The American Bind: Energy and Reform

Americans find themselves in a period of polarization with hardly any precedents in United States history. Our bimodal political party system is the foundation of this polarization, and both domestic and foreign actors have curated moral distance between both democrats and republicans alike.

2025 itself was a year of chaos: from Trump's slurry of executive orders, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the national No Kings Protest, the election of oil and gas titans in the EPA, DOGE layoffs dismantling any perception of stability in government jobs, violations of the Hatch Act through partisan messaging on government websites, the Supreme Court ruling of presidential immunity, the selective release of the Epstein Files which were to be released in full, and more.

We now find ourselves just 11 days into 2026, and Jonathan David Ross has caused mass unrest through the blatant murder of Renee Nicole Good, an unjust death which prompted government officials to label her a domestic terrorist.

It comes without any qualification that we live in a period of tyranny enabled by both spineless constituents and representatives alike. The primacy of law is now superseded by engineered moral distance: justice itself is structurally forbidden in such a state.

The rise of the internet into the pockets of almost every American through smart phones has been both a blessing and a deep curse, both of which stem from the internet's core capability to disseminate information akin to a firehose with minimal latency.

The blessing is in the fact that the capability for every man, without any contingent factor, has the capability to learn anything he desires and to ascend towards his being's vocation through self-education and will alone. The barriers which once precluded ascending from contingent factors, such as poor families, are now alleviated through the radical availability of information at will. Fantasy was transmuted into possibility; what can be greater than this?

What initially seemed to be great has in fact been diluted by its very own premise, and it has proved itself to be the fall of both the average man and even the extraordinary man.

Before we investigate the systemic reasons for this fall, we must hold empathy for our citizens. All people, from the day laborer to the executive, are bound to his animal body and its finite spring of energy. To commute to his job, work eight hours, and commute home is itself a great drain of energy. Likewise, most working Americans do not find themselves in financial security, and most work jobs which pay meagerly in comparison to their local cost of living. It is not enough to expend energy through the stress of work and the enactment of labor itself, but he now finds himself at home worrying regarding rent and food for the month.

The distinction between the energy drain of blue collar and white collar workers is fiction. Blue collar workers may find themselves in unions, which is itself a miracle in our modern era, yet their pay is often insufficient. They are subject to physically difficult working conditions. How can we expect people with physical affliction to transcend the body? Likewise, white collar workers were once promised that such careers would be stable, and that entire premise of stability was inverted with the mass layoffs from 2022 through 2025.

Even workers which wish for a more materially secure future, namely those without much education or skills, find themselves mostly locked outside of secure blue collar jobs. The most lucrative and secure union jobs, namely electricians, simply do not have enough apprentice positions for the litany of applicants. Members of the union are structurally incentivized to restrict the number of positions such that the value of his labor is highly maintained, constricting supply.

Workers today are bifurcated across multiple scales, from unionized laborers and the dreamers of material stability to the white collar laborers and their blue collar counterparts.

Actions which conserve energy after labor is personally rational, and rest after work typically aligns with this conservation

Rest after work for countless Americans is through interaction on social media and other means of consuming media. Social media platforms themselves are structurally necessitated to capture user engagement at all costs, namely through the collection of user data. User data itself is a wondrous resource, linked to two core powers: data itself powers the best-guess real-time presentation of engaging content and can be sold to third parties.

The miracle of social media platforms in the common day is the scale which they operate, and this is where those powers can be utilized at full capability.

Through the sheer firehose of content on any scaled platform, there will always be a set of engaging and comforting content to show the user. Both democrats and republicans alike can find content which validates their perspective of the world on the same platform. Echo chambers which align more towards partisan lines rather than truth are necessitated by the platform's thirst for continuous engagement.

This same data, this collection of user data on beliefs and behavior, is then sold to third parties. With enough of such data, demographics of citizens can themselves be mapped to what is most likely to rouse belief, agitation, and physical behavior itself. Consider Cambridge Analytica.

If a citizen is exhausted after work, both in the body and mind, it is logically incoherent to expect him to spend his little energy to challenge his own axioms and reflect critically on the same media which provides him comfort. He is incentivized to not do so, which largely means the majority of beneficial content on the internet is used by a small portion of the privileged. Why create a new world rather than escape into the one source of stability in one's life?

It is no mistake that politics have largely become a game of theatrics, both artificially and necessarily. Artificial in the sense that political speech which both incites negative emotions gather greater engagement from existing tribe members and reinforces the walls of the person's curated world. The collection of data at scale and its deployment is evidence of fact rather than fiction. Necessary in the sense that most citizens are not capable of reading and thinking beyond a middle school level, and the education system is fragmented with various quality across state lines. Very few people can hold contradictions within their mind without resolution, thus the easy to understand rhetoric of categorization of us versus them, or moral distance. The through line is repetition of emotionally explosive ideas spaced just far enough apart to construct a sense of a constructed argument rather than it really being smoke and mirrors around that single point. Political candidates operate in an illusive realm of arguments.

The horrific bind of American society is that the very conditions which could reverse these structural necessities are indeed impossible to reach within a lifetime.

In the worker's realm, security through strong labor protections is mostly fiction. Montana is the only state which protects employees from at-will employment. Any movement towards strong labor protections would be squashed by corporate lobbying, which Citizens United convinced the country to commit idolatry by elevating corporations to the status of man, that is wildly effective in swaying representatives. It often is the candidate which has the most financial backing that wins elections, and the amount of these legal bribes hardly needs to be substantial to provide this money to representatives. Corporations, most notably the handful that provide such donations, will never relinquish their power over citizens as long as such bribes are legal. Workers are precluded from security, and the only path to security is through their own accumulation of capital which is being squeezed by inflation.

In the realm of government, federalism is both a stain and a blessing. A stain because the fragmentation of governance makes widespread change amazingly difficult and enables the fragmentation of personhood through partial application of rights (see abortions, reproductive health, available in only some states and the challenged Obergefell ruling). A blessing because there remains some states which are willing to lean closer towards supporting citizens than corporations, and federal tyranny can be challenged through states which can dissolve their contract once they deem it illegitimate. We must remind ourselves that each state, regardless of political affiliation, is bound to its development of good will from larger corporations that provide higher-paying jobs, which then increase tax revenue.

The entire premise of American society is the elevation of corporations and profits above human dignity and life. The scale at which both information and corporations have grown seems almost insurmountable: we can behead a king, but we can't behead a system without support from those which benefit from dehumanization at scale (lawmakers, corporations).

In a sick way, Citizens United was founded on an illegitimate premise that then manifested itself into legitimacy.

The systems which dehumanize and exhaust workers indefinitely create the conditions that subdues citizens at mass and prevents their own manifestations of their vocations and individual gifts. We have made contingent, temporary, and abstract collections into necessary, eternal, and concrete kings. How can we behead power distributed across such things?

I doubt that anything short of workers facing starvation would result in any meaningful revolution, and likely any revolution would just impose new categories of oppressors and the oppressed.

We must remind ourselves that inaction is insufficient, even if it seems bleak and hopeless. There is only good, even if only locally, to generate from education and its downstream actions. As stereotypical as it sounds, any person which partakes in this endeavor is creating a better world for their own children (and their community), however little. Even the smallest choices, such as the brief examination of our own axioms, is itself a miracle given our circumstances.

The disparate collection of minuscule goods can only result in a greater good. Whether this greater good scales to a global good is dubious and uncertain.

What else are we to do anyways?