Who Is Dividing Americans? And Why?

[Geee]

Intellectual Takeout

n a podcast interview with Jordan Peterson, country musician and internet sensation Oliver Anthony expressed puzzlement over the divided state of America.

“We’ve gotten to a point where it’s easier for us to try find differences and faults in each other instead of similarities,” he began, before offering a corrective: “We all hold much more common ground than we do difference.” Anthony explained:

We’re all very biologically similar. We all have to acquire some amount of money. Most of us have ambitions of raising a family or at least developing friendships. I’d say 90 percent of the people that at least exist in North America are very similar in almost every way, but we’ve somehow found the nitpick, arbitrary differences that we hold, and we exploit those and blow those up. …

We are more divided today than we’ve ever been. Everything’s politicized, everything is about one party or one person trying to hold some moral high ground over the other just for the sake of being able to point their finger down at them.

It’s hard to disagree with his assessment.

Oliver Anthony shot to fame last August thanks to his song “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which explores themes similar to those he spoke of with Dr. Peterson. His blue-collar ballad, as it has been dubbed, laments the failures of a political class more invested in their own power than helping work-a-day Americans achieve economic independence and freedom from welfare dependence, addiction, and despair.

It is a simple message that has echoed through the ages—from the class divisions in ancient Greece and Rome, through the feudal system and peasant revolts of the Middle Ages, to the Protestant Reformation, the French and American Revolutions, and more modern struggles over workplace and civil rights.

Or, in the simple but profound words of African-American poet Phyllis Wheatley, “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.”

In short, in the West, the perennial political struggle of humanity is a vertical one against power, not a horizontal one against our peers. This alone should be a tip-off that not everything is as it seems in modern-day America—or the West as a whole.

[Valin]

Quote

Or, in the simple but profound words of African-American poet Phyllis Wheatley, “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.”

In short, in the West, the perennial political struggle of humanity is a vertical one against power, not a horizontal one against our peers.

@Geee

Is It? You know me, Mr. Positive, BUT just off the top of my head I can cite 50-60 thousand cases/examples (in  the last 6000 years) where that's not exactly true.

 

[Geee]

27 minutes ago, Valin said:

I can cite 50-60 thousand cases/examples (in  the last 6000 years) where that's not exactly true.

Link?