The Death of Discourse

I've got to be direct, it's like a big train-wreck

Hello there, old friend. It’s been a minute since I’ve written anything that wasn’t a quick lunch-break post or a short story full of graphic, unsavory things. This piece is going to be different, something more prescient in its message. My sense of self-preservation and aversion to pain tells me I should write something light, something that downplays how inexorably fucked the short- to mid-term outlook for the U.S. seems to be. This will not be that kind of read.

It’s rather appropriate that I’ve spent the last nine months pouring my creative energy into writing horror, as that’s the closest approximation I have for what I see in the coming months and years. I’ll be transparent from the jump: I have no solutions for this. I have no advice for coping. I have no patience left for anyone trying to convince me that reality, as I see it, is anything other than what I call it here. If you came with genuine curiosity and a desire to bridge divides through understanding and respect, well met. If you came to sow division, dance on the grave of a martyr, or anything resembling those activities—I kindly ask that you fuck off. The adults are talking.

I was watching Sam Hyde’s video on the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Between jabs at minority groups and other “on-brand” signalling, he kept circling the timeframe of “two weeks,” insisting that the next two weeks would decide the course of the country. Now those of you who are not terminally online shitposting autists might need some context for who Sam Hyde is. Sam is an accelerationist. Sam is a shitlord. Sam is a demigod to oldfags like myself who cut our teeth during endless summers on /b/ and later /pol/. Sam should never be taken too seriously. Sam always gets away with it.

In a concerning “/pol/ was right” moment of realization, it hit me: this is the most honest and accurate accounting of what many are feeling but entirely too terrified to admit. The two-week window felt right in the same way that the two weeks after Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination would have felt: a localized, significant event that appears disconnected from the global order but serves as the chaos theory crystallization point that precipitates something incomprehensibly larger. Cracks exist whether you see them or not. Once the crystallization point is reached, retrospective narratives make it look inevitable, though it was invisible at the time. Nobody thought the world would plunge into global war twice in 25 years following Ferdinand’s assassination, but now it’s clear that that one-off partisan killing led directly to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A quick scroll through the comments section of any social media post with the words “Charlie” and “Kirk” in the post will almost assuredly give you the sense that we're standing at the precipice of... something.

When I worked in tech support, customers often told me their equipment couldn’t possibly be broken because “it was working just fine before it stopped.” I’d roll my eyes and think: yes, that’s what happens when something breaks. Society, though more complex, follows the same principle. It works—until it don’t. All retellings of the events leading to civil wars and partisan violence follow some form of “gradually, then suddenly.” Localized failures accumulate: assassinations, media purges, visible hypocrisy. Each event might appear isolated or even reasonable given its historical context, but each adds a grain of sand to the psychological heap, one more snowflake to the inevitable avalanche. No individual event causes collapse alone, but collectively they do. These symbolic failures accelerate polarization and distrust among the population further driving the accumulation of one off events until an inflection point is reached, and people stop seeing their ideological opponents as co-citizens, only as enemies.

In prior times of conflict, you could somewhat test the signal. Instead of watching pundits, you could watch mechanical responses. What are the courts consistently finding? What do the overall market conditions look like? What messaging dominates institutions?

I've spent enough time on the internet and seen enough of humanity's capacity for cruelty to expect some disrespectful displays following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. What surprised me, was that the grave-dancing would not just persist as long as it has, but that the right would finally stand up for itself and give the left a taste of the cancel culture they'd created over the last decade. When Jimmy Kimmel was subsequently fired for making a joke, I expected that he might have taken the moment to reflect on the irony of his circumstance when he had cheered the firing of Roseanne for the same. The response on the right to come to Kimmel's aid and support his “free speech” when he is celebrating the death of his ideological opponent borders on pathological. We exist within a moment where principle has become little more than convenient cover to wrestle control back from their ideological opponents.

Fundamentally, on both sides, this is factional opportunism. It’s philosophical incoherence. It’s the individual actor signaling allegiance to the collective over their existence as an individual. The left understands this much to the detriment of the right. Parties and media don’t run on principle—they run on incentive and perception. Consistency isn’t rewarded; cycles of outrage are. That’s why it feels unmoored: because it is. It’s not left or right—it’s what happens when power asymmetry replaces shared norms. If one side perceives politics as existential, restraint evaporates. And when one side is politics, the rest is self-evident.

Outrage at grave-dancing is itself an indictment. Outrage assumes the actor is capable of shame, that principle exists. But Alinsky laid it out in Rules for Radicals. It’s “rules for thee, not for me.” It’s my grandma’s saying: “The easiest lie to remember is the truth.” It’s Frank Herbert's quote from Children of Dune:

“When I am weaker than you, I ask for freedom because that is according to your principles. When I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.” 

What I can’t wrap my head around is how anyone, seeing all this, still opens themselves up to it. It’s turning the other cheek—while popping a Xanax so you forget the slap is coming.

Institutions often appear strongest just before collapse. On the eve of failure, order is surface-deep. Collapse happens not because the machine “blinks red,” but because individuals stop cooperating en masse. When cheeks are bruised raw from turning, where do you turn next? What signals matter?

Traditionally, you’d watch courts, markets, and other institutions. But those fronts are unified—or hollow. Markets don’t forecast war. In 1914, global trade was at a historic high. In the late 1930s, U.S. markets were rebounding from depression. They reflect liquidity, not powder kegs. Courts are lagging indicators. By the time rulings fracture, the polity is already broken. Dred Scott didn’t cause the Civil War—it revealed the irreconcilable split.

Maybe it isn’t left vs. right. Maybe that’s why the signals don’t show the calamity. Or maybe they do, and we’re looking in the wrong places. The wobble may be there, the cracks may already be faulting—but too small for the eye to see.

Ask why large chunks of the population no longer see the system as legitimate. Ask why every decision, no matter how banal, becomes fuel for the fire. Maybe the real conflict is between collective institutions and individuals.

Media and academia are openly partisan. Corporations toggle by incentive. Sanctuary cities defy federal law. Governors sue Washington over Guard control. State judges injunct federal action across the country. Defectors are decried as heretics—Trump, Musk, and others. Trump didn’t take Wall Street with him, so the collective crushed him, then tried to kill him. Musk didn’t take Big Tech with him, so the collective set out to ruin him too.

You won’t see the FBI, courts, or Fortune 500 suddenly “switch sides.” They’ll double down on legitimacy and punish dissidents one by one. The pattern is asymmetry: collective actors shielded, individuals destroyed. We keep looking for traditional battle lines when the enemy fights demographically, legally, and culturally. Importing populations, incentivizing non-reproduction, normalizing surveillance—these are cheaper and more stable than militias.

Agreement on censorship, surveillance, and demographic engineering signals alignment at the top: collectivism versus individualism. Congress always finds a way to raise the debt ceiling or dodge insider-trading bans. But when it comes to protecting the individual—healthcare, immigration, wedge issues—they kick the can to fuel the next campaign. It’s not individual congressmen or voters; it’s the collective bodies—Congress as a whole, parties as wholes—pressing their boots to the neck of the people.

Look at participation rates: jury duty, enlistment, volunteering, turnout. Aside from rare spikes, all show steady decline. Traditional economics crumble. The mall is dead. Informal networks, black/grey markets, mutual aid, parallel media rise. Decentralized currencies—BTC, ETH, DOGE—mark sovereignty shifting from collective to individual.

So what does the conflict look like? What’s the battlefield of collectivism vs. individualism?

It’s diffuse, low-intensity, but constant. Violence becomes an expected procedure. It looks like arbitrary rules—mask mandates, distancing—that isolate individuals. It looks like cancel culture. It looks like lone actors taking potshots. It looks like selective prosecutions—Capitol rioters punished, Portland rioters excused. It looks like catch-and-release systems producing murders like that of Lakin Riley. It looks like Rittenhouse nearly killed in Kenosha, then railroaded in court. It looks like the attempted railroading of Daniel Penny chilling any action that would have saved Iryna Zarutska. It looks like Based Stick Man; the Battle of Berkeley; concrete milkshakes hurled at Andy Ngo. It looks like vandalized vigils for Charlie Kirk.

Every act is collectivists against individuals. Every act is a reminder: public life means bracing for violence. The individual politician may not say “this is good,” but the collective, by turning a blind eye, does.

As I said at the beginning: I don’t have solutions. Not because I can’t think of them, but because none of them solve the problem.

What made me good at tech support is what makes me bad at punditry: I can identify causes, but in tech the fixes are binary; in politics, they’re not. The older I get, the more I think the world runs on truisms. You cannot vote your way out of tyranny. If it weren’t for double standards, some folks would have none. And perhaps, it is true, that if you wish to make an omelet, you’ve got to crack a few eggs.