Amerika

A recent article points out the obvious: greater diversity means more conflict. With everyone sharing a rough heuristic estimate of what is good and how to behave, you have an orderly society; the more variations occur, the more people confront opposites to their desires.

It turns out that pluralism and diversity create enmity at an “intellectual diversity” level just as they do at a biological diversity level:

“When network density increases with more connections, polarization within the collective inevitably rises sharply,” says Markus Hofer from CSH.

“This finding impressed us greatly because it could provide a fundamental explanation for the peculiar form of polarization we’re currently observing simultaneously across many parts of the world—one that definitely threatens democracy,” Thurner continues.

“When people are more connected with each other, they encounter different opinions more frequently. This inevitably leads to more conflict and thus greater societal polarization,” adds Korbel.

When you are with people who are moving in roughly the same direction you are, your disagreements seem larger but are smaller. You want a different roof on the church, or maybe a new toll road. You fight over minutiae because all of the big stuff is sorted.

However if you find yourself among people moving in different directions, you suddenly have large disagreements over general direction. They want to go left, and you want to go right, or up and down or back and forth. You have no small disagreements because you cannot agree on the big stuff.

This means that you can make small talk about the weather, sports, entertainment, politics, or products but these will not be serious. You are talking about the details and you do not really care about the outcome because you want an entirely different type of society than they do.

Allowing them to articulate their beliefs allows you to see how fundamentally incompatible what you want is with what they want. This increases division because you want entirely different things, but no one can say this out loud. Like censored notions, these ideas go underground and fester to a raging boil.

The postwar order just ended: the last war for democracy and civil rights set up principles which were naturally taken to extremes over time as each generation needed to make a new mark, and now we have seen that DEADS (democracy, equality, atomization, diversity, and socialism) was always a suicide pact, and we want out.

Now the Hispanic guy wants a Hispanic country, the African guy wants BLM supremacy, the Jewish guy wants a new Jerusalem, the Christians want us all to die in the rapture, and so on. The center cannot hold because there no longer is a center. This is the terminal velocity of a dying society.

Tags: diversity, pluralism