> The close knit tribe that thrived with cooperation is definitely in its death throes right now

Is it? I think there are a lot of social systems that are being tested at the moment, some are failing. There are many developed countries that are improving their cooperation in the current crisis - I'm in one - Australia, there are others that have seemed to come together, and others that have failed abysmally. No doubt the ones that have had trouble will examine and regroup, maybe some won't. I can imagine if you're in a country with a thousand deaths a day, things don't look good.

Taking a look at some other "social systems that are being tested at the moment", I don't think your claim that Australia is "coming together" in comparison to other "developed countries" is correct. Some examples:

* Brisbane's "Boundary St" still exists, name unchanged [0].

* Story from less than 1 hour ago: 4 month-old baby of indigenous women dies while mother is in police custody [1].

* PM calls Australian BLM protests "completely unacceptable"[2], urges people not to attend[3], while "think[ing] to [himself] how wonderful a country Australia is" [4].

* The mounting spread of COVID-19 conspiracies, including the "Wake Up Australia" campaign [5].

* Australia participating in spying on its citizens [6], passing anti-encryption laws [7].

[0] https://www.news.com.au/national/queensland/calls-for-brisba...

[1] https://www.news.com.au/national/northern-territory/fourmont...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-11/black-lives-matter-pr...

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-05/pm-tells-people-not-t...

[4] https://www.sbs.com.au/news/quoting-a-meme-scott-morrison-sa...

[5] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-12/asio-briefing-warns-f...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

[7] https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...

There's always disputes, but no ones dying or being thrown out of their homes, people are being looked after. I have been amazed at the compassion being shown by the political class on both sides. iirc there was a lot of extra care taken in the NT for indigenous people because they seem extra susceptible to covid 19 just as a counter example. I didn't know that about boundary st - assumed it was just a boundary, seems it should be changed.

Its great this conversation has started, like most I'm unaware of these problems, and its good to get them out in the air, if the fix is renaming a street - then who cares, rename the street.

> There's always disputes, but no ones dying or being thrown out of their homes, people are being looked after.

This is an underrated point; I think your larger message, that cooperation isn't dying, is likely true. I think I have the tendency to focus on the problems that are growing (or continue to exist) without noticing areas where there is progress and my comment was a reflection of that. And I agree that it is good that we have started to have these conversations.

But I also think there is something to be said for the point the OP was making: human systems simply don't function as well at scale. Or stated more precisely: humans are better at being prosocial in smaller groups than they are in bigger groups. There are a lot of reasons why this might be the case (see for example [0], [1], [2], [3]). As we scale our society to be more and more global, I think we are going to need to reckon with this at some point.

[0] Not having enough interactions for tit-for-tat to function as a strategy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_itera...)

[1] Inability of humans to hit the requirements for a sense of community in very large social networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_community#Membership)

[2] Not having enough interaction between individuals to encourage reciprocity and cause feelings of guilt (or shame) when an individual is muddying the commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

They are indeed significant points. I feel a lot of government success comes from trust, as in all interactions, if you can't trust your government then things go bad, then they just become people trying to take stuff from you.

Maybe there is some limit where there's too many people for that to occur. I feel one of the necessary conditions is the population needs a cohesive belief system (at least in certain areas). For example, if you have a large population that doesn't believe in science but in the invisible hand of god, and a large population that is scientific humanist then I don't think any system will cope with that - there is very little common ground. If everyone is educated and believes in a rational universe then it makes things a lot easier.

> I can imagine if you're in a country with a thousand deaths a day, things don't look good.

You're obviously referring to the US during the pandemic of 1968-1969, which - as everyone knows - ended the United States forever, because things were so bad in tandem with the severe civil chaos occurring at the time (which was worse than anything going on now in multiple ways). The US never recovered; its superpower status, its wealth and power all vanished from there. Oh wait, that didn't happen at all.

I'm in the US, the future looks great, if you can see beyond the tip of your nose. Historically the US always improves thanks to the types of challenges that are going on now, rather than getting worse. In my short lifetime I've lived through several occasions of: 'things are so bad, this is the end of the US' type over-drama (which is farcical).

The US is radically more resilient than people outside of the US will ever understand. It's why the never-ending expectations of our national demise and erosion, going all the way back to our formation, have always turned out so embarrassingly wrong. They're wrong now as well.

What surprises me is observing the foreign/outside estimation of what it takes to essentially break a nation. I'm surprised the rest of the world is so fragile, they're mentally projecting their own low breaking points onto the US in the criticism.

I would ask that you reconsider your worldview. Its quite natural to speculate on the demise of the Superpower, because by its nature it is the Country that gets a lot of attention. This doesn't mean that a majority of the non-US peoples are actively rooting for its demise (maybe they are? Its an assertion that needs to be validated, perhaps with polls).

> It's why the never-ending expectations of our national demise and erosion, going all the way back to our formation, have always turned out so embarrassingly wrong. They're wrong now as well.

History has shown us that nearly every civilization that flourished and prospered also managed to vanish over a really short period of time. Societies are a lot more fragile than you would believe. American success is not based on some jingoistic manifest destiny; it is a country that has managed to get its fundamentals right. However, even the best prepared civilization can collapse in short order; its happened before, and there is no reason to believe it won't happen again.

I look back to the 50's in the US (and most western countries I believe) - a time when science and education were respected and educating and housing the citizenry was the goal. As a result of this and other events the booms of the 70's occurred.

There seems to be a reversal of this - science is actively disregarded by a large part of the population, education is not respected, a large and growing part of the population is disenfranchised and so on. These are not good portents imho.

Indeed, thats what I meant by "No doubt the ones that have had trouble will examine and regroup, maybe some won't", but I can see how some people who are bunkered down get disheartened. I do wonder though if a system that values the lives of its citizens so poorly should be doing a bit of reflecting, though I admire the positive attitude. I also wonder if maybe we're getting it backwards, from a purely darwinian point of view, a damn the torpedoes full steam ahead attitude probably pays in the long run, though it is nicer to live where not every decision is life and death.

People have been crying wolf about the destruction of the US for a long time. But recently, when the President wanted to use the military on protestors, and was told no, it seemed like more than just the obvious, more than a recapitulation of the past. If they said yes, and then a state of emergency was declared, it sounds like a stereotypical way to go right to an excuse for suspending elections. I didn't really expect that people would let him do it, but it really seems like he would if he could. It's so pat.

As much as people have cried wolf over the last decade plus (maybe more, I don't recall) about whether there would be normal elections, I feel like now we have a discrete point in time where the (un)willingness of the volunteer military to do unconstitutional things is all that remains; the people and other institutions are no longer in control of our fate.

You can say, oh, we're fine, the military still has integrity. But it's a volunteer military that's become a distinct class; if they're the only bulwark, then we're very close to a military dictatorship. At best, it could be like in certain countries where they serve as a check on bad civilian governance.

So, I can still hope/think that this President as dictator is alarmism, but I can't say that if it is crying wolf, it is making me more confident the US will go on and on. He can end his term as an ineffectual wanna-be despot, but he's probing and outlining the weak points - how someone smarter and more respected and sympathetic can deal the final blow to the system. Someone said that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

What recent events make me think of is the point Richard Feynman made about the O-rings in the Challenger investigation:

"To paraphrase Feynman's example, if engineers built a bridge that could bear 3,000 pounds without any damage, even though it was never expected to bear more than 1,000 pounds in practice, the safety factor would be 3. If a 1,000-pound truck drove across the bridge and a crack appeared in a beam, even just a third of the way through a beam, the safety factor is now zero: The bridge is defective, there was no safety factor at all even though the bridge did not actually collapse."

So yes, people were saying the same things in the 1970s. And they were wrong. But things always seem worse for good reason, and eventually, some day, things do fundamentally change. When things crack, but don't break completely, it is not necessarily a sign everything is fine.

Covid doesn't seem in itself like an existential threat to the US in particular, but any time it seems like people are denying reality that worries me, honestly scares me, and certainly it's been over a month that global daily cases are reaching new heights, while financial markets and the media seem detached and focused on reopening. Maybe we need to stay the course; maybe Mnuchin and many others are right that there's no going back, but the sense that people are imposing their wishes on reality, as though it is reality which will be forced to bend, feels like a bad premonition to me. I hate the idea of daring fate, of putting the all-powerful to the test.

This sounds both accurate and very depressing. The frightening aspect for me personally is that even if the current President loses the election and leaves office peacefully, he has transformed his party, perhaps permanently. Its not just him, its been happening for a while. But the country cannot be governed by a single party; it needs both parties to function. If one of them refuses to accept reality and scientific facts, I doubt that the country can continue to function, even if the people holding majority are qualified and sensible.

This was incredibly clear during the Obama Administration. Not sure what kind of inane cultural wars will consume the next one.