but by trying to find the happiness in your own life and community, you’re already helping.

The system wants us to feel crushed and powerless. They want us to feel like every single day, we just have to wake up and worry, and when we do, it has already won. Maybe it feels considerably privileged to even be able to wake up, but then use that privilege. You can’t be helpful if you’re angry and rage tweeting all the time.

Ask yourself what small part you can play to improve your own community, raise your children or talk to your friends, make work better for yourself and your team, and so on. When you learn to think, you can spread that to the people around you.

We all wish the world would change instantaneously right now, but we all must play our part, no matter how small. Remember in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit when every single person, creature, or species had to play their part in order to defeat evil? That concept doesn’t just apply to hobbits, elves, and dwarves.

The most important tool in our arsenal is thought — deep thought, not reactive thought. We’re not as powerless as we think we are. You don’t need to move mountains or save the day; you can start at home with family, your local community efforts, or your daily commute. What matters is that you don’t ever stop thinking and caring about people at large.⁶

1. There’s actually an excellent TV show about real historical tribalism and the generational violence it perpetuates that I cannot recommend enough: The Last Kingdom on Netflix.

2. I don’t really have an issue with the more general use of the term “generation,” as in “younger generations face unprecedented issues that their parents’ generations did not.”

3. (For more info, see: What Both Parties Get Wrong About Immigration)

4. The book Democracy Awakening by the prolific historian Heather Cox Richardson (who’s also on Substack, YouTube, and other social media) gives a good look at the party switch. While I already knew about the history I’ve talked about in this article from previous studies, I happened to start this book while writing and thought it would be good for y’all to have an actual source to check out since I’m no PhD. (As of writing, I haven’t gotten very far though but it’s about past American history plus modern American history.)

5. I recommend the book Saving Capitalism: For the Many Not The Few by Robert B. Reich, former secretary of labor, which explains in depth the entanglement between corporations and our government. You can also find him on YouTube.

6. You can probably tell I really rushed through this draft so excuse the messy writing, and I will eventually come back to this and give it a proper edit.